Celebrating Transition at Fifty

Perhaps it seems disingenuous to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a magazine that has spent almost as much time dead as alive. Even during its vital periods—separated not only by years of silence but by huge stretches of land and sea—can the name Transition really be said to refer to the same entity? We each face a similar question every year when our so-called birthdays insist upon continuity between the wet, wailing past and the bewildered present—no matter the metamorphoses, the departures, the disavowals, the conversions, and the transitions that separate the two.

In both cases, the honest answer to the question is no. We are not the same. And yet we repeat the name and occasion—Transition, 1961–2011—because it is culture’s most powerful spell in the face of chaos. We joyfully invoke the familiar names in this special issue: Wole Soyinka, Paul Theroux, Ali Mazrui, Henry Finder, Abiola Irele, Ilan Stavans, and Michael Vazquez. But the purpose of this special issue is not to tell a seamless story about Transition’s journey from Africa to the Diaspora. On the contrary, we are especially interested in the moments when the seams rip and the patterns change. It is in these gaps that we find the unresolved questions that continue to drive the magazine today, and that necessitate its further exploration.

We have divided this special issue into two parts. The first appears behind Hank Willis Thomas’ remarkable image, “A Place to Call Home (Africa-America)” which is meant as much to provoke as to describe. It is here that you will find several of Transition’s former editors and long-time contributors considering the magazine’s place in history, both political and personal. Soyinka, Finder, and Vazquez each describe the aims and ideals of Transition while they were at the editorial helm, and the picture that emerges reveals both surprising continuity and great change in the magazine’s identity over the years. Readers will also be struck by the dramatically different experiences of Theroux and Stavans—one man was an expatriate in East Africa, the other an immigrant in New York. Both of their careers began at Transition, but the magazine Theroux knew thrived with a knife at its throat; Stavans found the magazine comfortably ensconced in an academic institute.

In both of their essays, these two prominent white contributors mull over what it meant to be part of an “African” or “black” magazine. One might ask, along with Rajat Neogy’s 1962 interviewer, “Could you tell us something about the writers who appear in this journal, say for instance the racial composition?” But of course, the answer has always been slippery: “Well it’s primarily African, because the creative work is coming from young Africans. But … my ideal conception of the magazine is that we’ll have set such standards that it would be obvious the things it stands for are implicit [End Page A-1] in the material, rather than any careful choosing of people just for their colors.” Let both the question and the answer stand.

The second part of our anniversary celebration—flip the issue if it’s in your hands—appears behind a modified version of the 1961 first-issue cover designed by Helen Calogeropoulos. We return to Uganda not only to explore our past, but to imagine our future. Former editorial assistant Elizabeth Palchik Allen has solicited exciting work from the country’s contemporary writers and artists, some of whom know Transition only as a vivid bedtime story. Paradoxically, their wrenching critiques of the Transition generation—David Kaiza on the African Writers Series, and Okello Ogwang on our own magazine’s role in the brain drain—are the pieces that most fully embody that old iconoclastic spirit. Two more essays take us back to the source in substance rather than style. Frederick Golooba-Mutebi makes it clear that the struggle to square the precolonial kingrom of Buganda with the postcolonial state of Uganda is far from over. And Richard Ssebaggala’s report on the conversation about homosexuality is eerily reminiscent of the conversation about Ugandan Asians in the 1960’s: everybody knows they...