Transition 75/76: The Anniversary Issue - Selections from Transition, 1961-1976 - Softcover

“There will be no birth without miscegenation.”
—Rajat Neogy, 1961

Transition was founded in Uganda in 1961, a time of seemingly infinite possibility. Kampala, the magazine’s home, was a cosmopolitan city with a literary community that included Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Ali Mazrui, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and Okot p’Bitek. Its editor was a rakish young Ugandan, Rajat Neogy, whose intellect and humor quickly gained international attention: in 1967, the New York Times called the journal “Africa’s slickest, sprightliest, and occasionally sexiest magazine.” Transition was intellectually provocative, visually engaging, and fearless in skewering the pieties of right and left, black and white; it defended freedom of the press and critiqued the “ethnic turn” in African politics, from Rwanda to Biafra to Uganda itself. In the pages of Transition, the intellectuals of an independent Africa found their voice.

Rajat Neogy was jailed for his efforts, a casualty of Cold War machinations and homegrown authoritarianism. Transition was forced to move, first to Ghana and then to England; the editorship passed to the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, whose Transition rededicated itself to partisanship in African politics—famously calling for the death of Idi Amin on one cover—and to the promulgation of the black arts. Finally, in 1976, the magazine closed shop for good.

In 1991, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—both of them students of Soyinka’s at Cambridge University—revived the Transition of their youth. (The magazine is now the official publication of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.) In celebration of the magazine’s 75th issue, the editors have collected the most provocative, intelligent, and influential work from the first fifty issues of the magazine: essays, interviews, photographs, and angry letters.

In this anthology, the controversies that defined postcolonial Africa rage anew. Writers debated the importance of the English language for the African writer, the fate of Africa’s Asians, the white expatriate as Tarzan, “Western democracy” and “African socialism,” the African leader as Leninist Czar. Ali Mazrui’s notorious dissection of Kwame Nkrumah ignited an argument over nationalism and authenticity that lived on in a torrent of letters to the editor, all included here. “The Decolonization of African Literature,” the famous polemic penned by three young Nigerian critics, is reprinted in full, alongside Wole Soyinka’s blistering response. Paul Theroux’s “Tarzan is an Expatriate,” an indictment of white culture in Africa, continues to generate mail thirty years later.

The Anniversary Issue also provides a unique window onto the Sixties in general: a Swedish journalist in Bolivia watches the mummification of Che Guevara; the author of An American Dilemma takes America to task for the Vietnam War; the publication of Human Sexual Response occasions a wry and ruthless examination of the female orgasm; a victim of Greek fascism pens a secret diary from an Athenian jail; the exiled leader of the Black Panthers looks back on his experience in the Third World on the eve of his return to the United States; a young Asian flees Idi Amin’s Uganda.