Yea, Let Us Also Praise Famous Men! Transition at half century (1961–2011)

Fifty years back, when Rajat Neogy founded Transition, the Berlin Wall was just two months old, South Africa’s Robben Island was apartheid’s impregnable fortress of incarceration (or so we thought), and Chinua Achebe was the new kid on the literary block. Africa was freeing itself from the shackles of colonialism, and a new generation of writers was stepping to the fore. Indeed, the list of contributors to Transition in the 1960s sometimes reads like a Who’s Who of Africa and its diaspora: Wole Soyinka and James Baldwin, Ali Mazrui and Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o, Achebe himself and Nadine Gordimer, Okot p’Bitek and Bessie Head, Langston Hughes and V.S. Naipaul, Julius Nyerere and Martin Luther King, Jr. The names go on, and they are illustrious.

These prodigious figures notwithstanding, the story of Transition’s founding, fame, and attendant controversies may today seem remote to many (especially, sadly, among the youth of Uganda). But underlying all this is the fascinating story of Transition’s cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, first in Kampala, then in Accra, and now in Massachusetts, over the last five decades. Indeed, the long trajectory of Transition’s sojourn is compelling, and instructive, for not just literary and cultural historians, but also for those of us interested in the unofficial versions of the issues that have informed the paths of events on the African continent and its entailing global connections.

If many now remember Transition’s Kampala years (1961–1970) mainly in relation to the Cold War and the cold warriors, this is not entirely surprising. Transition’s editors did, indeed, strive to place the magazine, and by extension the African continent, at the heart the world’s intellectual and cultural productions. To the extent that Transition in Kampala and Accra had to cope with the general militarization of Africa’s politics, one might also want to keep in mind the ways in which influential global players sought to influence Transition’s editorial position and personnel, along with the political destinies of the magazine’s leading elites. In this regard, the story and implications of Transition’s tangle with the CIA in the late 1960s—a tangle in which the magazine found itself the inadvertent recipient of Cold War CIA funding, courtesy of a foundation in Paris that had been infiltrated [End Page B-4] by the agency—are perhaps well known to many. (As Transition’s founding editor later put it, “Transition was only exploitable because we were not aware of the exploitation.”)

Silencing the Dissident. Acrylic on canvas. ©2010 Daudi Karungi.

And yet, while much has been made of Transition’s political engagements with Ugandan, African, and world issues of its times, what may be less obvious, or clear, is the extent to which the magazine has lived up to its initial calling as a journal of literature, art, and culture—especially today, when literature and literariness, like much else, is no longer pronounced with such reckless confidence and misplaced pomp. If this highlights the apparent crisis of certainty in contemporary literary history, then perhaps Lu Xun, one of the founders of modern Chinese literature, was right when he said that in times of revolution, literature takes a back seat. Indeed, it is tempting to see the literary concerns of Transition in the late 1960s as having taken a back seat to the political concerns ascendant. But that would only be partially true.

Transition deserves credit for, among other things, providing a platform and occasion for heralding a new mode of critical debate about African literature that, in one respect, Obi Wali’s “The Dead End of African Literature” (1963) may be its best marker. Whatever its “nativist” proclivities, the debate was a springboard for the subsequent discourse that spun into what is now known as postcolonialism. In this regard too, it is worth remembering that a year earlier, in 1962, the fifth issue of Transition was devoted to [End Page B-5] the 1962 African literature conference at Makerere College, entitled “A Conference of African Writers...