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Music enhances participation in emerging democracies where the rights of association, assemblage, and and the freedom of expression are suppressed by the state apparatus meant to guarantee them in the first place. Ugandan Afropop musician and politician, Robert Kyagulanya (aka Bobi Wine), composed the song “Tugambire ku Jennifer” (Tell Jennifer on Our Behalf), which articulated the social aspirations of Kampala’s street vendors. The song’s meaning does not begin and end with the composer’s intent but stretches to its effects on the listeners. Analyzing meaning through the lens of speech act theory provides an understanding of what music means when it simultaneously reflects and shapes society.

The COVID-19 pandemic struck when Uganda was in the middle of an acrimonious campaign season, in which longstanding president Yoweri Museveni was being challenged by Bobi Wine, a reggae singer turned politician. When Museveni imposed a strict lockdown, musicians sympathetic to Wine responded with songs about COVID-19 that challenged the government’s short-term, biopolitical demarcation of the national emergency. Pier and Mutagubya interpret a selection of Ugandan COVID-19 pop songs from 2020, considering in musical-historical perspective their various strategies for re-narrating the health crisis.

In recent decades, musicians have figured prominently on Africa’s political stage. Popular Ugandan musician Bobi Wine moved beyond protest singer and ventured into politics by entering parliament in 2017 and challenging long-term President Yoweri Museveni at the presidential polls in 2021. To push for social change, Wine created the People Power movement and built an alliance with fellow musicians. This article studies Wine’s movement and his alliance with musicians by taking a political economy approach. I posit that the political activism of musicians reaches its limits when a sitting government can easily threaten the economic base of its oppositional challengers. Alliances become fragile once the government can demonstrate that challenging a ruling elite has severe consequences for one’s livelihood whereas aligning with the government ensures economic prosperity. The article uses ethnographic data, interviews, and newspaper articles to demonstrate this argument. Auf den politischen Bühnen Afrikas haben Musikerinnen und Musiker während der vergangenen Dekaden eine bedeutende Rolle gespielt. Der populäre ugandische Musiker Bobi Wine beschränkte sich nicht auf eine Rolle als Protestsänger, sondern wurde politisch aktiv, indem er im Jahr 2017 ins Parlament einzog und Langzeitpräsident Yoweri Museveni bei der Präsidentschaftswahl im Jahr 2021 herausforderte. Um sozialen Wandel zu forcieren, kreierte Wine die Bewegung People Power und schuf eine Allianz mit weiteren Musikerinnen und Musikern. Dieser Artikel untersucht Wines Bewegung und seine Allianz mit Musikerinnen und Musikern unter Zuhilfenahme eines polit-ökonomischen Ansatzes. Zentrale These des Artikels ist, dass der politische Aktivismus von Musikerinnen und Musikern dort auf seine Grenzen stößt, wo eine amtierende Regierung die ökonomische Basis seiner oppositionellen Widersacher leicht bedrohen kann. Allianzen werden fragil, wenn das Herausfordern der herrschenden Elite ernste Auswirkungen auf die Lebensgrundlage der Opponenten hat, wohingegen eine Unterstützung der Regierung ökonomische Prosperität sichert. Der Artikel greift auf ethnografische Daten, Interviews sowie Zeitungsartikel zurück, um dieses Argument zu illustrieren.

Special IssueSites in Contestation: Reading Contemporary Popular Culture in AfricaDuring the 2019 Guild elections in two Ugandan public universities (Makerere and Kyambogo), poetry performances in the form of songs were deployed by some candidates to articulate particular ideological perspectives. This paper examines the poetics and politics of the songs - the aesthetics of the musical performances themselves and their power in mobilising large crowds for the guild vote. I argue that poetry performances in the form of songs do not function merely as election entertainment, but rather that they are central to the contest itself and therefore go a long way to defining its very nature. I also argue that the fact that the 2019 elections at both Makerere and Kyambogo Universities were won by people allied to the People Power movement, whose leader, Hon. Robert Ssentamu Kyagulanyi, provided two songs with which the candidates articulated their message to the electorate, demonstrates the influence of both musicians and popular songs in processes of political mobilisation. Data for this paper was collected using observation, interviews and focus group discussions with selected members of the electorate, and a close reading of the lyrics of the songs. As my analysis reveals, the songs animated the election campaigns to the extent that their performance not only defined the character of the elections, but also, to some extent, contributed to their final outcome.

Deadly protests erupted in Uganda on Nov. 18 as supporters of presidential candidate and pop star Bobi Wine clashed with security forces over his arrest.

In January 2021, Uganda's president and ruling party were returned to power in an election that was the most violent and least fair in the country's history. The electoral performance of the opposition nevertheless exposed significant weaknesses in the regime's grip on power and demonstrated its lack of support and legitimacy among Uganda's large urban youth population. This article analyzes the fraudulent tactics employed in the election. It argues that Uganda is likely to witness an increasingly bitter and brutal contest between the militarist regime and the citizenry, and that the country's militarized politics calls into question a donor model that prioritizes security over democracy.

Do social media offer more opportunities for parliamentary opposition and independent candidates to reach voters in electoral autocracies? Social media have been seen as a great liberation tool, facilitating the mobilisation of disenfranchised citizens. However, scholarship on electoral autocracies highlights how they are well-versed in subverting democratic innovations. Taking the 2021 legislative campaign in Uganda as a case, we show that social media offer a range of opportunities for the opposition to campaign, while also providing new ways for the regime to try to maintain its dominance. Our findings rely on insights from 35 interviews with legislative candidates combined with data collected from their Facebook pages and Twitter profiles as well as from those of their opponents. We contribute to the literature on electoral autocracy and on candidates' use of social media in electoral campaigns by identifying the opportunities social media offer for both the regime and its opposition.

This article analyses the political rise of the Ugandan opposition leader, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, arguing that he has a deployed a novel type of generational populism - a mobilising political discourse which frames the struggle between 'the people' and 'the elite' in generational terms, defining the former in relation to their status as youth, and in antagonistic opposition to an elite, which is depicted as defending a gerontocratic political order. At a theoretical level, the article broadens political science's conception of populism, by introducing a new subtype of the political phenomenon which demonstrates the importance of intergenerational dynamics in the construction of the discursive categories of 'the people' and 'the elite'. While it argues that Kyagulanyi's success demonstrates the potential of populism in African countries to electorally challenge incumbent regimes, by helping to build political coalitions across ethno-regional lines, incorporating previously excluded social groups into the political process, it concludes by stressing that Kyagulanyi's political project has failed to offer any real ideological alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxy that has characterised President Museveni's Uganda over the last four decades.

Despite populism being a fast-growing field of inquiry, populist discourse in an African setting is understudied. This paper expands our knowledge of populist communication and foreign policy in a competitive authoritarian context, proposing an analysis of two Ugandan politicians—Bobi Wine and Yoweri Museveni—and their communication on Twitter before the January 2021 election. Counter to expectations, I find that thick ideology has a limited effect on the electoral discourses of both candidates in a competitive autocracy such as Uganda, and this applies also to their communication about foreign policy. When it comes to their position on foreign policy, strategic electoral communication is focused on positioning themselves in relation to the West, signaling a commitment to a strong future linkage with the West and democratization in the event of electoral victory. The content analysis of Twitter-based communication finds that the long-standing incumbent, Museveni, uses tried-and-tested populist tropes to reinforce his regime, emphasizing his government's allegedly strong capacity to maintain a linkage to Western donors and to conduct a successful foreign policy focused on receiving foreign aid and advancing its investment in economic development. In his turn, counter-candidate Wine is a contemporary populist who contests the long-standing regime and promises a truthful commitment to democratization and an authentic and corruption-free linkage with the West if successfully elected. This paper aims to broaden our understanding of how political leaders in competitive autocratic countries of the Global South make strategic use of populist communication about foreign policy to advance their political agendas.

After focusing on the questions of terrorism and women in the last installment of the Olivier Barlet Dossier (Black Camera Fall 2023), this third article on the films from FESPACO 2023 looks at what might be considered political films. Yet for what emancipation? It may be a commonplace, but all images are political. Choosing the political as the theme of this third article on the films from FESPACO 2023 is very broad, then. Several films nonetheless stand out for their explicitly political nature, either focusing directly on political combats and taking activists as their subject, or clearly inscribing themselves in political history. But does this necessarily make them political? The question ought to be perhaps whether they are politically effective, or in other words, emancipatory? Do they help construct the freedom of the spectator, or ram home an uncontested message?