Reflections from contemporary Uganda: Foreword by Elizabeth Palchik Allen

Pilgrims on Martyrs Day. ©2010 Edward Echwalu

Pilgrims on Martyrs Day. ©2010 Edward Echwalu

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Do transitions ever end? It’s a question worth asking these days, not just of Transition itself—a magazine plagued by fifty years of fits and starts—but of the country of its birth, Uganda, as well. Transition’s tenure in Uganda was brief, a scant decade spanning the heady years of the sixties. But as the saying goes, those years were some of the best of its life, or at least the best remembered. Indeed, it is rare when a forum for intellectual debate finds itself so seamlessly aligned with the ethos of its time, and with such success. Flipping through the first issue, one can’t help but feel the energy:

This journal appears when East Africa is undergoing various and exciting changes. It is a time when idealism and action merge with various degrees of success. It is also a time for testing intellectual and other preconceptions and for thoughtful and creative contributions in all spheres.

There’s a certain charm that runs through those early years—a faith in the power of art and the intellectual endeavor. The disposition is all the more striking today, with the benefit of hindsight, for the optimism that characterized Transition’s first decade eventually gave way, if not to pessimism, then to a clear-eyed awareness of the pitfalls and potholes that derail even the most promising of starts. By the end of Transition’s time in Uganda, the magazine’s founding editor had been arrested under the country’s “emergency regulations” and detained without trial for several months. The state never quite managed to marshal out a coherent justification for the arrest, but Transition’s many essays critiquing the regime of Milton Obote—critiques that targeted the very detention laws that later ensnared the editor himself—were legendary.

This history contains a wicked irony for the Uganda of today. As Transition celebrates its fiftieth year, the country of its birth has found itself reliving past history. Just a few months ago, after a bout of protests in the capital city, Uganda’s current president, Yoweri Museveni, announced his desire to reenact parts of the old detention laws, at least for some political deviants—rioters mainly, but also those whom the president calls “economic saboteurs.” (For Museveni, economic sabotage means those activities—think demonstrations—that cause the state’s security apparatus to do things that make investors nervous.) So far, the president has gotten quite a bit of pushback from Parliament (blessedly), but it’s still unclear where this story ends. If nothing else, it underscores the ways in which Uganda’s postcolonial history—like the history of so many countries—has been a pendulum of transitions, swinging from autocracy to democracy and back again, or to some unclear place in between. [End Page B-2] And yet, if politics has a way of circling the drain, repeating itself in different milieus, Uganda itself has not stood still. As the contributions to this issue show, the country of today is a much alive place—a country, not unlike others, engaged in debates with itself on a host of issues, some searing. What does it mean to be Ugandan—or un-Ugandan, for that matter? What does politics come to mean in the aftermath of extreme political violence? From such experiences, what aesthetic emerges? What happens to a country’s art and intellectual life, and to the conversations that sustain such life? The pieces that follow are not retrospectives of a prior time; they are a cross-section of the artistic and intellectual life of the current moment. If Uganda is, indeed, a country in transition—and all countries are, in the end—the character of those movements, be they political, aesthetic, or cultural, drive the inquiries and expressions that follow.

Boda boda. ©2010 Edward Echwalu

I would be remiss to end this forward without one backward glance: to...