[Rajat Neogy Remembered]

[End Page A-62]

We made our introductions through our work, and met in person later, which is the right sequence for writers to get acquainted. Rajat’s magazine had recently begun in Uganda, I was writing poetry and fiction in Malawi. Africa was a small place, then—or so it seemed, because it was one place, where writers were eagerly signaling to each other: Chinua and Wole and Chris Okigbo and Ulli Beier from Nigeria, Cameron Duodu from Ghana, Dennis Brutus and Nadine Gordimer and others from South Africa, Zeke and Ngug’i from Kenya, David Rubadiri and I from Malawi, and yet others in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania. Nearly all these signals were directed towards Uganda, where Rajat edited them for publication in Transition.

It is hard to imagine a little magazine that influenced writers on a whole vast continent, but that is what happened with Transition. Rajat began his magazine at just the right time and it became a rallying-point throughout the 1960s. It helped that Rajat was a local boy, with the experience of a British university, and it showed in the way he spoke, moving from Swahili, to Hindi, to English. Kampala then was a small green city, and Uganda was prosperous and full of distinguished people in 1966: Chinua Achebe, V.S. Naipaul, Ali Mazrui, Ezekiel Mphalele, and distinguished anthropologists from Makerere. Rajat had lived through Uganda’s later colonial years, its independence and hopeful years; he was also to experience its disintegration and terror. [End Page A-63]