from the “Politics” section to the less controversial “Business” pages. Black-and-white close-ups of frowning opponents may be preferred to wide-angle color photographs of political rallies showing the crowd.30 Metaphors and tales are, as elsewhere, widely used as a way to toy with repression.31
Degrees of submission and collusion vary within the newsroom, and according to topics and sections of the paper. This is why broad labels (“private press,” “state media,” “opposition media,” and “independent media”) are too general to help understand the nature of the relationship between state and media, the way domination is exercised and negotiated. Also, such labels do not capture the depth and complexity of the repertoires of critique and political languages deployed: editorial choices have to be analyzed against the backdrop of the plurality of power sources, together with a long and complex history of political ideas. Moreover, journalists position themselves not simply “for” or “against” the government: the range of possible positions is wider and more complex. Nicole Stremlau has shown well how during the first years of the regime, newspapers such as the New Vision (belonging to the government) and the Weekly Topic (owned privately by three major pillars of the NRM regime) participated in building a consensus around the new political order the NRM was attempting to build following the Bush War, while openly taking on a mission to criticize the regime in order to “strengthen the revolution.”32 These papers fiercely denounced corruption and abuse of power, and in order to do so journalists used the very ideals the NRM was supposed to protect.33 At the time, the way these journalists worked reflected a desire to be integrated within the political and moral renovation project of the NRM, while trying to protect themselves from repression: the state was an object of both desire and fear. Support and criticism could be intertwined within the same article, as a strategy of protection but also in coherence with political and ideological trajectories that were common between some journalists and NRM officials.
As mentioned earlier, repression is far from taking place only in visible ways. Official justification often hides the genuine reasons why repression is triggered in the first place. Nevertheless, these justifications are worth taking seriously for what they are: official representations of what legitimate media speech is, in the eyes of the political elite. Of interest here are the effects of this official ideology of discourse: how this ideology was perceived and sometimes taken on by journalists and citizens, and the influence it has had on actual political speech.
The definition of what can and what cannot be said has often been enforced by the state through extrajudicial violence, but also through criminal law. This started as early as 1986, even though criminal condemnations of journalists up until now have been extremely rare.34 But beyond criminal law, what is of interest to us here is that some journalists actively participated in crafting this new media language during the first ten years of the regime, including some who published very aggressive investigative pieces against powerful officials, especially journalists from the Weekly Topic, the New Vision, and the Monitor.35 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
