“In 1791 a man made a startling deathbed confession: seventeen years earlier, he had purchased an entire boatload of Irish immigrants and sold them into slavery in the South.”

—from Stephan Talty's “Spooked: the White Slave Narratives”

 

TRANSITION 85: Table of Contents

 

DISPATCH____________________

Bedtime for Banda
Hastings “Kamuzu” Banda was a study in contradictions: a Pan-African pioneer in cahoots with apartheid; a prudish puritan who made his mistress Malawi's “official hostess;” a dapper doctor-dictator who invented a nation as mercurial as he was. When he died at the age of 101, Malawi lost its moorings. Farai Sevenzo goes in search of Banda's ghost.

Safe as Houses
The oldest housing project in Europe is a Roman emperor's palace on the Adriatic Sea. Amid the ruins—ancient and modern—of contemporary Croatia, “private property” is up for grabs. Scott L. Malcomson reflects on the varieties of domestic experience.

POSITION____________________

Spooked
In the struggle against slavery, abolitionists had a secret weapon: white slaves. Kidnapped in New England and blackened up for sale, white slaves suggested a terrifying possibility to the country's white majority—it could happen to you. Stephan Talty considers a paler shade of bondage.

UNDER REVIEW____________________

Invisible Races
Nobody believed the Lemba when they said they were Jews. After all, they lived in southern Africa, they looked black, and most of them were Christian. But then a DNA test linked them to an ancient caste of Jewish priests, proving . . . what, exactly? Seth Sanders ponders culture, biology, and the return of race science.

FICTION____________________

Couscous
A child is born.
By Calixthe Beyala

CONVERSATIONS____________________

Here Comes the Son
When Fela Kuti seceded from Nigeria in 1974, he turned his house into an unlikely African utopia, full of girls, ganja, and an extravagant music called Afrobeat. Three decades later, his clean-living, sax-playing son aims to turn Fela's experiment into the blueprint for an African Renaissance. Kelefa Sanneh talks with Femi Kuti about black power, bad English, and the politics of pop.

The Guerrilla Professor
Like most academics, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba used to doubt the relevance of his research. Unlike most academics, he decided to do something about it: today he's fighting a guerilla war for the liberation of Congo, his homeland. Michael C. Vazquez talks with Wamba about teaching, tactics, and the discipline of revolution.

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