When she first walked into the Tilapia nightclub, Hibo Elmi had been living in Kampala for about a year. Her childhood had taken her across East Africa. Elmi's parents left Somalia during the early-1990s civil war, and she lived in Kenya and Ethiopia before arriving in Uganda's capital. In Kampala, both Elmi and her twin sister, Hoden, struggled to integrate with the city's Somali community. "We didn't dress like them, and we spoke broken Somali," she said. "We used to get trashed and insulted for doing things we weren't supposed to be doing as women, like playing basketball." In hope of finding a more welcoming environment, the sisters set out to explore Kampala's party scene.By this point, in 2013, Tilapia was already one of Kampala's best late-night spots, attracting a Pan-African crowd. Plastered on its red walls were Soviet political posters, souvenirs collected by the original owner's sister during her stint as acorrespondent in Moscow. The party Elmi walked into that night was called Boutiq Electroniq, and her experience was profound. "As soon as I walked in, I could see the potential everywhere," she recalled. "There were people from different parts of Kampala, or different parts of Africa, or anywhere really, and the thing that brought us together is that we didn't know where else to go."This outsider spirit applied to both Boutiq Electroniq's crowd and its music. While many Kampala club nights are soundtracked by commercial dancehall, reggae or hip-hop, at Boutiq Electroniq you'd hear music from across Africa that didn't get much airtime in clubs—kuduro, tarraxinha, balani, coupé-décalé, soukous—plus Western electronic music like house, techno and grime. Word spread, and the parties began to attract inquisitive music heads. Elmi said Boutiq Electroniq's inclusive atmosphere encouraged her to start DJing, and she now plays under the name Hibotep. (She also DJs back-to-back with her sister.) "There's a sense of freedom at Boutiq that you don't get elsewhere," she said.These parties drew together DJs and producers that now form the core of Nyege Nyege, a collective whose recording studio, record label and annual festival is providing a crucial platform for East Africa's ripening electronic music scene, and fostering a cultural dialogue with the rest of the world.

Hibotep

The two people who started Boutiq Electroniq and Nyege Nyege are Arlen Dilsizian, a Greek-Armenian academic who has lived in Kampala for seven years, and Derek Debru, a wiry Belgian with a scruffy beard who arrived in Uganda after roaming across India, the US, Japan and Southeast Asia. After meeting each other, Dilsizian and Debru connected with a Ugandan percussion troupe called Nilotica Drum Ensemble. The early Boutiq Electroniq parties brought together DJs, percussionists and MCs from all over Kampala. Dilsizian would DJ, dipping into his vast collection of African music, with the ensemble playing live and Debru, as he puts it, "passing around waragi, hyping everyone up."Since 2013, Nyege Nyege has grown rapidly. In 2015 they opened a recording studio in Kampala called Boutiq Studio, a place for local, regional and international collaborations. That same year they held the first edition of their annual festival in an abandoned resort in Jinja, by the source of the Nile. And in late 2016 they started Nyege Nyege Tapes, a label that is releasing thrilling, mostly East African music, ranging from northern Ugandan electro acholi to singeli from the streets of Dar Es Salaam.Nyege Nyege is named after a Luganda word that means "the feeling of a sudden uncontrollable urge to move, shake or dance." (It also translates to "Horny, Horny" in Swahili.) Its home turf is Bunga, a neighbourhood whose main artery, Ggaba Road, arrows diagonally from downtown Kampala towards the edge of Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake. It's a part of the city where many African nationalities mingle, creating a lively, cosmopolitan atmosphere. Bunga and the surrounding area has no shortage of party spots: there's Capital Pub, which Dilsizian calls Kampala's "oldest and grimiest nightclub," where heaving crowds writhe to dancehall and pop. A couple of doors down from Capital is Vision Congo, a small, cheery Congolese bar with DJs playing regional sounds like soukous, lingala and ndombolo. Another Congolese venue, La Reference, has live bands playing soukous (loudly) on weekends. Also in this neck of the woods is Deuces, an afterhours spot that, like any good afterhours spot, gets increasingly sloppy as closing time nears.After Tilapia's second owner, an eccentric Englishman, was deported from Uganda, it became a collectively run space, loosely overseen by a group of musicians and part-time promoters. The vibe was loose but safe. There were no bouncers on the door. Sex workers from the nearby Kabalagala district would come to hang out off-duty without getting hassled. People could help themselves to drinks from the bar and leave money in a basket as payment, a system that sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't.In this setting, Boutiq Electroniq thrived. As its following grew, the parties began taking place in non-traditional club spaces around Kampala: abandoned factories, suburban bars, vacant blocks. There was a roadside spot next to Tilapia, called Bar 2-7, where Boutiq block parties would run until sunrise. "They were always free," Dilsizian said. "Free in terms of cost, but also in terms of ambiance. You could do whatever you wanted. People would turn a blind eye if you were high or that kind of thing."This freedom extended to sexual preference. From early on, the party attracted a LGBTQ following, making it a welcome addition to the cultural landscape in a country where homosexuality remains illegal under colonial-era laws. A failed attempt in 2014 to pass an extreme anti-homosexuality bill provoked international outrage, and, as recently as August, Uganda's government thwarted Pride celebrations for the second year running.The movement towards gender equality has also been fraught, with Uganda ranking 163 out of 179 countries in United Nations' 2016 Gender Inequality Index. "Large parts of Ugandan society are extremely socially conservative, even regressive," said Kampire Bahana, a core Nyege Nyege artist who DJs under the name Kampire. "I got into clubbing and DJing for the music, but I have been groped in my fair share of clubs. And Ugandan police raiding a Pride party last year and terrorising and arresting members of my community put a fine point on how rare and necessary safe spaces are." Bahana is planning to launch a Ugandan version of Johannesburg's Pussy Parties, which have female DJs and bouncers. "The way people here react to the name 'Pussy Party' tells you how needed these kind of events are," she said.

Kampire

Nyege Nyege mostly operates away from the glare of the authorities. "In Uganda, music is a way to create change without being seen as overtly political," Bahana said. The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has maintained his grip on power for 31 years, and the 73-year-old has no plans to relinquish it—politicians in his ruling party are pushing to scrap a clause in the country's constitution that prohibits people over the age of 75 running for the presidency. Attempts by Museveni's allies to initiate this constitutional change in September led to a farcical brawl in parliament.But Nyege Nyege has found itself in the crosshairs of Uganda's religious right, a group that has been instrumental in cultivating hostility towards the country's LGBTQ community. (Homophobia has long been peddled by American religious missionaries in Uganda.) A pamphlet distributed after last year's edition of Nyege Nyege Festival criticised the event for being "highly ritualistic," claiming its second day descended into a "sex orgy." "Let's not deny the fact that the event was organised and highly funded by the international gay community," the pamphlet said.Uganda is a country of young people. It has the world's second-youngest population, with an average age of 15.9. (Only Niger is younger.) It's a diverse country too, attracting people from across East Africa. It has one of the most compassionate refugee policies on the planet, giving migrants rights to land, education, healthcare and work. (That policy is under strain, with more than one million people fleeing violence in South Sudan to live in Uganda, triggering what the United Nations refugee agency is calling "one of Africa's biggest humanitarian crises.")Within this youthful nation is a new generation of artists, who, in Kampala especially, are embracing technologies—smartphones, internet, laptops—that are now within reach, though internet coverage remains both expensive and slow. (Kenya, Uganda's bigger, wealthier neighbour, boasts one of the fastest mobile internet speeds in the world.) "The amount of growth that we've seen in three years is astonishing," Bahana said. "Everyone is more connected, and there is more access to information, software and modes of distribution."Wabwire Joseph Ian, who runs an organisation called Youth-Connect Uganda, said the country has a "developing creative artists ecosystem," fuelled by access to new technologies, in which young artists working across different disciplines are connecting for the first time with audiences outside their home town or city. "We need spaces where creative artists can have ideas, create, test, learn and unlearn," he said. "Such environments are still rare in Uganda."