To Our Readers

This issue of Transition forms part of a new series appearing after a considerable period of time during which the journal was produced only intermittently. The long interruptions that preceded the publication of each of the last few issues may have created the impression that the journal was no longer in existence. We hope that the present issue will serve as a reassurance that this is not the case. As is apparent from our masthead, the new editorial and management team is intended to infuse new life into the journal. We are confident that this arrangement, along with new procedures for an improved production schedule, will ensure continued and regular publication.

When Rajat Neogy founded the magazine in Kampala, Uganda, back in 1961, Africa was in the midst of a vast, momentous process of transition. With the accession of several African countries to independence—beginning with Ghana in 1957, followed by Nigeria and a host of other countries in 1960—a new era seemed to have been inaugurated. The establishment of these young States was taken to mark the promise of new beginnings all over the continent. This was a pivotal moment of African history—the sixties represented an era of great expectations, notwithstanding the early signs in the Congo of the crisis in which Africa has since been engulfed.

Transition reflected this mood in its content and editorial style. From the beginning, the magazine attracted writers and intellectuals beyond its own geographic location, and published work by an international pool of emerging young talent, both African and non-African writers, many of whom later went on to achieve eminence. Most importantly, Rajat Neogy ensured that Transition would extend its sphere of interest over a broad array of issues of the most urgent concern to all Africans: issues that focused on the emerging structures of life in the new independent nations and the challenges they posed to African will and endeavor. The magazine thus became central to the elaboration of an African consciousness grappling with new events and developments as they unfolded on the continent. It is thus no exaggeration to observe that Transition was integral to the construction of a new African discourse in the immediate post-colonial, post-independence period—indeed, the early issues were formative of a modern African intellectual and cultural life.

The founding editors and contributors recognized the significance Transition had assumed, and this recognition constituted the sustaining force in its revival and survival subsequent to the closing of the magazine's Kampala offices by the regime of Milton Obote in 1968, the forced exile of Neogy in 1969, and his relocation to Ghana in 1971. The subsequent fate of the journal may be said to reflect the ironies of African experience in the post-colonial period, symptomatic as it is of the vicissitudes that have attended the shape and evolution of events in Africa. When Wole Soyinka replaced Neogy as editor in 1974, the journal seemed to have acquired a providential lease of life, but although Soyinka's editorship gave luster to the magazine, it could not resolve the many problems that made for its precarious existence. With the demise of Transition in 1976, the African world seemed to have forever lost a precious resource. Yet the journal was given life once again, revived at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University in 1991 under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

To recall this history is to stress the imperative need for this magazine today, as the African crisis continues to intensify. The pervasive mood of disillusionment in African circles sometimes labeled "Afro-pessimism" has been transformed into a profound moral distress engendered by what Achille Mbembe has termed the "postcolony." It is not without significance that contemporary African literature has been preoccupied with these new anxieties, reflecting the objective markers of what Ali Mazrui refers to as "the African condition." With globalization and other pressures bearing down upon the continent's populations, the African situation has acquired an urgency that calls for new powers of reflection, deeply...