Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault
organizations, and administration employees, all from different social backgrounds. Among these was L.N., born in 1977 to an Acholi father working in customs. In 2001, he graduated in administration and public management. While a student, he was a member of the executive of the Uganda National Students Association and guild vice president. He worked at the office of the vice president as an assistant coordinator for the National Youth Development Project. He was also an elected member of the National Youth Council, representing a Northern District. He resigned in 2003 because, according to him, it was “turning into a Movement project.” He then went into business and consultancy for the government until he found a position in an international NGO.
Before engaging in the discussions, L.N. frequented Club Obbligato for the good food and the music. He went there with his colleagues from the vice president’s office and had never met the historicals before.51 His participation in the discussions was thus linked to the professional world and the fact that the club was frequented by executives from the administration. However, it reflected more generally a generational, ethnic, and political opening of the Ekimeeza. Supporters of the opposition favoring multipartyism, who had important experiences as student activists and who had only childhood memories of Idi Amin or the Bush War, began to frequent the club. People from Northern Uganda also started to come.
In this context and in the middle of the heated electoral campaign of 2001, Maria Kiwanuka, director of Radio One and one of Wamala’s friends, came to Club Obbligato and attended one of the debates.52 Enthusiastic about the quality of the discussions and looking for a new product to position the station editorially and commercially during the campaign, she asked one of her journalists to “format [the discussions] for radio broadcasting.”53 Sources do not concur on the date of the first broadcast, but it most likely occurred in March 2001,54 between the presidential and the general elections.55 Economic interest is important to explaining the emergence of the Ekimeeza. Wamala overcame his original reluctance to broadcast the discussions: “We agreed [to broadcast] because [the radio station] came with a package. They would give us beers to give to the people who come to discuss. [. . .] We sell [them for] 1,000 shillings instead of 2,000.”56 The Ekimeeza did not generate money in itself: the earnings of the beer sales went directly to the club.57 According to Wasula, the Ekimeeza did not represent a major source of income for Club Obbligato compared to the concerts,58 although it was definitely an opportunity for free advertising.
Even if some among the original members chose to leave, the audience kept growing, in particular in the electoral context. After the historicals and the cadres, students were another population that came to the club: they were mainly men born in the 1970s, most not married and childless, with far more modest incomes. They came in groups, often from campus, after they heard the show on the radio. Again, this audience was diversified ethnically and politically. B.W. and W. K., both members of political parties, from Eastern and Northwestern Uganda, respectively, came at that time.
B.W. was born in 1973 in Mbale.59 He was a Mugisu and a Catholic. His mother was a teacher and his father worked in the administration. He graduated with degrees in education and biology from Makerere, where he led a Hall and was a member of the Panafrican Club, in which he met important leaders of the NRM. He became a teacher, first in a secondary school, then at a private university. He was well known for supporting the NRM and was often teased about it by other members of the Ekimeeza. He was part of the Pan-African Movement, an organization close to the NRM that also organized debates.
W.K. was born in 1978 close to Arua, in the northern province of West Nile. His parents were teachers. In 2005, he graduated with a degree in philosophy. He was president of the guild. He was also an activist in the opposition political party FDC (Forum for Democratic Change) and a member of the Uganda National Students Association (UNSA). He began his political career in 2001 as a political mobilizer in Masindi during Kizza Besigye’s first presidential campaign. When I met him he earned a living thanks to short-term contracts in the information technology sector. For several of the members of this particular generation of speakers, the first contact with the Ekimeeza was through student politics.60
Starting with a dozen people originally, the discussions soon gathered hundreds. Between 2005 and 2009, when I conducted most of my observations, the number of people attending the debates in Club Obbligato ranged from 250 to 350. Based on the success of the first show in 2002, two ebimeeza in Luganda were created. One on Radio Simba, which was attended every Sunday by approximately 200 to 300 people, and one on CBS, the Kingdom of Buganda’s radio station, which was the largest, attended by 300 to 600 every Saturday.61 Smaller ebimeeza flourished all around town (there were ten of them in total in Kampala). All were in Luganda, and each gathered around thirty people.62 As we will see in detail in the next chapters, a few were launched up-country, especially in Masaka.
Ebimeeza were often said to have been more affordable for the “ordinary citizen” than phone-in talk shows. Yet this might not have been the case, given the increase of mobile phone ownership and the decrease in communication costs.63 Assessing how much it cost to attend was difficult, as it varied from one participant to the other. It depended on transport, and some participants actively invested in this activity by buying documentation (especially newspapers) and sometimes clothes. But basically, to attend an ekimeeza, participants first needed to get there (from the city center, it cost around USh500 at the time by collective taxi [around 0.15£], and 3,000 by boda boda [a bit less than £1]). At Club Obbligato, where having a drink was not mandatory, a soda cost USh700, whereas a beer cost between USh2,000 and USh3,000. In Mambo Bado, the ekimeeza of the kingdom’s radio station, CBS, one could not drink; people could stand freely in the audience, but those who wanted to sit on a plastic chair had to pay USh300 (0.08£). There were therefore financial differences within the audience, between people seated (around 150) and people standing (the rest). In Simbawo Akatii, the ekimeeza of Radio Simba, the system was different, as participants had to buy a drink to access the courtyard (USh700 for a soda). In all cases, attending an ekimeeza required leisure time, which attracted both people who could afford to take some and people who were idle because they were jobless.
In Kampala, many people say that the ebimeeza in Luganda were “real People’s Parliaments,” because they were supposedly more popular: “Most of our people here don’t go to Obbligato because that one is in English, not many people can speak the language. So this one [in Luganda] can attract the majority,” the presenter of one of the Luganda shows told me.64 Interestingly, however, despite their differences in reputation, the social gap between the show in English and those in Luganda was not as great as usually claimed. Variations could indeed be noticed. There were, for instance, important differences in the ethnic composition of the audiences of the shows. However, in terms of educational backgrounds in particular, the data gathered do not indicate fundamental contrasts between the ebimeeza in Luganda and the one in English. As we will see, the data indicate that the English-speaking audience did indeed gather more university graduates than the Luganda-speaking ones. But the audiences of the ebimeeza in Luganda did include an important number of educated people as well. It was precisely this gap between the reputation of the Luganda shows and their actual social composition that was of interest in my research: they were made up of populations relatively similar to those participating in the shows in English (in terms of masculinity and diploma). But they did not convey the same image.
Information about the social composition of the audience in the ebimeeza was compiled through questionnaires that were distributed in several shows. This technique was far from flawless, but it was also the most effective and reliable way available to me at the time to obtain information on the profile of the audience members at the various ebimeeza. The objective was in particular to put the data gathered through interviews and life stories in perspective. The way the questionnaires were given and completed by informants is important to take into account. It is paramount to underline that these figures should only be considered as tendencies and not definitive results.
The questionnaires were anonymous. They were distributed in three different ebimeeza in July and August of 2008. A total of 276 were filled in and analyzed. I always distributed them after obtaining authorization from the organizers and after having been