Scholars to mark Transition magazine’s 57th anniversary
In 1968, the government jailed Neogy for sedition after the magazine criticized proposed constitutional changes by President Milton Obote’s government. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- According to today’s symposium abstract, it will explore how the magazine was able to “galvanize such a commanding momentum with a powerful virtuosity” that brought statesmen, politicians, and scholars conversing and raising questions about Africa in relation to the world.
KAMPALA. The Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) will today hold a public symposium to reflect on the role of Africa’s top literary magazine, Transition, which served both as an intellectual and social space, vibrant with articles, essays, poems, and opinions during the early postcolonial period.
Transition, founded as a magazine of ideas and policy debate for East African intellectuals by Ugandan-Indian Rajat Neogy in 1961, featured articles of various authors such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, Christopher Okigbo, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Tom Mboya, and Julius Nyerere.
Rajat Neogy died in 1995 at 57 in the United States.
He was born in Uganda, went to school in London, but returned to Kampala and started Transition.
In 1968, the government jailed Neogy for sedition after the magazine criticized proposed constitutional changes by President Milton Obote’s government.
After his release, Transition was revived in Ghana in 1971. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka took over as editor in 1973, but it was overwhelmed by developments on the continent and closed shop in 1976.
American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr resurrected the magazine in 1991.
It remains based at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The theme
Today’s symposium under the theme: ‘Remembering Transition, a Literary Journal of Africa’ will feature among other speakers Makerere University Deputy Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dr Okello Ogwang, African Centre for Media Excellence co-founder Mr Bernard Tabaire, Dr Laury Ocen, a former MISR post-doctoral fellow, Dr Benedetta Lanfranchi, a research fellow at MISR and the MISR director, Prof Mahmood Mamdani.
According to today’s symposium abstract, it will explore how the magazine was able to “galvanize such a commanding momentum with a powerful virtuosity” that brought statesmen, politicians, and scholars conversing and raising questions about Africa in relation to the world.
“The symposium will explore how what might have started as a simple journalistic initiative prospered into metadiscourses of development politics, culture in transition, nationalism, race relations, continentalism, and epistemological grid of ideas produced from Africa, but which was nevertheless able to inform world experiences,” the abstract reads in part.
