By Nyang’au Araka
Dr. Stella Nyanzi, the Ugandan scholar, poet, human rights activist, and President Yoweri Museveni’s fierce critic has shared a moving personal account of academic pursuit, motherhood, and resilience in the diaspora.
In a Facebook post, Dr. Nyanzi reflected on the emotional and physical toll of commuting 654 kilometres across Germany with her children aboard the country’s high-speed ICE trains.
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All the while, she juggled co-teaching duties at a university and enduring temporary homelessness.
“I am the evicted landlady travelling 654 kilometres with my children in the first class of Germany’s ICE fast trains,” she wrote, describing her life in recent months as one of survival and commitment to her academic role.
According to her post, the journey, an overnight trip beginning in Bavaria shortly after midnight and ending in her university city just before 8 a.m., became her norm during the recently concluded semester, where she was co-teaching a class that began at 8:30 a.m.
Last week alone, she made three such journeys with her children, each carrying two large suitcases filled with their belongings.
Upon arrival, they would take a taxi to a hotel room she had paid for by the week.
“Last night, we took the overnight trip on the ICE train for the very last time.,” she wrote.
“Today, on 1st August 2025, I am moving into my rented apartment in my university city,” she wrote. “I am excited; very tired but excited. My children are very tired too.”
Dr. Nyanzi, known across East Africa and beyond for her outspoken feminist and political activism, fled Uganda in 2022 following repeated arrests and state intimidation under the regime of President Museveni.
Her criticism of authoritarianism, homophobia, and gender-based violence often landed her in hot water with authorities most notably during her imprisonment in 2018 over a poem criticizing the president.
Now in Germany under a writers-at-risk programme, Dr. Nyanzi continues to speak out but she also lectures, writes, and raises her children, all while navigating the precarious realities faced by many African academics in exile.
Germany, despite its reputation for high academic standards and political asylum, presents real challenges for migrants especially those raising families while on temporary fellowships.
Affordable housing in university towns remains a major problem, and for single parents like Nyanzi, the burden is heavier.
She humorously likens her children sleeping on the first-class seats of the ICE to “young lions and lionesses” — and herself, defiantly, as the “Mama Lion” who continues to “roam with her cubs and rrroarrrrrr.”
Now settled in her new apartment, Nyanzi says she is ready for the next chapter.
“My children are tired too,” she wrote.
“But we made it.”
