Talkative Polity. Florence Brisset-Foucault

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 rules? The varied answers people have given to these questions provide information about deeply entrenched conceptions of political personhood and political order. These conceptions need to be historicized and situated socially. Social actors did not have the same capacity to impose their views on who could speak and how. The state, in particular, displayed a special urge in trying to impose its vision of legitimate speech, of the delimitation of what should be said and what should not. But, as we will see, the state was not alone in this.

      Many authors before have used practices of discussion to decipher emic conceptions of good government, civility, and morality, and have underlined how local forms of sociability are fruitful cradles of imaginary polities. Collective places of leisure—pubs, clubs, cafés, salons, tea meetings (called addas in India and grins in West Africa), the baraza of Zanzibar, and upper-class clubs in Kenya—have indeed historically been the framework of conservative or innovative solidarities and political ideas, in a more or less intentional way.⁶³ Maurice Agulhon and Edward Thompson in particular emphasized the links between the transformations of sociability practices and the larger evolutions of political culture in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France and Britain. There, the creation of “circles,” religious societies, and constitutional clubs opened the way to creating an ethos of equality.⁶⁴ Many such examples have existed at different times in history.⁶⁵

      Eventually, the underlying question raised in this book has to do with the controversial and emic partitions made by varied people in contemporary Uganda about what can be talked about out loud, and what cannot. This controversial question is particularly relevant in the case of Uganda, given its centrality in the political and religious history of the country.⁶⁶ But the limits of speech—about what can be said and what cannot—have also been key issues in more recent events and dynamics: the social and economic importance of the so-called “yellow press”;⁶⁷ the heated controversies around the question of sexual behaviors and preferences;⁶⁸ and the harsh repression of anthropologist Stella Nyanzi (who researches precisely the injunctions weighing on women’s and men’s speech and behavior in the name of gender conformity).⁶⁹ Such issues raise tragic and fascinating questions concerning the violent emic negotiations on the borders of the “public sphere.” As Michael Warner has emphasized, the great and controversial partition between the “public” and the “private” realms has been a canvas for thinking about the possibilities of emancipation in Western political thought, while also being a reflection of gendered relations of domination.⁷⁰

      The other reason why this project might be all the more relevant in the Ugandan context is that citizenship and the ways of thinking about oneself as a member of the polity have been at the center of strong reform efforts by the NRM government. For the last twenty years, a relatively open and nonnormative definition of citizenship has been adopted in African Studies.⁷¹ It relies on empirically based, inductive approaches that take into account but also go beyond questions of legal status. Citizenship in this context is understood as the emic and plural notions that form the basis for the imagination of sovereignty, participation, and access to certain rights and belonging. This wide definition allows for the investigation of the varying ways in which people conceptualize belonging, the borders of the political community, their rights and duties and those of others, their relationship to political