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 ebimeeza.
Adopting an evaluative and normative framework does not encourage asking questions about what kind of political, social, and civic heritages surfaced during the ebimeeza or were nourished by them. It is necessary to reconstitute carefully how the ebimeeza made sense, in varying ways, for different people and organizations (political parties, NGOs, the Kingdom of Buganda), how they were integrated into their social trajectories and ambitions, and how all of this influenced the ways the debates were organized. Such an analysis will also allow particular features of the Ugandan political game and society to be highlighted. Many people in Uganda criticized the fact that some orators were encouraged to participate by political parties, which supposedly jeopardized “the viability of talk shows as avenues of civic engagement.”52 I argue that such concerns should not prevent us from studying these dynamics in order to illuminate further the functioning of political parties in Uganda and their social composition. The incredible display of self-confidence from orators, their particular forms of speaking, and the quasi-professionalization of some are extremely significant in regard to Uganda’s political and social history. As we will see in detail, the concerns raised by the ebimeeza were structured by much older debates, in Uganda in general and in Buganda in particular, about who is entitled to speak in public, and they allow unearthing the daily workings of electoral politics and the localized effects of the transnational political economy of development in renewed ways.
The social embeddedness and the more or less intended effects of radio in the creation of cultures, in the coming together of communities and the imagination of social persons, have been the object of fertile research in African Studies. Researchers have sought to understand the intentions of the colonial state in using broadcast technologies,53 and also to analyze how, in complex ways and through its vernacular appropriations, radio has enabled sensitive experiences of modernity, which have been both enslaving and liberating.54 Radio has also offered a platform for particular sections of colonial societies to voice their social ambitions and craft their own languages in relatively autonomous ways.55 African broadcast cultures, even at their most local and chauvinistic, are nodes of cosmopolitan encounters and cultural hybridity.56 Radio has often been used as a way to affirm a connection to the world and to claim power in the name of cosmopolitanism.57 African broadcast cultures have enabled creative new spiritualities and religious authorities to emerge.58 They have provided and contributed in the forming of spaces of gendered moral guidance, patriotic nostalgia, and resistance;59 they have challenged or entrenched established divisions between public and private.60 Lately, African radio programs have also offered fertile ground on which to analyze particular figures of moral authority and explore local conceptions of justice and truth that are often overshadowed by hegemonic transnational narratives of human rights and free speech.61
By uncovering, through the study of the ebimeeza, local yet globally connected debates about suitable ways to engage in politics, this book aims to contribute to this growing field of research. I seek, however, to examine, in possibly a more direct way than has been done before in African radio studies, the close interactions between radio and political power: to bring the state and politics “back in.”62 The idea is to document the daily making of radio speech at the crossroads of a variety of social dynamics, but also in relation with the working of the state as a heterogeneous and changing space, in relation with electoral politics and within local power configurations. Eventually, the objective is to understand how speech is the result of a politics of control, but in less straightforward ways than what might have been expected in a “semiauthoritarian” regime.
To examine these issues, the analysis here relies on fieldwork carried out in Uganda (mainly in Kampala, but also in Fort Portal, Gulu, and Masaka) between 2005 and 2013. This fieldwork linked the systematic observation of dozens of ebimeeza programs with in-depth and sometimes repeated biographical interviews with orators, spectators, organizers of the ebimeeza, politicians (especially members of Parliament), state officials in charge of communication, officials from the Kingdom of Buganda, advertisers, journalists and radio producers, NGO staff, media managers and owners, and so forth. In total, more than 150 persons were interviewed, and a questionnaire was distributed during three different ebimeeza. The fieldwork also provided material based on the observation of meetings of orators’ associations; in-depth content analysis of twelve shows transcribed into English and translated from Luganda and Lutooro (as well as listening to dozens of others); the examination of the archives of two of the ebimeeza made up of hundreds of lists of orators, members’ notes, and documents produced by the organizing committees (such as meeting reports, correspondence with members, etc.); and finally the analysis of local press articles and letters to the editor on the ebimeeza.
This material reveals not only how people talked, but also the historically and socially situated ways people had of imagining good forms of speech. These representations were at the center of heated debates and controversies on the ground: Who was entitled to speak and how, about what, from where, and according to what
