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 introduced by them. 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
