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 He also explained that “finding a proper lunch in Kampala is very difficult. . . . There are many places to eat but to call that a lunch . . . [At Club Obbligato at least], we didn’t have to choose between chicken and meat.”32
According to informants, the meetings in Club Magic were quite similar to the original ones in Club Obbligato; they harbored a very different format of sociability than the formality that characterizes family and clan ceremonies in Buganda, which are usually very hierarchical, marked by congregating around the “guests of honor,” and by deference toward elders. Such gatherings aim at strengthening the links between members of a clan or restaging family roles.33 As Mikael Karlström noted, clan meetings are the cradle of an exclusive format of sociability, which nourishes social hierarchies and thus promotes a specific model of personhood rooted in clan genealogy and defined by one’s place in the clan social fabric.34 In Club Magic, the sociability was largely masculine. It was very rare to meet wives and children, and as one interviewee explained, it would not come to members’ minds to bring relatives.35 The rare women who came did not come as wives but on their own. As we will see more precisely below, the absence of women had an important influence on the format of the ebimeeza. Their absence also distinguished the shows from other kinds of gatherings, in particular the Local Councils and church meetings, as well as the rural and up-country talk shows, where the presence of women, and also children, was important. Meetings in Club Magic, as was originally the case at Club Obbligato, were the cradle of an exclusive equality among men of a certain standing.
The following quotation by Dr. Edward Kayondo, talking about Club Obbligato, illustrates the specificity of this format of sociability and how it was seen by the historicals:
Q: Why this pub in particular? What did it have that was particular that people would meet there?
A: Well, it was out of town, slightly out of town, with parking, quieter than town, it had a band after. After discussion we could go dancing all night. . . . It had cooking facilities.
Q: Why was it important that it was out of town?
A: Because in town you have no parking. And you have noise, and you don’t have such a big area. . . . And the people running it are friends. . . . This place is a social club.36
The word club, as used by Kayondo, was ambiguous, referring not only to the idea of a nightclub but also to “social clubs,” which were typical of colonial sociability and as such implied an idea of exclusivity and an ambition to be part of the social and cultural elite.37 Contrary to the latter, Club Obbligato was not officially exclusive: one did not need to be registered as a member to get in. That principle was not evident at the beginning, though; some founding members of the Ekimeeza would have preferred to preserve a certain exclusivity or privacy. However, as the lunch meetings were not protected by any rules or open financial barriers, and because of the commercial objectives of the club’s owners, who wanted to attract the most people possible, the entre-soi started fading, especially after discussions began to be broadcast.
Distinguished Movementism
Such ways of being together were strongly related to the forms of political action these actors valued, to their political ideals, and to the ways they interacted with the state and political elites. The following quote from an interview with two historicals illustrates their state of mind:
Historical #1: [Under Amin], when you had a car like this one [a 4x4], they took it from you like that. You were killed and they drove it without even changing the number [plate]. . . . Wamala’s father was killed because of his property. If he hadn’t been rich, maybe he would still be alive. But he died because of his money. So why would I want politics? Let [Museveni] be in power as much as he wants, if we are at peace . . .
Historical #2: We didn’t think it would