Transition : The Anniversary Issue - v. 75/76

"Transition" celebrates its 75th issue! Founded by the young Rajat Neogy in Uganda in 1961, Transition became the forum where intellectuals of an independent Africa found their voice.

Transition was intellectually provocative, visually engaging, and fearless in skewering the pieties of right and left, black and white.

It defended freedom of the press and critiqued the 'ethnic turn' in African politics, from Rwanda to Biafra to Uganda.

In 1967, the "New York Times" called the journal 'Africa's slickest, sprightliest, and occasionally sexiest magazine'.

Although Neogy was jailed for his efforts and "Transition" was forced to move, first to Ghana and then to England, the publication again flourished under the editorial leadership of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka before closing down in 1976. "Transition" was revived in 1991 by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and it is now the official publication of Harvard's W.E.B.

Du Bois Institute.For this anniversary issue the editors have collected the most provocative, intelligent, and influential work from the first fifty issues of the magazine: essays, interviews, photographs, and angry letters. The controversies that defined postcolonial Africa rage anew.

Nkrumah the Leninist Czar, Ali Mazrui's notorious dissection of Ghana's founding father, ignited an argument over nationalism and authenticity that lived on in a torrent of letters to the editor, all included here. "The Decolonization of African Literature", the famous polemic written by three young Nigerian critics, is reprinted in full, alongside Wole Soyinka's blistering response.

Paul Theroux's "Tarzan" is an Expatriate, an indictment of white culture in Africa, continues to generate mail thirty years later.This issue also offers perspectives on other concerns from the 1960s and 1970s: a journalist in Bolivia watches the mummification of Che Guevara; America is taken to task for the Vietnam war; the publication of "Human Sexual Response" occasions a wry examination of the female orgasm; a victim of Greek fascism pens a secret diary from jail in Athens; the exiled leader of the Black Panthers reviews his experience in the Third World on the eve of his return to the U.S.; a young Asian flees Idi Amin's Uganda. The publication of this anniversary issue not only marks a milestone in the history of "Transition", but also provides a much needed resource that will interest the general reader as well as scholars and activists from a wide range of fields.