How is it possible to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a magazine that has spanned three countries, two continents, and several long stretches of silence?

Transition 106 provides many answers. Rather than telling a seamless story about our journey from Africa to the Diaspora, we have called upon generations of remarkable contributors to define what the magazine has meant to them. The diversity of responses is astonishing:

Henry Finder describes it as “the internationalization of the African mind,” Ilan Stavans fancifully dubs it “the Jewish journal of blackness,” and for Wole Soyinka it has been nothing short of a “universal mission.” If there shall be “no birth without miscegination,” as our founder Rajat Neogy memorably declared, there shall be no remembrance without it either.

We devote the other half of this celebratory issue to Uganda, our birthplace. We return less to pay homage to our past than to imagine our future. Elizabeth Palchik Allen introduces exciting work from David Kaiza, Okello Ogwang, Richard Ssebaggala, and many others, all of whom explore their country’s “postcolonial identity” and call into question the easy coupling of those words. If any thread runs through all of these contemporary writings and the rest of Transition’s peripatetic history, it is the rejection of easy words in favor of hard words, weird words, and risky words. Only in providing a home to these can the true words be found. Read more about Transition's History

Feaured Articles

Cannibal Logic
An interview with former Executive Editor Michael C. Vazquez by Carina del Valle Schorske

But Why, Father?: Looking back on the Legacy of the African Writers Series, Fifty Years On
For half a century, the African Writers Series was the publisher of record when it came to African literature (whatever that means). But did the quality of the writing usually meet the mark? Or was Wole Soyinka right when he called the imprint an “orange ghetto”? Growing up in the shadow of the AWS, David Kaiza tells us why the next generation of writers is less concerned with salvaging black pride than with the craft of fiction itself.

Issue 106 Table of Contents - History

Issue 106 Table of Contents - Uganda