participated in the reinvention of an elitist sociability. As such, the ebimeeza can be seen as one of the sites where a “reciprocal assimilation of elites” occurred, to use Jean-François Bayart’s words.80 That is to say, a site where historically distinct components of the elite could together reinvent a political culture, reinvent the parameters of class domination, and, through their social and economic alliance, rebuild a sociopolitical order. It illustrates how the wealthy, liberal, and moderate Ganda elite class was able to socially materialize its alliance with the leftist military elite of the West, through a heterodox interpretation of the Movement revolution. Last, this elitist and intellectual heritage of the ebimeeza needs to be taken into account in order to understand how the new generation of speakers understood themselves and their part in the polity when they took the floor. As we will see in detail below, far from discarding this distinguished heritage, they embraced it.
TWO
The Political Economy of Radio Speech
UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGENCE OF THE EBIMEEZA AND THE format they took also requires an exploration of the political economy and the sociology of the media within which they were produced. Historically the Ugandan press has been intrinsically linked to religious mobilization, party and faction politics, and of late has been dominated by university-educated intellectuals. By contrast, radio has a very different history. As we will see, the introduction of live political debate on the air was far from being a self-evident or straightforward process. In order to be politically acceptable, professionally valued by media workers, and economically viable, the programming of talk radio needed to take particular formats. Political speech and the opening of new avenues for popular expression cannot be understood in isolation from the ambivalent development of commercial radio within the private realm of the state, the importation of foreign entertainment and news formats, the economy of development and international aid, and the local heritages of a relatively long history of radio culture.
The Liberalization of the Airwaves and the Invention of Private Radio
The involvement of audiences in programming is a rather old phenomenon in Uganda, as in the rest of Africa. Radio clubs were initially launched during late colonialism, with the ambition of teaching “civic values” to colonial subjects.1 In Uganda, before the creation of a proper, official station in 1954 by the protectorate government, mobile broadcasting units “would shuttle between about twenty political rally venues in Kampala and the neighboring areas many times a week disseminating information. [. . . Then] the same broadcasting team would record questions from the audience and take them to the colonial masters for answering.”2 But in contrast with the vibrant and deeply political press of late colonialism, the British aimed at protecting the airwaves against open political controversy and debate.3 In the 1980s, before and after Museveni’s takeover, a program called You and Your Government encouraged people to send in questions by letter, which were then answered on the air.4
Interactivity thus did not come with the liberalization of the airwaves, but it changed tremendously because of it, for when the first private radio stations were launched in 1993, and when the airwaves became the terrain of commercial competition, the logics of programming mutated. Before that, the state radio was the realm of teachers, carefully chosen ethnic entrepreneurs, and public servants whose careers oscillated between media production and administrative work in the Ministry of Information.5 They were broadcasters who understood their professional ethos as the fulfillment of a duty to report government and state decisions and activities without questioning them, not necessarily only as a result of constraint, terror, or guilty collaboration with violent regimes, but also because such an ethos corresponded to their training and their vision of what a public broadcaster should do.6 However, audiences had already developed a taste and habits of interacting with broadcasters ahead of the privatization of the airwaves.
The liberalization of radio in 1993 was not the result of journalists’ liberal demands or a cause for political mobilization. It was the result of a petition from businessmen who considered the airwaves an investment opportunity and who were for the most part close to the Movement leadership.7 For the authorities, opening the airwaves was part of a wider policy of further embracing the market economy.8 William Pike, at the time editor in chief of the government newspaper the New Vision, was influential in the decision of the government to liberalize. He insists on the fact that it was a business move, and that radio stations were mainly expected to broadcast music and “not engage in political criticism,” or government propaganda for that matter, both considered a nuisance to business.9 According to Peter Mwesige, in the first two years after the liberalization, 80 percent of the programs were dedicated to music, not because of political constraint, but because it was profitable.10 As a journalist from the Monitor recalled:
I think we had not at that time thought about it. . . . I don’t know, there was . . . It is true, a government radio is not enough, but there was no movement to push for opening the airwaves. [. . .] The journalists in the government media were also satisfied with what they were doing. They were not really pro–opening up. [. . .] And there was also the question of training. Because most of the journalists at that time were print journalists. [. . .] Here, [the liberalization] was a donation from the government.11
Radio was not the realm of journalists. From the authorities’ point of view, the first stations were owned by “trustworthy” people who they knew supported the establishment, like Thomas Katto. He was a senior businessman who owned Radio Sanyu, the first private station to be launched, and who had made his fortune with a tissue factory and in clothing.12 Capital FM was launched next by William Pike, a British journalist at the time strongly supportive of the Movement; and Patrick Quarcoo, a Ghanaian businessman and radio presenter. At the time, Quarcoo was in his thirties. Today he owns several stations in Uganda and Kenya, as well as a tabloid in Nairobi. He left Ghana in 1984 to secure an MBA in Manchester. He specialized in media management and was later hired by Reuters as a business manager for Africa, which is how he met Pike. The Ugandan economic context seemed favorable to him as a media product developer:
We were looking for a country that was liberal enough and at that time, President Museveni was also looking for investors to go into the country. There was a fortuitous mix. [. . .] At that time, some advertisers would look to advertise on national radio and national television and they would be told there’s no space, you have to wait for two or three days. So it was a real business opportunity to be able to come in and say to people, “Hey, if they won’t take the money, we’ll give you advertising.”13
Maria Kiwanuka, already mentioned above as a friend of the historicals of Club Obbligato’s Ekimeeza, is a good example of this first generation of radio owners, and of the overlapping nature of the private and public sectors that has proved instrumental in the development of these new venues for political speech. In September 1997, she launched Radio One (followed four years later by a sister station, Radio Two Akaboozi, which broadcasts in Luganda). She comes from an influential Ganda family. Her father was a civil servant. She was born in the 1950s and educated in Kampala, graduating with a degree in commerce from Makerere in 1977. She worked in the banking sector before going to London for her MBA . She was then recruited by the World Bank as an analyst.14 When she came back to Uganda in the 1990s, she became a board member of the Uganda Development Bank, a nonexecutive director of Stanbic Bank, and a member of the Presidential Economic Commission.15 Her husband, Mohan Kiwanuka, heads Oscar Industries, a company created in the 1970s that specializes in stationery, and he is regularly cited in the press as one of the wealthiest men in the country.16 In 2011, her links with the political establishment were publicly acknowledged when Maria Kiwanuka was nominated as minister of finance, a position she held until March 2015.17
From the mid-1990s, stations started broadcasting in the vernacular. For instance, Radio Simba was launched in 1996 by Aga Sekalala Jr., a Ganda businessman
