Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault
forms and repertoires of political engagement people might have with it.72 Scholars have been analyzing who people consider to be citizens, the social and moral arguments at play in the changing definitions of who is “in” and who is not, and who is a “better” citizen and why. They have underlined the variety, richness, rootedness, and cosmopolitan character of African political thought on these subjects.73 A number of scholars have, in particular, contested clear-cut dichotomies in terms of citizens versus subjects that do not cover the “patchwork of legal statuses” in existence in Africa,74 in the past and present. Neither do such dichotomies encompass the intertwinement of claims of sovereignty and submission (the latter being far from equivalent to passivity).75 Scholars have noted the diversity of spheres of belonging or engagement, the plurality of the actual practices and the representations at play on the ground, as well as the varieties of pasts and futures people refer to.76 This book builds on this very rich literature, but insists on the fact that the study of these conceptions cannot be isolated from the mechanisms of social and political domination in which they take part.
As mentioned, the invention of a particular format of citizenship has been at the center of strong efforts by the NRM government. During the Bush War that led him to power (1981–1986), and influenced by Nyerere’s Ujamaa and Maoism, Museveni crafted the model of the “Movement democracy.” This model is grounded in a universal belonging to the NRM (seen as being equivalent to the Ugandan citizenship); regular elections based on individual merit and not party tickets;77 and the creation of participatory structures at the grassroots level, namely, the Resistance Councils (RCs).78
According to Museveni, political modernity can be reached only by annihilating the mechanisms that favor the permanence of “archaic” features, namely, ethnic and religious sectarianism. By parting with primary solidarities that cloud judgment and lead to making irrational political decisions based on identity, citizens could make choices favoring development.79 Museveni believes that “ethnicity and sectarianism [. . .] are short term problems”80 that will be overcome through commerce, education, work, and a nonpartisan form of collective mobilization.
One of the main vehicles for the emergence of this renewed society was the institutionalization of a system of “grassroots democracy,” incarnated by the Resistance Councils, today called Local Councils (LCs). The smaller units (RC1s and LC1s), which correspond to the village levels (or “zones” in urban areas), are open to anyone age eighteen and above.81 Citizenship as mediated by the RCs is based on residence,82 and transcends ethnic, party, and religious affiliations.83 The RC system was more or less successful, depending on the region.84 Whereas they were spheres of political mobilization and education during the war, they were then transferred under the authority of the Ministry of Local Government and refocused on local issues, typically managing security and public works issues. RCs also act as a channel between the government and the local populations.85 Attendance at meetings has become more uncertain with time, and RCs have not always managed to overcome older established social hierarchies.86 Despite these limitations, many have acknowledged the fact that the councils have been widely invested and appropriated by Uganda’s population, sometimes with great enthusiasm, in particular in the South of the country. Moreover, RCs saw their mandate enlarged for a few years at the beginning of the 1990s, as they were used as local arenas of mobilization and discussion of the new constitution project.87 Generally, scholars agree that they led to important mutations in people’s and local leaders’ political practices and conceptions of political legitimacy, of citizens’ roles, and of the relationships between rulers and ruled.
Generally speaking, with the advent of the Local Councils, political participation and social mobilization were strongly encouraged by the authorities to take place within the state structures, or at least according to the Movementist repertoires of mobilization.88 Nevertheless, this move toward a relatively domesticated format of political participation was not necessarily based on constraint. Women’s organizations in particular initially adhered largely to the social and political project of the NRM.89 The situation was different, however, for actors who were stigmatized by the NRM project, especially the kingdoms. In 1993, Museveni overcame his own reticence and accepted the restoration of the monarchies that had been banned by Milton Obote in 1967.90 But this was done only under certain conditions, as the kingdoms did not recover all the prerogatives they’d had at independence. According to Article 246 of the 1995 constitution, a “cultural” or “traditional” leader should not get involved in “party politics.” “Involvement” in “party politics” is difficult to delimitate precisely, but this ban is often interpreted broadly by state officials, and clearly restricts the ways in which people are allowed to be involved in the discussion of common issues. This question has been particularly heated in the case of the Buganda Kingdom,91 and the ebimeeza found themselves at the center of this controversy. As historians have shown, Buganda has been the cradle of intense conversations about good ways to be a citizen, a subject, and a good Muganda. 92
Study of the ebimeeza also provides an opportunity to explore current forms of Ganda patriotism, conceptions of belonging and how they are intertwined with alternative sources of the imagination of the self, and civic virtue. More generally, in such a context of ideological pluralism, questions remain as to the ways people see themselves as members of the polity, decades after the “revolution” that led Museveni to power. By studying the ways in which people speak in public, and the ways people think one ought to speak in public, this book will help to unveil the composite and fundamentally political character of the imagination of political personhood in contemporary Uganda.
ONE
The Ebimeeza and the Political Culture of Kampala’s Upper Class
“IT IS THE COMMON PEOPLE [WHO COME]. THE EVERYDAY MAN and woman that you meet on the street. [. . .] Day-to-day people, the common man comes around, expresses himself freely.”1 This is how one of the first producers of Ekimeeza introduced me to the show when I first went to Kampala in 2005. In day-to-day conversations and in the media, the ebimeeza were indeed often described as popular spheres of discussion, where “ordinary citizens” could come and air their views.
The ebimeeza emerged, however, within a very restricted social circle, and were originally imagined as the fulcrum of a culture of distinction. Actually, what characterized them was their plasticity: the fact that people used them to promote very diverse models of citizenship and political culture. This tension between the imagination of a high-quality debate among men of culture on the one hand, and popular democracy on the other, marked the ebimeeza from their inception until the 2009 ban. This tension was constantly debated, never actually clarified, and was at the core of the state’s ambivalent attitude toward the talk shows. Actually, the question of whether or not the ebimeeza should be opened to the masses had important implications within the emic debate on the nature of democracy in Uganda, and involved deeply antagonistic imaginaries of citizenship.
The first ekimeeza to be launched was held in English and resulted from the broadcast of discussions held among a group of friends who used to gather in one of Kampala’s famous clubs, Club Obbligato. The ebimeeza thus need to be resituated within a particular history of sociability practices, and in the trajectory of a specific group: the Ganda business class. A close reconstitution of their emergence shows how these new possibilities to take the floor and express oneself were not the result of radical struggles for “freedom of speech” or for the participation of “the common man” in politics. Instead, they were linked to a history of interelite relations within the political, economic, and social establishments. The study of the ebimeeza thus allows for the genesis and social grounding of the Movement State to be revisited and enables going against the grain of the official historiography that portrays it as the result of a univocal “social revolution” that gave back power to the grassroots.
FIGURE 1.1. Opinion piece by David Ouma, “Bimeeza Took Debate Down to the People,”