Rajat Neogy, Transition Magazine and heart of evil

What you need to know:

  • False narrative. So why was Neogy in prison? There is a false narrative that he was jailed because he and Transition had criticised the proposals for the 1967 Constitution. In fact, Neogy and Transition did not criticise those proposals. Not that there would have been anything wrong with that.

Dear Tingasiga;
Rajat Neogy, the founding editor of Transition Magazine, who was arrested in Kampala 50 years ago this week, would have turned 80 this year. At almost 85 years of age, Barbara Neogy Lapcek, his wife at the time, retains a vivid memory of the traumatising and disruptive events that followed her husband’s incarceration.

Barbara, who lives in New York City, recalls that Friday October 18, 1968 was a very hot day in Kampala. Her husband was supposed to have been arrested before dawn that morning, along with Abubakar Kakyama Mayanja, a 39-year-old lawyer and parliamentarian, whose article and a subsequent letter to the editor Neogy had been published in Transition.

The heavily armed soldiers of the paramilitary Special Force had been given instructions to arrest Mayanja and “the editor.” They had picked up Mayanja and Daniel Nelson, the editor of The People, the government weekly newspaper of the day. The two men had been thoroughly beaten before the error was discovered. Nelson was released, with apologies for the “small mistake.”
Later that morning, six men in civilian suits raided Transition’s small office in Baumann House, located at Number 7 Obote Avenue (now Parliament Avenue) in Kampala. After rummaging through Neogy’s things, they arrested him under the Emergency Powers Act, which allowed detention without charges or trial.

Neogy was taken to the Central Police Station, then transferred to the Maximum Security Prison at Luzira where he was placed in a 5.5 X 7 foot cell for total solitary confinement. Mayanja was already settled in his own solitary cell.
For 23 hours every day, eased down to 22 hours a day after the first week, Neogy stayed alone in the cell, and was not even allowed to speak to the warders and prisoners who brought him food. He was not allowed to write, but could read strictly censored books. During the 1-2 hours of daily “relief,” Neogy was allowed some exercise in a compound the size of a badminton court. That was his existence for five months in a country where he was born on December 17, 1938, a country whose image he had boosted with his Transition Magazine.

Transition was a first rate publication, the likes of which we have not seen again in English-speaking Africa. Neogy had done much to nurture an environment in which free intellectual discourse and a battle of ideas were beginning to be relished in our infant country. He had given equal space to the rulers and their opponents; to thinkers across the entire spectrum; to the finest literary creators and the full breadth of politics, culture and society. In the process, Transition had captivated the intellectual community around the world. Ideological contestation had found an African battlefield where there would be no bloodshed.

Transition had become essential reading, even for us who were still struggling to master the English language and to understand the issues that were so masterfully argued in its pages. When contributors to Transition spoke and wrote, we listened, read and learnt. They ignited a passion in us for the well-written word and for balanced and civil debate.
My father invested in Transition, at a cost Shs2/50 an issue, in the hope that his children would learn from the masters. We did not know it then, but we subconsciously imbibed the message that if these luminaries could respectfully confront key issues with bold analysis and comment, so could we. The real mustard seed was planted.

So why was Neogy in prison? There is a false narrative that he was jailed because he and Transition had criticised the proposals for the 1967 Constitution. In fact, Neogy and Transition did not criticise those proposals. Not that there would have been anything wrong with that. All that Neogy had done was to provide a forum for Mayanja to respond to an article in the previous issue, written by Picho Ali, another lawyer who was head of research in the Office of the President.

Mayanja, who a year earlier, had written a brilliant critique of the 1967 Constitution Proposals, was jointly charged with sedition. The contentious articles, the drama of their trial, and the real reason why Neogy was incarcerated – the controversy over Transition’s real source of funding - are worthy of full recall and examination in a separate column.

Suffice to say Chief Magistrate Mohammed Saied dismissed the sedition charges against the two men on February 1, 1969 and set them free. Within minutes of their freedom, they were rearrested and sent back to solitary confinement. With a direct view of Luzira prison from their family home on Mbuya Hill, Barbara Neogy endured the agony of her innocent husband’s detention. However, she never relented in her efforts to get him released. She went to see President Milton Obote in his office every Thursday. “He was always welcoming,” she said last week.

On Thursday, March 27, 1969, Obote asked Barbara if she had any plans for the following day. She asked him why. “You will be pleasantly surprised,” Obote told her.
When Barbara arrived at Luzira Prison very early the next morning, she found many women at the gate. They were humming rhythmically for a long time. Then the men came out, including Neogy. But Mayanja was not among them. He would not be released until August 19, 1970.

It was a happy moment for Neogy and his family, but their troubles had just begun. Theirs is a story of tragedy and triumph. It does not end with Neogy’s death on December 3, 1995 in a small room in a San Francisco building for the poor, where he had spent his final years as a welfare recipient, a sometime taxi driver, and a very sick alcoholic, who was broken by the loss of his homeland and of his monumental creation.

Wole Soyinka was right when he wrote shortly after Neogy’s death: “Something had snapped in Rajat’s sensitive soul, like one who had looked into the heart of evil and found the harmony of existence permanently untuned.”
But Neogy’s story continues through his amazing second wife Barbara and through his seven children and 13 grandchildren who live across the globe.

With the help of his daughter, Tayu Neogy, who was only 14 months old at the time of his arrest, and his wife, Barbara, I have been able to reconstruct their venturesome journey. I tell the full story of his life on three continents at Mulera’s Fireplace, www.mulerasfireplace.com, in memory of a man whose legendary lifetime achievement was at the expense of his personal and family life.

[email protected]