Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault
Most of them were distributed ten minutes before the debate started. They were obviously filled out on a voluntary basis. Generally, people were happy to answer the questions and help with the research. Nevertheless, it is plausible that some did not participate because of fear of repression. Other limitations need to be taken into account, such as that the questionnaires could be completed only by people who knew how to read and write. This needs to be noted, even if, according to official statistics, the literacy rate in Kampala is up to 91 percent.65 Moreover, the questionnaires could be filled in only by people who spoke English, as, even if it would have been easy to distribute a questionnaire in Luganda, I did not have the linguistic or financial capacity at the time to analyze the answers. Despite these biases, I think it would have been a pity not to collect this information, which, in addition to being new, complemented the ethnographic observations, just as the latter helped to get around some of the limits of the survey, especially by interviewing people who could not fill in the questionnaire, and thus integrating into the interview sample people who were less educated.
Apart from providing an idea of the composition of the audience, what was at stake with the survey was to observe how much the discussions had become socially diversified since the beginning of the shows. According to this data, the first characteristic of the audience was its relative youth.
TABLE 1.1. Age of audience members at three ebimeeza
These figures need to be put into perspective, as 45 percent of Ugandans are under fourteen, and life expectancy is fifty-three years.66 It is worth noting that the average age was around thirty, whereas the founders were between forty and fifty years of age when they first started debates in Club Obbligato.
A characteristic that did not change much between the creation of the ebimeeza and the moment when the investigation was carried out was the gender of those in attendance.
TABLE 1.2. Sex of audience members at three ebimeeza
In Club Obbligato, no women completed the questionnaire. Nevertheless, there were women who attended and some who took the floor, but they never numbered more than five or six. The imbalance was also striking in the shows in Luganda, even if women were a bit better represented. Several elements explained this gap between sexes. Obviously, structural inequalities between sexes in terms of levels of education need to be taken into account.67 However, it is possible that the absence of women was linked to the fact that most ebimeeza took place in bars, which women saw as potentially damaging for their reputations; nevertheless, women were also an extremely small minority in shows that took place in gardens or courtyards. Among the six women I interviewed who regularly attended Radio One’s Ekimeeza, five took the floor each time they came, partly because the producers favored women when they registered to speak. Among them, there were two staunch political activists, one from an opposition political party and the other from the NRM. One was a former vice president of the Students’ Guild at Makerere, another three were lawyers. All these women had been to university. They had political ambitions and significant experience in public speaking in venues open to both sexes. In the shows in Luganda, the configuration was similar: the women interviewed who attended regularly were generally highly educated and actively engaged in a political party. Very often they were also part of the leadership of the show (see chapter 7).
Given the fact that the NRM has usually been praised for its achievements in integrating women into politics,68 it is worth questioning more precisely the relative absence of women. This phenomenon illustrated further the disconnection between the ebimeeza and the Local Councils, which guaranteed a place for women to engage in politics and be elected, and thus be granted access to a specific form of citizenship largely focused on the management of local issues. According to Aili Tripp, in the 1990s, women attended the lowest levels of Local Councils but were more rare in the higher ones, and women who did attend LC meetings tended to remain silent.69 They also tended to prefer women’s rather than mixed groups.70 According to Sylvia Tamale, there was generally a feeling of hostility toward women engaged in “high politics” at the end of the 1990s.71 The women speakers interviewed did indeed stress the difficulties they had in taking the floor at the ebimeeza. When they did, they were exposed to nasty remarks from the audience.72 They were very vigilant on what they wore, being careful not to show their waist or legs.73
As mentioned earlier, ethnic characteristics varied from one show to the next.74 The table below gathers ethnic group representations (as listed in the 1995 constitution) according to the regional categories usually used by Ugandans on a day-to-day basis.75
TABLE 1.3. Ethnic and regional origins of audience members at three ebimeeza
The contrast between the Ekimeeza of Radio One and the others is obvious. In the ekimeeza in English, ethnic origins were very varied. People who defined themselves as Baganda in the questionnaire were a small minority. The majority of the informants presented themselves as Northerners or Easterners, reflecting a certain distortion compared to the proportions in the Central Region and Uganda in general.76
For Club Obbligato, these results illustrate an important shift in the ethnic composition of the audience. This shift can be attributed to the fact that all the other shows were in the Luganda language and that there were no shows in a Northern or Eastern language in Kampala. Most of the Northern or Eastern members interviewed said they had not mastered Luganda enough to engage in a Luganda debate, and the Radio One Ekimeeza was the only one where they could take the floor. As such, the show became a meeting place for some Northerners and Easterners in Kampala, including politicians from Northern constituencies (see chapter 5).
The audiences were also characterized by a high level of education:
TABLE 1.4. Completion of primary school by audience members at three ebimeeza
In the three shows covered by the survey, more than half of the informants said they had completed at least primary school. The proportion was higher in Club Obbligato. I mentioned earlier that the questionnaire introduced distortions: there is a strong possibility that actually, the proportion of people who accessed formal education and completed at least primary school was in fact smaller. When more precise answers were taken into account, the proportions in the audiences were as follows:
TABLE 1.5. Diplomas held by audience members at three ebimeeza
According to UNESCO, in 2008 in Uganda, 21.65 percent of the age category concerned benefited from secondary education,77 and 3.77 percent of the age category concerned had access to university.78 Keeping in mind the distortions already mentioned, it seems safe, however, to say there is still an important gap between the ebimeeza audiences and the general population in terms of access to higher education. More than half of the informants in the English-speaking Ekimeeza had gone to university. There were approximately half that many in the shows in Luganda, however, whereas the local discourse made the ebimeeza in Luganda places where “school dropouts” could take the floor, there was a nonnegligible number of audience members who had at least finished primary school and had been to university.
Despite these high levels of education, a difference between the composition of the original group and the audience of 2008 was not deniable: in the show in English, 13.4 percent of the informants said they didn’t have a diploma, whereas the historicals were all graduates from university, successful businessmen, lawyers, and doctors. The latest statistics on the use of different languages in Uganda are very dated (1970).79