Document Number Five: Elections and Tutelary Politics in Uganda, 1967–1971

Abstract

Abstract In July 1970, Uganda’s President Milton Obote published—under his own name—a plan for a new system of single-party elections. ‘Document Number Five’, as it was called, offered a radical solution to a profound problem. Africa’s nationalist politicians had committed themselves to adult suffrage and the secret ballot as an affirmation of the existence of the nation. Yet they feared that an untutored public, encouraged by unscrupulous politicians, would make the wrong electoral choices. Obote’s complex electoral plan was designed to enforce a national approach to campaigning. Yet, more than that, Document Number Five itself was imagined as the focus for a public political discussion that would educate and enlighten the public and discipline political opportunists. Uganda’s English-language media—dominated by a relatively small group, whose educational privilege had brought them to positions of power—became the forum for this discussion. It was a constrained discussion, conducted in the shadow of intimidation, but it was neither predictable nor entirely scripted. Those who wrote and spoke had a wary eye on their personal safety and their careers, but they also had a sense of themselves as intellectuals, whose words mattered to themselves and to others. While the planned elections never took place—forestalled by Idi Amin’s coup—those who spoke and wrote about Document Number Five affirmed the sense of those involved that politics was fundamentally tutelary and that it was their right, and duty, to guide those who were less educated.