In Western culture, sex sells, but even a hint of eroticism could earn you a lengthy prison sentence in Uganda.
Twenty-one-year-old pop singer and Kampala native Jemimah Kansiime, who performs under the stage name “Panadol wa Basajja,” which translates to “medicine for men,” may find that out the hard way, as she now faces 10 years in prison for violating the country’s stringent anti-pornography laws, according to Agence France‑Presse, via Yahoo.
Passed in February 2014, Uganda’s anti-pornography bill, which is popularly known as the “mini-skirt bill” for its banning of short dresses and other like garments, has sparked controversy, and a music video that was popular among Kansiime’s Ugandan fans has been accused of breaking the law.
The video in question: “Nkulinze,” or “I am Waiting for You,” was viewed by Uganda’s Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo, who has described placing an “intelligence team” of spies “on the ground” to watch provocative singers closely.
Lokodo was not pleased, and Kansiime was hunted down for being “very obscene and vulgar.”
Watch the music video below:
***Warning: Explicit Content***
Panadol wa Basajja – Nkulinze by LePoint
The minister also described American pop singer Rhianna, one of Kansiime’s idol’s, as “the type of people I’m condemning,” and said there was nothing good about her style of dancing.
“That’s why Panadol was arrested,” he said, before warning of more arrests.
The singer spent more than a month behind bars after her arrest for the music video, and now she faces up to 10 years in prison, if found guilty in what is to be the first full trial under the law.
“I was aware that there are some sections of society that are conservative,” the singer told Agence France‑Presse. “I was just experimenting to see if I put on a short dress, will the audience like it?” said the singer.
Kansiime and her former manager, Didi Muchwa Mugisha, were both arrested last November, and while Mugisha pleaded guilty and was fined 200,000 Ugandan shillings (about $75), Kansiime pleaded not guilty, and spent five weeks locked up before she could raise the cash for bail.
“When I was making that video I never intended it for children, I intended it for adults. I did not sell or distribute the song,” she told AFP in Kampala. “My rights have been trampled upon, my freedom of expression has been trampled upon.”
According to AllAfrica’s Uganda Women’s Network, the anti-pornography bill sparked a series of violent acts against women and girls in public places immediately after its 2014 passing.
Ugandan women and girls were reportedly stripped naked, and sometimes raped, by gangs of men on the pretext that they were indecently dressed.
Kansiime’s attorney, Isaac Semakadde, says the case is about creative censorship.
“That right to erotic entertainment, there has to be a space for it in an open and free society,” he told AFP. “To ban all forms of pornography, all forms of nudity, is outrageous.”
Semakadde said divisions must be made clear between child pornography and other forms of sexually explicit content.
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