A new video by singer Jemimah Kansiime has the sort of risqué sex appeal characteristic of her idols Rihanna or Nikki Minaj. But for the 21-year-old Ugandan singer, gyrating in a bikini could be grounds for 10 years in prison as per tough anti-pornography laws passed the African country signed into law last year.
“I was aware that there are some sections of society that are conservative,” Kansiime told Agence France-Presse, adding that she had no idea that her video broke any laws. “I was just experimenting to see if I put on a short dress, will the audience like it?”
But Kansiime wears far less than a short dress in her latest video, Ensolo Yange. After shots of the pink and purple haired singer drawing deep on a hand rolled cigarette and sipping a beer, the shot widens and the 21-year-old singer appears in a scant bikini, covered in foam that she lathers over herself suggestively.
The singer has already served five weeks in prison for appearing in the video, which has now been viewed on YouTube more than 370,000 times.
While Kansiimi sees the case against her as an infringement of her “freedom of expression,” Uganda’s Ethics and Integrity Minister Simon Lokodo has called her videos “very obscene and vulgar.” “If you dress in such a way that you irritate the mind and excite the people then you are badly dressed; if you draw the attention of the other person outside there with a malicious purpose of exciting and stimulating him or her into sex,” Lokoda said after controversial anti-pornography legislation was signed into law in February 2014.
According to the law, “a person shall not produce, traffic in, publish, broadcast, procure, import, export, sell or abet any form of pornography.”
But many women’s rights activists have taken issue with the vague language of the law.
In it, pornography is defined as “any representation through publication, exhibition, cinematography, indecent show, information technology or by whatever means, of a person engaged in real or stimulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a person for primarily sexual excitement.”
“That’s a very broad paragraph into which you could fit anything,” Stella Mukasa of the International Center for Research on Women told ThinkProgress in a phone interview. “It’s a roll back on women’s rights in the country. We have fought for many years to see them being defended and promoted and protected.”
The open-ended language prompted many to take the law into their own hands.
Shortly after the law was passed, mobs publically stripped at least 10 people, and claimed that they were aiding the police with enforcing the anti-pornography law. Uganda’s Police Force later issued a warning against such vigilante efforts.
Mukasa, a Uganda-native, said she sees the anti-pornography law as one part of a broader effort to curtail rights in the country.
“We’re starting to see that if you don’t agree with this party that is in power, it’s a very big problem with homophobia, non-tolerance, and a restrictive civic space which doesn’t augur well for the country’s development,” she said, referring to recent legislation that has limited rights to associate freely and criminalized homosexuality in the country.
While Mukasa called Jemimah Kansiime the “first causality” of the country’s harsh anti-pornography laws, she is hopeful that the case against the singer will bring about positive change.
“As unfortunate as it might be for [Kansiime], I think her case presents a great opportunity to utilize the judicial system to pronounce themselves on the constitutionality of these kinds of laws which I would call morality law that are not only discriminatory but are an attack on freedom of expression.”
That’s the argument her attorney Isaac Semakadde has made as well.
“That right to erotic entertainment, there has to be a space for it in an open and free society,” he said.
Kansiime, however, has mixed feelings about the video and the difficulties its presented for her.
“I have to do something that people like,” she said, “[But] I have not benefitted from that video.”