Talkative Polity

Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda

Florence Brisset-Foucault

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780821423776
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446669
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For the first decade of the twenty-first century, every weekend, people throughout Uganda converged to participate in ebimeeza, open debates that invited common citizens to share their political and social views. These debates, also called "People's Parliaments, " were broadcast live on private radio stations until the government banned them in 2009. In Talkative Polity, Florence Brisset-Foucault offers the first major study of ebimeeza, which complicate our understandings of political speech in restrictive contexts and force us to move away from the simplistic binary of an authoritarian state and a liberal civil society.

Brisset-Foucault conducted fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, primarily in Kampala, interviewing some 150 orators, spectators, politicians, state officials, journalists, and NGO staff. The resulting ethnography invigorates the study of political domination and documents a short-lived but highly original sphere of political expression. Brisset-Foucault thus does justice to the richness and depth of Uganda's complex political and radio culture as well as to the story of ambitious young people who didn't want to behave the way the state expected them to. Positioned at the intersection of media studies and political science, Talkative Polity will help us all rethink the way in which public life works.

Notes

Introduction

1. Club Obbligato’s Ekimeeza was the first to be launched, and its name became generic for this particular kind of radio show. Ebimeeza is the plural of ekimeeza. I will use Ekimeeza with a capital E to talk about Radio One’s show and ekimeeza when talking about similar shows on other stations.

2. Apart from the people who were officially in charge of the organization of the ebimeeza, journalists, political officials, and prominent political party members, the names of the interviewees have been withdrawn and their initials changed.

3. Ekimeeza, Radio One, 9 August 2008.

4. This is a very vast literature. See, among others, Larry J. Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 21–35; Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (1997): 22–43; Leonardo Morlino, “Are There Hybrid Regimes? Or Are They Just an Optical Illusion?” European Political Science Review 1, no. 2 (2009): 273–96.

5. Aili Mari Tripp, “The Changing Face of Authoritarianism in Africa: The Case of Uganda,” Africa Today 50, no. 3 (2004): 4. For a more detailed assessment, see Tripp, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010).

6. New attempts at classifications can be found, for instance, in David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 430–51; Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes”; Mikael Wigell, “Mapping ‘Hybrid Regimes’: Regime Types and Concepts in Comparative Politics,” Democratization 15, no. 2 (2008): 230–50; Matthijs Bogaards, “How to Classify Hybrid Regimes? Defective Democracy and Electoral Authoritarianism,” Democratization 16, no. 2 (2009): 399–423; Michael Wahman, Jan Teorell, and Axel Hadenius, “Authoritarian Regime Types Revisited: Updated Data in Comparative Perspective,” Contemporary Politics 19, no. 1 (2013): 19–34. Other authors have criticized the attempt to draw typologies altogether as it doesn’t encourage inductive research that compares parameters of domination between regimes categorized as “democracies” and regimes categorized as “authoritarian.” See Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); Jay Rowell, Le totalitarisme au concret: Les politiques du logement en RDA (Paris: Economica, 2006); Olivier Dabène, Vincent Geisser, and Gilles Massardier, eds., Autoritarismes démocratiques et démocraties autoritaires au XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2008).

7. Some authors, however, have given a more convincing analysis as to why some regimes evolve in authoritarian directions whereas others democratize. See in particular Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), who insist on the importance of taking into account incumbents’ relationships to the West, and their organizational power, to explain their permanence or even consolidation. Others have underlined these limitations and provided in-depth case studies of the everyday workings of authoritarian states, notably Hibou, Force of Obedience; Rowell, Le totalitarisme au concret. Happily, the literature on Uganda has been renewed recently: see Joseph Oloka-Onyango and Josephine Ahikire, eds., Controlling Consent: Uganda’s 2016 Elections (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2016); Sam Wilkins and Richard Vokes, eds., “The NRM Regime and the 2016 Ugandan Elections,” special issue, Journal of Eastern African Studies 10, no. 4 (2016); and Sandrine Perrot, Jérôme Lafargue, and Sabiti Makara, “Introduction: Looking Back at the 2011 Multiparty Elections in Uganda,” in Elections in a Hybrid Regime: Revisiting the 2011 Uganda Poll, ed. Sandrine Perrot, Jérôme Lafargue, and Sabiti Makara (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2015), 3–34.

8. This literature also has a tendency to adopt a romanticized and liberal conception of “civil society” as ontologically progressive, detached from the state and opposed to the extension of its influence. For powerful counterarguments, see John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, eds., Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jean-François Bayart, “Civil Society in Africa,” in Political Domination in Africa: Reflections on the Limits of Power, ed. Patrick Chabal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 109–25; and on the private dimensions of the state as the source of its strength, see Béatrice Hibou, ed., Privatizing the State, trans. Jonathan Derrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On the historical sociology of the state and the way state and society constitute each other in Africa, see Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993); Tobias Hagmann and Didier Péclard, “Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa,” Development and Change 41, no. 4 (2010): 539–62; Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, eds., States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Christian Lund, “Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa,” Development and Change 37, no. 4 (2006): 685–705; John Lonsdale, “States and Social Processes in Africa: A Historiographical Survey,” African Studies Review 24, nos. 2–3 (1981): 139–226.

9. See in the case of the neoliberal reforms in Uganda, the analysis of Graham Harrison, “Post-Conditionality Politics and Administrative Reform: Reflections on the Cases of Uganda and Tanzania,” Development and Change 32, no. 4 (2002): 657–79.

10. Richard Banégas, La démocratie à pas de caméléon: Transition et imaginaires politiques au Bénin (Paris: Karthala, 2003); Bayart, State in Africa; and for a sociological and historical analysis of the “Arab Springs,” see Jean-François Bayart, “Retour sur les Printemps arabes,” Politique africaine 133, no. 1 (2014): 153–75.

11. All this has been particularly carefully demonstrated by Jean-François Bayart, Achille Mbembe, and Comi Toulabor in their influential essay: Jean-François Bayart, Achille Mbembe, and Comi Toulabor, Le politique par le bas en Afrique noire: Contributions à une problématique de la démocratie (Paris: Karthala, 2008).

12. Ibid.; and Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 173–93.

13. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité: Le souci de soi, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Whether or not these forms of agency constitute freedom is a matter for political theorists.

14. Jean-François Bayart, “Hégémonie et coercition en Afrique subsaharienne: La ‘politique de la chicotte,’” Politique africaine 110, no. 2 (2008): 123–52.

15. I borrow this expression from Frédérique Matonti, Intellectuels communistes: Essai sur l’obéissance politique; La Nouvelle Critique (1967–1980) (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).

16. I am particularly indebted here to Béatrice Hibou, Anatomie politique de la domination (Paris: La Découverte, 2011). See also Jean-Claude Barbier’s careful and very useful comparative examination of Weber and Bourdieu’s approaches of “domination”: “Domination:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One: The Ebimeeza and the Political Culture of Kampala’s Upper Class
• Two: The Political Economy of Radio Speech
• Three: The Ebimeeza and the Partisanization of Ugandan Politics
• Four: The Ebimeeza as a Ganda Patriotic Stage
• Five: “A Constituency in Itself”: Talk Radio and the Redefinition of Political Leadership
• Six: Taming Speech: The State’s Suitable Citizens
• Seven: The Bureaucratization of the Ebimeeza and the Desire for Discipline
• Eight: An Academic Model of Exclusive Citizenship
• Nine: Silent Voices, Professional Orators, and Shattered Dreams
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index