Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault

[. . .] There are people who come there and they don’t debate. They put their name on a paper, but they can spend months without debating.³⁵

      However, when observing the spatial organization of the debates at Club Obbligato or at Radio Simba, the division into two sides or according to political party lines does not stand out. That was not encouraged by the organizers. People could sit wherever they wished, and, as we will see later, at Club Obbligato and at Radio Simba, seating strategies reflected mainly the status orators claimed or thought they had within the assembly rather than any political solidarity or antagonism. On the contrary, one striking thing in all the ebimeeza was how much people from different political “sides” or “parties” were sitting, chatting, and laughing together, sharing drinks and food in an informal atmosphere.

      An Opportunity for Opposition Political Parties

      Despite the historicals’ hostility, the ebimeeza were strongly and very early on intertwined with party politics. Before the 2005 reform, they were a convenient venue for opposition parties (but also the NRM, as we will see below) to try to overcome the fact that they could not organize political rallies or present candidates in the elections. There they could meet citizens and ensure the continuity of their ideas and their structures.³⁶ But the ebimeeza were also linked to intraparty struggles and were used by subaltern activists to gain prominence within their own parties.

      Before 2005, parties existed but could not register members or hold rallies. Opportunities to meet citizens officially were thus relatively scarce: they happened on a microscale (typically within a political leader’s circle of sociability or clientele networks). Collective mobilization events had to be organized by politicians on an individual basis. They were often frowned upon by the authorities and restricted to electoral campaign periods. As Giovanni Carbone has shown convincingly, political parties’ leaderships, especially in the Democratic Party, developed tactics to use any opportunities of interaction with supporters and citizens in order to ensure their organization’s continuity both in people’s minds and in organizational terms. The DP was notably keen on organizing seminars and conferences, and so using “organizational repertoires,”³⁷ which were similar to the ebimeeza (i.e., based on intellectual debate and interactions rather than mass rallies).³⁸ But the ebimeeza were used by all parties. As a Forum for Democratic Change member of Parliament from Northern Uganda told me: “There was a time [when] a public rally was dispersed for members of the opposition. And this [ekimeeza] is the venue where you come and start addressing issues. You need a meeting place!”³⁹ The shows were also opportunities to ensure a certain visibility of the organization: beyond the speeches themselves, some participants displayed their party colors (yellow for the NRM; green for DP; red for UPC [Uganda People’s Congress]; orange and later blue for FDC), by carefully picking their outfits. Last, the ebimeeza were of course a free media space in an increasingly commercialized context. As we will see in detail, the partisanization was also strengthened through individual ambitions and agendas of social advancement. Some participants hoped to catch the eye of a potential mentor, or to be recruited as a political campaigner by demonstrating their loyalty to a party.

      The strategy adopted by opposition politicians toward the ebimeeza followed two different patterns. First, on an individual basis, important members of the opposition leadership began to frequent Club Obbligato informally, as early as 2001 (on these individualized approaches, see chapter 5). However, the presence of the opposition in these new spheres of discussion also took place in a more coordinated way in the context of the 2000–2001 election campaign, as one orator explained:

      Q: What led you to attend these debates?