Transition: Africa’s pre-eminent magazine that refuses to die

Last Wednesday, Prof Mahmood Mamdani and the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) convened some three dozen or so mix of scholars, journalists, writers and policymakers to celebrate the late Rajat Neogy and Transition, the magazine he founded in 1961.

What was Transition? Let Rajat Neogy answer. In a 1962 interview, he said: “I always find it very difficult to summarise what the magazine is, in fact, trying to do so. It is essentially a cultural magazine. It’s a literary magazine. It’s also, I think, a sociological magazine, in that it tries to present what is happening in East Africa from nearly every possible point of view; through economics, through art, through sociological documents, through politicians’ speeches. And the idea is to see, feel and hear what contemporary East Africa is doing, thinking, and acting upon.”
We come from a background of the oral tradition. We transmit ideas by word of mouth. Transition changed that by inculcating in the emerging African intelligentsia a passion for the written word. A discipline to write things down.

Today we don’t have enough serious debate. We have a lot of shouting. A lot of noise. Labelling, stereotyping and name calling has replaced sober reasoning. Guesswork has replaced reasoning. Assumptions have replaced facts. Transition was like a magnifying glass which concentrated the scattered rays of intellectual output, giving them leverage and impact.
Transition quickly became a bridge between scholars and policymakers in the newly independent African countries. Ideas were subjected to scrutiny and many fell apart. Many of the policymakers of promise had presented themselves as intellectuals but soon the rigors of debate exposed their ideas as shallow, weak and self-serving.

Devoid of any power in their arguments they resorted to wielding the power of their positions. But the Transition editor was not intimidated. He insisted that with great power comes great responsibility and so demanded that the new rulers become accountable. They subjected the prejudices and fears of the new rulers to the acid test of evidence and facts.
Neogy’s friend Paul Theroux recalls how he was once sought out by Neogy after a meeting with Milton Obote. Neogy said, “Obote leaned across his desk and asked me ‘Who is this Paul Theroux?’.” Paul was excited that the big man was reading his writings. The two toasted to the fact that they had now become irritants to the high and mighty.

Big dreams have an irresistible allure. From the French Revolution to the Cuban Revolution to pan-Africanism strong expressions of idealism will always draw people like moths to a lamp. In many ways Transition was a big intellectual dream. A grand quest in the tradition of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and Herman Mellville’s Moby Dick.
This room is full of those who continue to be enchanted by that allure. That irresistible pull to pursue something beyond ourselves. That grand quest for the impossible.

Like the Old Man, our trophies get attacked and devoured by predators consumed by a mad passion to dispossess and destroy. Their attacks often leave us with nothing but a giant skeleton on the beach and a worn out body.
That scholars and other people of note can gather 57 years after the founding of Transition is a tribute to that undaunted, defiant but always noble spirit that defined Rajat Neogy. He was the pre-eminent midwife to a baby that has simply refused to die, let alone be cowed or silenced.