Paul Wamala’s father, Dr. Paulo Wamala, owned a pharmacy and a large hotel by Lake Victoria. He was close to Kabaka Muteesa II, and Paul Wamala says that Paulo helped the king during the 1966 crisis, when the kingdom was attacked by Obote’s government.15 Paulo Wamala was killed under Amin’s regime. After his father’s death, Paul Wamala graduated with a business administration degree in Britain. In 1986, when Museveni came to power, Wamala got part of his father’s property back. When we met, he operated in construction, real estate, and entertainment businesses. Thanks to his family history, Wamala claimed that he “talk[ed] with the king every week,” but he was critical of the radicalization of royalism that occurred in the mid-2000s. He also had close contacts with members of the NRM government, especially for business reasons.16
Another important historical was James Wasula, who was born in Mengo, in the heart of Buganda, at the end of the 1950s.17 His father worked for the kingdom in the Lubiiri, the royal palace, while his mother worked at the Ministry of Finance in the central government. Wasula went to primary school in the palace. When it was attacked in 1966, he fled in one of the kabaka’s vehicles. His father then entered the Ministry of Education of the central government. After passing his A levels, Wasula worked at the high court, then studied in South Africa. Back in Kampala, he specialized in accounting and joined the Coffee Marketing Board, staying in that position until its privatization in 1991. Today, Wasula works in intellectual property and the protection of copyright. He is a musician and has managed the Afrigo Band since the 1980s. In 2000, he bought shares in Club Obbligato. He was the main chairman of the Ekimeeza until it was banned in 2009.
However, before Wasula assumed the chair, the first chairman of the Ekimeeza was Alan Shonubi, a lawyer born in 1958.18 He is also from a wealthy family connected to the kingdom’s establishment. His grandfather was a chief and attended King’s College Budo, the “jewel” of Uganda’s colonial education system, created in 1906 and following closely the model of British public schools.19 His mother, Catherine Senkatuka, was a well-educated Ganda woman. She also went to Budo, and in 1944, she became the first woman to be admitted to Makerere College.20 In the 1950s, she went to study in Great Britain. According to her son, she was also a member of the Legislative Council (LEGCO), the Ugandan parliament before independence. She then became a secondary school teacher. Alan’s father is a Nigerian businessman. Alan Shonubi followed the family path and also went to Budo. He then entered the prestigious Law Development Centre (LDC) in Makerere for the necessary schooling to become a lawyer. Nevertheless, it was difficult to find a position during the war. As a musician, he performed in bars in Kampala, and that was how he came to meet the Afrigo Band. After the war, in 1986, he worked in insurance companies and in a bank, before creating his own bank. Since 1990, he has headed a law firm, Shonubi, Musoke & Co. Advocates, which specializes in corporate law and employs ten lawyers. He was said to be one of the richest men in the country.21 He sent his three sons to Budo, and in 2005, he chaired the Old Budonians’ Club, after having been the vice-chair for seven years. As he told me, “I transformed the club. It was a paper organization earning a few hundred thousand shillings per month [around £30] to cover its activities. Today it has a [USh]36 million budget per year [around £13,000].” In 2005, he also joined the board of the school.22
Another historical was Edward Kayondo, a medical doctor born in 1955, near Kampala.23 When we met he was the president of the Old Budonians. He grew up in Bulange, close to the kingdom’s seat. He is from a more modest extraction compared to Wasula, Shonubi, and Wamala. His father was a medical officer. According to one of their friends, Kayondo was the only one among the group who had to “make himself on his own” through education.24 He went to the Mengo boys’ school and then to Budo, thanks to a grant he received because his grandfather was a priest and had been to Budo in the 1920s. In Budo, he met Betty Kamya and Winnie Byanyima, future MPs and political celebrities, as well as Crispus Kiyonga, the future minister of defense. He also met Alan Shonubi. In 1973, he became secretary-general of the school’s debate society. He entered Makerere in 1974 where he studied medicine, and then he went for further studies in Newcastle, leaving there to travel around Europe and the United States. In 1982 he went back to Uganda where he taught medicine. He owns land, a school, and a hotel. For a few years, he compiled and published almanacs and books about the most important educational establishments of the country.25 He sent five of his children to school in Budo.26 Edward Kayondo never missed the Ekimeeza radio talk show, of which he was an emblematic figure, sometimes chairing the debates.
It was striking that these men were a product of the diversification of the Ganda upper class and the attenuation of its fragmentation between landowners, businessmen, and professionals, which occurred during late colonialism.27 Some of the historicals inherited social status through land and relatively important positions within the kingdom’s administration, but their parents and they themselves founded their social standing on a combination of business, education, and the professional world, including positions within central government. This mutation allowed them to reconstitute their status after the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, the impoverishment of tenants, the nationalization of land, the disappearance of the kingdom, and the crumbling of the economy.
The extent to which the social status of the historicals influenced their position toward Movementism and royalism will be analyzed further below. But it is necessary to underline here that the historicals knew one another well prior to the emergence of the Ekimeeza. The four men introduced above were part of a larger group of childhood friends who participated more or less intensely in the discussions. For some of them, these links were reinforced by family connections. They all stayed in Mengo, and some of them had close connections with the royal establishment. Several of them met at the Mengo boys’ school or Budo. Later, they engaged in business together, in particular in the entertainment and land and housing real estate sectors. Some of them, especially Paul Wamala, were already acquainted with Maria Kiwanuka, the owner of Radio One, who was from an important Ganda family and a prominent figure of the Kampala business community, and later became minister of finance (see chapter 2).
These men brought a specific kind of political and social heritage to the Ekimeeza. Their practices of sociability were strongly illustrative of particular educated and masculine ideals of “modernity” and social distinction, linked to Kampala’s multiethnic professional and business urban environment.
A Bourgeois Masculine and Individualistic Sociability
Sociability encompasses practices that are objectively determined but subjectively discerned as governed by affinity.28 They are specific to particular groups and thus often discriminative. They need to be learned, require special know-how and skills, and their preservation can be linked to ambitions of sociopolitical domination and ethnic, gender, class, or state formation.29 For reasons explored below, important members of the original group of friends left the Ekimeeza at Club Obbligato. However, they continued to meet regularly (for some of them almost every day) in another pub, Club Magic, also owned by Paul Wamala.30 Therefore, Club Magic was a good place to observe the way they interacted and reconstitute the atmosphere of the first discussions that gave birth to the ebimeeza.
Club Magic was located in the center of Kampala, near the central avenue, Kampala Road. It was both a restaurant and a car park. Like most capital cities, Kampala is greatly affected by traffic jams. Members of the upper class are reluctant to use public transport or mototaxis (boda boda), and often complain about how difficult and unsafe it is to park in town. Several people explained during interviews how they selected their leisure activities based on parking criteria: the Magic Club was an answer to that dilemma. As with Club Obbligato, lunch was expensive (USh10,000, around £4). Beyond considerations of practicality and comfort, bars are obviously strong markers of social distinction. A regular orator, also a client of another of Kampala’s famous drinking places (the Lugogo Rugby Club) and himself an Acholi, once explained to me that one could find “the cream of the young Acholi intellectuals” in Lugogo.31
