“Why
I suspect that it is the truly sensual who take easily to fasting.”
—from Wole Soyinka’s “Kaduna Prison, 1969”
TRANSITION 75/76: Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION____________________
An African Dilemma
Of arms and essayists, spooks, sex, and savants: Michael Colin Vazquez tells the story of Transition in Africa, 1961-1977.
Do Magazines Culture? (1966)
What role should the press play in a developing society? Indeed, in any society? Transition’s founder Rajat Neogy defines the task of the editor.
SPECIAL SELECTION: POLITICAL OBITUARIES____________________
John F. Kennedy (1964)
A Transition exclusive—on the first anniversary of the president’s assassination, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. remembers JFK, race man.
Guevara is Dead, Long Live Guevara (1968)
When Che Guevara turned up dead in the Bolivian jungle, a Swedish journalist captured the moment in words and pictures. Bjorn Kumm announces the birth of a myth.
Indigenous Ills (1967)
Most every problem facing African countries today is blamed on outsiders—communists, colonialists, imperialists, missionaries, shopkeepers. Okot p’Bitek suggests that the problems—and the only real solutions—lie within.
SPECIAL SECTION: TARZAN AND THE ASIANS____________________
Tarzan is an Expatriate (1967)
Among the palm trees and the tangle-fronds of East Africa, there exists a race whose appetite for luxury, narcissism, and inconsequence knows no limit: the expatriate. Paul Theroux considers the unlikely preserve where any white man can be Tarzan, King of the Jungle.
Hating the Asians (1967)
Asians—Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs—are the stepchildren of the African colonial state. Paul Theroux anatomizes an African racism.
Polemics: Tarzan and the Asians
Letters on libel, sedition, and Paul Theroux.
The Negro Problem (1964)
With the 1962 publication of The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin became everybody’s favorite protest writer. Francois Bondy talks with him about love, race, and the life of the mind.
On the Painter Beauford Delaney (1965)
James Baldwin ponders blackness, the blues, and an area of lightness.
200 Years of American Negro Poetry (1966)
Langston Hughes canvasses the interlinking histories of protest and prosody.
A Tro-Tro Driver Talks about His Life, Work, and Democracy (1971)
The tro-tro o r “bush taxi” is a fixture of urban life in West Africa. In this remarkable interview, one tro-tro driver sets the record straight.
SPECIAL SECTION: THE NKRUMAH AFFAIR____________________
Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar (1966)
For leading Ghana to independence, Kwame Nkrumah inspired black people across the world. But his peculiar combination of Soviet-style centralism and royalist glamour may not have served his constituents so well. Ali A. Mazrui profiles the revolutionary monarch.
Did Nkrumah Favor Pan-Africanism? (1966)
Nkrumah, the author of Africa Must Unite, was virtually identified with the pan-Africanist movement. Russell Warren Howe suggests that Nkrumah’s foreign policy actually sowed division and discord across the African continent.
Polemics: The Nkrumah Affair
Letters on Nkrumah’s legacy, Mazrui’s treachery, Howe’s villainy, and the dictatorial mystique.
One-Party Government (1961)
Does democracy require competing political parties? Is freedom a Western invention? Julius Nyerere contends that single-party democracy is the African way.
Tanzaphilia (1967)
Why do Western intellectuals love Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s sly, soft-spoken, socialist president? Perhaps because he is a Western intellectual? Ali A. Mazrui reports.
The Politics of the Pill (1968)
In which Paul Theroux (writing as “A. Mzuri”) takes a stab at Mazruian analysis.
Of Lust and Logic (1965)
Is the female orgasm a bureaucratic conspiracy? Leslie Farber wonders.
Acholi Love (1964)
Boy meets girl. Girl spurns boy. Boy retaliates. Okot p’Bitek recounts the story of love among the Acholi.
V. S. Naipaul (1971)
On the publication of V. S. Naipaul’s novel, In a Free State, Adrian Rowe-Evans talks with him about craft, integrity, and the art of writing.
Looking for Mercenaries (1967)
What kind of person becomes a soldier of fortune? Are white mercenaries dogs of war, or simply dogs? John de St. Jorre reports from the Congo.
The Law of Military Plumage (1971)
Bernard J. James and Roger A. Beaumont discover an iron law of conflict: snappy dressers lose.
SPECIAL SECTION: NIGERIAN WAR
Death of Christopher Okigbo (1967)
In 1967, the Biafran War claimed one of Africa’s finest poets. Paul Theroux and Rajat Neogy remember.
On Biafra (1968)
Chinua Achebe, unofficial ambassador for the breakaway Republic of Biafra, talks with Rajat Neogy about Nigerian brutality, Biafran dreams, and life during wartime.
SPECIAL SECTION: UGANDA DIARY____________________
Curfew (1971)
In 1966, a constitutional crisis in Kampala became the pretext for ethnic war. Paul Theroux describes a day in the life of a city under siege.
A Matter of Transition (1971)
In 1968, Transition’s editor, Rajat Neogy, was charged with subversion and jailed by the Ugandan government. Barbara Lapcek-Neogy, his wife, recounts the story of the editor and the dictator.
Behind the Clown’s Mask (1975-1976)
Idi Amin: good, bad, or misunderstood? Colin Legum charts the incendiary career of Africa’s most popular tyrant.
Farewell Uganda (1974)
No one hated the Asians as much as Idi Amin, who in 1972 expelled his country’s fifty-thousand-strong Indian community. Bahadur Tejani describes the rise and fall of Asian East Africa.
SPECIAL SECTION: SHADES OF APARTHEID____________________
David Pratt is Dead (1961)
Was the man who shot apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd a madman? Or was he a reasonable man in a time of madness? Rajat Neogy pens a eulogy for a South African martyr.
Letter from South Africa (1963)
Bessie Head reflects on friends and loneliness.
England, South Africa, and that Encounter Article (1964)
Apartheid not only pits black against white—beneath the surface, tension seethes between Dutch settlers and English colonists. M. M. Carlin defends the integrity of English South Africans.
Polemics: Shades of Apartheid
Letters on the black, the white, and the ugly.
On South Africa (1971)
As long as exiles and outsiders lead the antiapartheid movement, it has no chance of mounting a real challenge to the South African regime. What blacks really need, Lewis Nkosi suggests, is self-reliance—and violence.
Eldridge Cleaver on Ice (1975-1976)
Rather than face a murder charge, the author of Soul on Ice went into exile—first to Castro’s Cuba, then to revolutionary Algeria. In a safe house in Paris, Henry Louis Gates Jr. talks with Eldridge Cleaver about the Black Panthers, betrayal, and the value of individual freedom.
Rajat Neogy on the CIA (1967)
Like other magazines of the 1960s, Transition had been partially funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In the wake of the revelation that the Congress was itself funded by the CIA, Rajat Neogy defends himself and his magazine.
Africa, Watergate, and the Press (1973)
As the U.S. Congress prepares to impeach Richard Nixon, Rajat Neogy reflects on freedom of the press and the Africanization of American politics.
How Not to Compare African Traditional Thought with Western Thought (1976)
Do African beliefs in gods and spirits, oracles and fate, make Africans unsuited to modern Western rationality? J. E. Wiredu insists that superstition is as universal as reason.
SPECIAL SECTION: AFRICAN LITERATURE: WHO CARES?____________________
The Dead End of African Literature (1963)
Under the sway of foreign models, composed in foreign tongues, African literature is doomed to sterility—or so claims Obiajunwa Wali, in this founding text of the African-languages debate.
Polemics: The Dead End of African Literature
African writers (and their critics) write back to Obiajunwa Wali.
English and the African Writer (1965)
English may be the language of the British colonizer, but it is also, in a country with 250 ethnic languages (like Nigeria), the very precondition of a national literature—and even an instrument of Pan-African practice. Chinua Achebe surveys the vexed terrain of language and literature.
The Writer in an African State (1967)
The African writer, Wole Soyinka suggests, has become an appendage of the authoritarian state: a fabulist of ancient greatness and a sycophant to black tyranny.
The Common Tongue (1972)
Kofi Awoonor speaks with John Goldblatt about language, influence, and Irish literature.
Ted Joans, Tri-Continental Poet (1975)
Ted Joans, trumpeter, painter, and poet-author of Afrodisia and Black Pow-Wow, talks with Henry Louis Gates Jr. about beats, surrealists, and living in Timbuktu.
SPECIAL SECTION: PRISON WRITINGS____________________
It Only Happens to Other People (1969)
Rajat Neogy describes being the psychology of incarceration.
The Man Died (1973)
Wole Soyinka pens a portrait of the artist as political prisoner.
Epilogue: On the Trail of Transition
When Wole Soyinka first came to Kampala in 1962, it was to celebrate Africa’s postcolonial renaissance. Four decades later, he returns to East Africa in search of innocence lost.