Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault
Even defenders of “free speech” could desire the enforcement of limitations and see this enforcement as justified in order to nurture a “civilized” and honorable form of speech. Thus, the official repertoires of legitimate media speech were not simply unilaterally imposed: they were negotiated and agreed upon by some dominant journalists within the media field.
Journalists from the New Vision, the Weekly Topic, or the Monitor were sometimes very critical of what they saw as grave excesses of power. But in the first ten years of the regime, they still accepted the premises of the new political order Museveni was trying to build after the “revolution,” and they were clearly dominating the market, which put them in an excellent position to lead the debate on what “professional” or “legitimate” journalism was. The way they reacted to the first operations of repression against some newspapers in 1986 and 1987 is revealing. Beyond the political issues at stake (consolidating the new political order after a bloody war), their concern was also clearly the restrictive definition of a profession, of what “real journalism” was. In their eyes, this was necessary to consolidate their position, including toward the state. According to William Pike, editor in chief of the New Vision: “Government was heavy-handed but it was often provoked. Even Amnesty International said that most of the cases had arisen ‘because journalists have written wildly inaccurate stories without making proper efforts to check their facts.’”36 James Tumusiime, his assistant in the mid-1980s, agreed: “They were blackmailing, it was gutter press, yellow press, different people. Serious newspapers survived.”37 Wafula Oguttu, who edited the Weekly Topic and later the Monitor, had a similar opinion: “They were just small secessional [sic] newspapers [. . .] writing inflaming stories which are not even well researched, making a rumor very, very big. [. . .] They were people who thought they could make a little money. Some of them were not even journalists.”38
Journalists position themselves not only politically, but also as a profession, and as members of particular social groups. Even in a politically restricted configuration, everything that happens within the media cannot be exclusively attributed to the state and its hegemonic agenda: parallel dynamics, linked to the nature of the media as a field, need to be taken into account. This is well illustrated by the process that led to the adoption of the 1995 Press and Journalist Act, which was also the result of the mobilization of journalists who were close to academia and themselves highly educated. This act embodies the attempt by government to delimit a legitimate public sphere restricted to “professionals” (defined in terms of their level of education), and attempts by particular journalists to impose themselves and their definition of “true journalism” within the field. The 1995 act in fact expresses a coincidence of objectives of control and criticism that was not necessarily conscious or voluntary.39 The way control over discourse is enacted cannot be reduced to state constraint and repression: side dynamics and autonomous issues were at work, too, linked in this case to professional recognition and the need to be taken into account.
As a member of the profession recalled, “Many veteran journalists linked the creation of the journalism course at university to President Museveni’s despise for journalists’ bad training at that time, [and to] his anger against what he saw as looseness associated to an absence of proper training.”40 Indeed, during a press conference in 1990, Museveni famously called journalists “former fishmongers” who had “abandoned their nets” to go into journalism. The endeavor by some to strengthen media speech by linking it to academia was reflected in the 1988 creation of the Department of Mass Communication at Makerere University and in the 1995 Press and Journalist Act, which was aimed at turning former “fishmongers” into properly qualified professionals. The act defines who is a journalist (and thus who can publish in a newspaper or speak on radio) based on academic qualifications.41 As mentioned before, despite the fact that it is sometimes presented by human rights organizations as being hostile to “freedom of speech,” the act was partly the result of a mobilization by journalists themselves. It was not, however, consensual. A journalist remembers the “perpetual argument of whether to push for professionalization of journalism in the line of law and medicine or let [in] anyone who can just practice the trade of recounting stories.”42 Was speech to be let loose? In the opinion of those who defended the law, the act would strengthen their political position by fundamentally distinguishing them from the people who worked in the partisan or religious press, who sometimes defended agendas qualified as “sectarian” (and as “nonprofessional”) by the political authorities and dominant journalists themselves.43
Things have changed for the press in Uganda today. But going back to these controversies was necessary to understand that when interactive radio started to be programmed on private airwaves in the mid-1990s, these shows challenged the established repertoires in the definition of legitimate media speech. For not only the government but for many people, talk shows in general, and the ebimeeza in particular, represented the terrible perspective of speech let loose: of laypeople, not professional journalists, taking control of the airwaves. In this sense, they challenged both previous compromises on the nature of media speech and previously established models of citizenship.
Exploring Imaginaries of Citizenship as Products of Relations of Domination
The ebimeeza have often been referred to in the scholarship on the media in Uganda, but they have never been the focus of in-depth ethnographic and historicized research.44 The richest study available on interactive radio in Uganda more generally is Peter Mwesige’s work, which relies on a very large corpus of shows and interviews with members of the audience, including from several ebimeeza. The issues raised by Mwesige in his research are, however, different from those examined here. His concerns have to do with the potential of talk radio to enhance public debate and democracy. He examines the capacity of these programs to integrate better the concerns of the public into the media and into the political agenda, to offer participatory opportunities beyond “a socially advantaged minority,” and to enhance pluralism.45 One of his main research questions concerns the elaboration of the “political talk show agenda”: What topics are tackled? How are they determined, by whom, and what room does this leave for popular concerns to be raised? He found the overall talk show agenda to be linked to, but not dependent on, the government’s agenda. He also showed that there was a clear discrepancy between the talk show agenda and the concerns of the wider public, as defined by national surveys (people seemed more concerned with issues such as poverty, HIV, education, etc.).46 In terms of the political influence of talk shows, he found that it was very limited. Mwesige concludes that even if they did not favor “genuine” participation, interactive radio programs did allow for a greater degree of elite competition and did strengthen pluralism, especially in a politically restricted environment.47 He explains that “some ordinary voices have access through opportunities of audience participation, but they are easily drowned out by the political elites whose ‘expertise’ still appears to reign supreme. [. . .] While political talk shows facilitate some degree of political contestation and citizen participation they come off as an imperfect public sphere that is characterized by participation inequality.”48
For my part, I refrain in this particular book from reflecting on whether the ebimeeza were actually representative of the “public” or not, or whether they enhanced “democracy.”49 However legitimate and important these questions are,50 I argue that the varied conceptual frameworks brought together by democratic theory carry the risk of not doing justice to a very rich and historically situated phenomenon, by forcing upon it univocal, historically situated and normative grids of interpretation.51 The ebimeeza provide a heuristic entry point to unearth the historicity of entrenched emic debates about the conditions of political participation and belonging in Uganda. What I seek in this book is to allow these emic representations of the legitimacy “to speak out,” to emerge from the field. This avoids the risk of casting them aside because they may be “undemocratic.” I want to understand how certain features—often considered as flaws—are interpreted and sometimes valued by people themselves. I want to see what they reveal of the Ugandan political game; what they mean in a given historical context; and how they reflect particular, historically grounded political and social cultures. This should also help us understand the forms speech took in the