IVERYBODY WAS 
having a lunchrime drink in 
a bar in Kampala, Uganda 
one hot afternoon in 
November 1961. Then a 
22-year-old man with a 
big head and lots of 
hah- entered, his arms 
saddled with copies 
of a new magazine 
he was trying to sell. 
As the hawker 
wended his way to 
a table, an angry 
Englishman bolted from 
the din of the afternoon, dashed 
in his way, snatched one of the 
magazines from him and ripped it in 
shreds. He couldn't have stopped at 
that. 'That's what I think of your trash!' 
he spat at the young man. In the Lugogo 
Adesokan 
Retailing a 
Forgettable 
Tale Akin 
Black Orpheus & Transition revisited 
Sports Club, another venue in 
the city where the journal was 
being peddled to members of a 
jazz club, the manager 
threatened to eject the club for 
allowing what someone also 
called 'nasty left-wing 
literature'. 
taking his first shot at marketing, this reaction 
was enough intimidation. ButRajatNeogy, the 
young man, was not an appretice hawker, not 
even an accomplished one. The journal he was 
vending, Transition was his brainchild, an 
idea he had taken so seriously he staked his 
personal convenience for it. He had returned 
to Uganda a year before, just married, with 
a degree in political science, with the intention 
of introducing his wife, a Swede, to his parents, For a prospective newspaper vendo 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol.11 NO 5
take her round Kampala, then head for 
Greece, perhaps for honeymoon. But 
Uganda was giddy, like most of Africa, 
with the euphoria of imminent selfgovernment. 
He had studied politics and 
practised journalism as a student and 
freelancer. He was spoken of as bohemian 
and given to the idealism of twentysomethingness. 
Somehow, he saw himself 
as having a statement to make and 
Transition was his show of hand. 'Society 
as it is, for what it is, (is) totally unacceptable 
to me for obvious reasons. It cannot be 
changed, there is no satisfaction in Utopian 
intellect. I do not want to change it. I am 
an outsider. I accept my inaccessibility 
to others. I don't make a fetish of being 
'outsider'. Sentimentalists of a finer order 
will call my 'condition' the painfulness of 
truth. But pain and joy do not come into 
this. Since I am surrounded by stupidity 
and I am not selfish (because not possessive 
or acquisitive materially or spiritually) I 
have a certain duty... I have to add my 
contribution, in iron and steel i.e. in 
permanence'. 
A classic of Euromodernist 
pessimism? Wait for this, a publisher's 
announcement titled "Culture in 
Transition". 'This journal appears when 
East Africa is undergoing various and 
exciting changes. It is a time when idealism 
and action merge with various degrees of 
success. It is also a time for testing 
intellectual and other preconceptions and 
for thoughtful and creative contributions 
in all our spheres,' it said. 
That journal, so vilified in its premiere 
appearance took Neogyand others three 
months to produce. The team included 
Valerie Hume who had canvassed for the 
advert spaces without any idea what was 
to be published and Signor Pessina, an 
Italian refugee from Zaire who spoke no 
English but who as printer set several 
million letters by hand and made as many 
errors. It came out the day in November 
when Neogy's first son was born. 
What went for planning was 
anything but that. 'I gathered that he was 
planning to starta magazine,'wrote Hume 
in a reflection published in Transition six 
years later. 'An independent, intellectual 
magazine about culture and the African 
creative scene and all that'. What Neogy 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
VoLllNOi 
wanted from her was straightforward, 
although to her it was not. 'You go and sell 
advertising and when you've sold enough, 
we can go to press', he told her. 
'But what are we printing?' she 
asked.
'You don't worry about that, just 
sell the space.' 
Wole Soyinka who visited Kampala 
shortly after the first edition was published 
and who succeeded Neogy as editor 
recalled in his first editorial 1 3 years later: 
' I . . . remember well the editorial office 
situated in Rajat's home, its entire space 
taken up by a smooth slab of wood, 
supported on piles of bricks. All the labour 
originated from this desk'. Two thousand 
copies of the first edition were printed out 
of which 1,200 were sold, perhaps 
including the copies torn in the fury of 
offended sensibility. 
Rajat Neogy died in December 
1995.
Since handing over the editorship 
to Soyinka in 1974, he had returned to 
San Francisco in the US where he 
published a newspaper and did some 
writing. Very little of his life for the next 20 
years was known. Peter Benson, the 
American scholar has written a book, 
Black Orpheus, Transition and Modern 
Cultural Awakening in Africa, (University 
of California Press, 1986) a thoroughly 
researched and well-written study about 
the history of Transition and its counterpart 
in West Africa, Black Orpheus, as they 
inspired the development of creative and 
intellectual groups in East and West Africa 
for the two decades that they existed. 
Neogy reportedly died of inflammation of 
the pancreas. He is survived by his mother 
Sumitra, the seven children (four sons 
three daughters) from his three marriages, 
and a grandchild. In a way, this is a 
tribute to him and others. 
To be sure, Transition was not just 
a restless youth's dream. According to 
Benson, one of the pieces published in the 
first issue was a retrospective tribute by 
Gerald Moore to Black Orpheus, which 
the German Ulli Beier had founded (with 
Jahnheinzjahn and Moore) in Ibadan in 
1957. Neogy had heard about this cultural 
journal and been impressed by its success. 
He was determined to try something similar 
in East Africa. Black Orpheus was 
published until 1982 (though it ceased to 
be regular from the late 1960s) and even 
with changes in its editorial philosophies, 
as in its handlers, it fulfilled the role its 
founders designed for it. Like Neogy, 
Beier, a 35-year-old expatriate teaching 
extramural students at the University 
College, Ibadan, had before hip-, the 
example of the Parisian review, Pretence 
Africaine published by Alioune Diop. 
Attending the World Congress of Black- 
Writers in Paris in 1 956, Beier had been 
struck by the literary movement that had 
grown around the review. 'One could 
envisage that this could kindle a similar 
development in the English speaking 
territories...' he said in a discussion which 
Andrew Salkey, the Caribbean writer 
moderated for him and Moore at Dennis 
Duerden's Transcription Centre in London 
in 1 966 , the year he left Nigeria for 
Papua New Guinea. (Beier alleges in a 
1994 interview with Olu Obafemi in 
TEMPO, a Lagos weekly that Benson did 
not contact him while researching the 
book; but Benson claims he got a letter 
from Beier dated 21 August, 1981 in 
which he discussed how he came to 
Nigeria in 1950) Beier had hoped to 
stimulate literary activity in West Africa 
with a view to providing 'a vehicle for the 
new writers who would emerge'. An article 
by Jahn in the first edition reporting on the 
conference in Paris also struck a link 
between the congress's resolution and 
Black Orpheus's ideology. 
Neogy too had intended a vehicle, 
'on which the wagon of intellect may 
travel for certain distances', yet something 
besides a gallery for new culture. (It is 
instructive to note that whereas Transition 
has been revived in the US in the late 
1980s - thus leaving a gap of 10 years 
save a three-year interregnum between 
1 968 and 1971 - Beier and Moore said 
in 1966 that the period for the kind of 
magazine they founded had passed. 'We 
need several different kinds of magazines 
now,' remarked Beier whom Benson 
christens 'border operator' for his role as 
exporter of African literature. Two kinds in 
fact; one would publish a new writing and 
circulate limitedly while the other, 'a really 
highly critical journal' would supply the
highest standards in evaluating the 
literature). 
In 1957, a rich cultural mine was 
waiting to be exploited by Beier in West 
Africa, due in part to the sense of freedom 
and confidence that self-rule would bring. 
The University of Ibadan was one of the 
three centres of higher learning in the 
whole of West Africa. (Fourah Bay in 
Sierra Leone and the University of Ghana 
in Legon were others). Ghana had become 
independent in March and Nigeria was 
soon to be. Raised in one of the most 
culturally dynamic regions on earth, writers 
like Amos Tutuola had made history with 
the publication in 1952 of The Palmwine 
Drinkard, and Chinua Achebe was waiting 
to publish Things Fall Apart the 'first firstrate 
novel' in black Africa. Their thematic 
and stylistic preoccupations suited the 
Moforpark in Kampala 
prevalent taste for literature of discovery, 
and if, as he was later accused, Beier had 
approached the 'new culture' with a hint 
of condescension intending to promote its 
exoticism, there was the objective reality 
that little was known about what writing 
was going on in the sub-region. Young 
writers were scattered in the cities and 
universities in Nigeria, Ghana and even 
South Africa, and others like Soyinka, 
then studying for a degree in English at 
Leeds University in England would soon 
return home to initiate important intellectual 
and cultural movements; Black Orpheus 
would now be a vehicle for their aspiration. 
Beier had developed a keen interest 
in traditional Yoruba culture and was 
necessarily committed to a more than 
academic study of its potentials. 
Sangodare Akanji, one of the several 
pseudonyms under which he wrote reviews 
for Black Orpheus was described in the 
contributors' notes in a 1958 issue as a 
'detribalised Yoruba' who having been 
born abroad and lived most of his life in 
Europe and the Near East, 'recently 
returned to Nigeria in order to "rediscover 
his lost Yoruba self". (Beier had been 
born in Gleiwitz (now in Poland) and had 
studied archaeology and lived in Palestine 
before being taken prisoner of war during 
the second World War). 
His contacts among expatriates who 
taught in schools ensured that Beier 
gathered material quite rapidly for the 
journal and with the experience of Odu (a 
scholarly journal of Yoruba studies which 
he co-edited) in store, all he needed was 
a printer. He found one in Times Press in 
Lagos. Moore and Jahn were co-editors 
who also wrote, and the layout, cover 
design and headings were done by Beier's 
wife, the artist Suzanne Wenger. Texts 
were illustrated with the drawings G.M. 
Hotop had made for the German edition 
of Tutuola's first novel. The name itself was 
taken from the introduction written by 
Jean-Paul Sartre to Leopold Sedar 
Senghor's edition of poems from French 
Africa, in which the French philosopher 
(who incidentally also wrote the 
introduction to Frantz Fanon's The 
Wretched of the Earth, on important book 
on the origins of African radicalism) had 
evoked Orpheus's descent into hell to 
explain the black poet's search for identity. 
In the first editorial, Beier wrote: 'While it 
is the primary purpose of this journal to 
encourage and discuss contemporary 
African writing, we shall not forget the 
great traditions of oral literature of the 
African tribes. For it is on the heritage of 
the past . that the literature of the future 
must be based.' 
For the next twenty years (and more] 
this journal defined the emergent African 
culture in a way not too surprising in the 
light of its origins. It 
published writers and 
poets from Africa and 
the diaspora and so 
obsessive was its 
interest in the literatures 
of the black world that 
one of the poets Black 
Orpheus helped in 
exposing, Christopher 
Okigbo in an interview 
in 1 963 criticised it for 
wanting to perpetuate 
the 'black mystique ' 
He wondered why 
Beier would publish 
black Americans but 
not white ones, since 
they really had a 
cultural affinity 
Okigbo, one of Beier's 
important critics also 
expressed a view 
concerning the editor's taste for the works 
of untutored artists but he, like Soyinka, 
Gabriel Okara, Ama Ata Aidoo, Alex La 
Guma, Kofi Awonoor, John Pepper Clark, 
Dennis Brutus, Eskia Mphahlele, Jean- 
Jose Rabearivebo, Tchicaya U Tamsi - 
artists like Demas Nwoko, Vincent Kofi, 
Taiwo Olaniyi (Twin Seven Seven), 
Ibrahim el-Salahi - featured (wrote and 
drew) and were written about on the 
pages of Black Orpheus. 
The critics including Beier (and his 
several cognomens), Paul Theroux, an 
African Quarterly 
on the Am 
Vcill NO 3
American Peace Corper in Africa, Martin 
Esslin and Oscar Dathorne assessed the 
literature in a way that underscored the 
journal's ideology, convincing people like 
Clark (who with Abiola Irele succeeded 
Beier as editors) that European literary 
aesthetics were predominant in African 
literature and likely for the worse. This 
tendency became most obvious when 
Esslin, a drama critic at the British 
Broadcasting Corporation was 
commissioned to review.the new plays of 
Soyinka and Clark. In 'Two African 
Playwrights', as the review was titled, 
Esslin confessed his lack of knowledge of 
the social conventions of the cultures which 
the playwr ig hts were writi ng from. Theroux 
also wrote a critique of six poets including 
Clark, Brutus and Awonoor, and Dathorne 
the works of Achebe apd Soyinka. Like 
Beier and Theroux, Esslin was white; in 
fact of all Black Orpheus's critics, only 
Dathrone was black, a Caribbean. Their 
artistic judgements were called to question 
in essays like 'The Legacy of Caliban' 
which Clark published in the first edition 
under his joint editorship with Irele in 
which they also announced a break with 
the old regime. Beier's preference of the 
negritudinist sensibility as well as works of 
art owing their strength to accidental 
metaphors was criticised not only in this 
essay but in the general character of the 
series they edited. However, the pan- 
Africanist outlook of the journal was 
retained in their choice of essays. 
The demands of the new thrust, 
coupled with the practical difficulties of 
the civil war and the editors' greater 
concern for editorial than managerial 
matters affected the journal's fortunes. 
While their resolve to reassess the 
presumed standards that informed Beier's 
editorship was exciting in view of the 
need to maintain a definite identity even 
in a continuum, their inability to muster 
Beier's entrepreneural acumen betrayed 
a weakness characteristic of most 
intellectuals. Butwith their different brands 
of enterprise-lrele went on to found New 
Horn Press in Ibadan and Clark to whom 
it fell to edit the journal later became in the 
mid-1980s the proprietor of Pec Repertory 
Theatre in Lagos - these men have shown 
that they are not totally without the 
trading instinct. At all events, it is to Beier's 
credit that while not a creative writer or 
African Quantriy 
on the Am 
VoLl/N03 
painter, he manifested the original critical 
sensibility to judge any work of imagination 
with enthusiasm as well as the commercial 
skills to market what he produced. At one 
time, he was running Black Orpheus and 
Odu, the Mbari Club and Mbari 
Publications, Duro Ladipo's Theatre, and 
keeping his primary job as a teacher in six 
different places. Late in 1960, with a 
Rockefeller Foundation grant of $5,500 
he began trips to several African countries, 
neeting writers and artistes for involvement 
in Black Orpheus. 'Beier's success in 
educating anglophone Africa to the 
intellectual currents of francophone Africa 
and black America and in promoting the 
works of new anglophone writers both 
within and outside of Africa, is perhaps 
til JLeogy reportedly 
died of inflammation 
of the pancreas. He 
is survived by his 
mother Sumitra, the 
seven children (four 
sons three daughters) 
from his three 
marriages, and a 
grandchild, tn away, 
this is a tribute to 
him and others, 
the primary legacy of his editorship of 
Black Orpheus,' writes Benson. The 
essence was the 'black mystique'; the 
identification of borders. But how 
consistent is this crusading bentwith Beier's 
assertion of being 'blissfully ignorant of 
borders' when he began publishing the 
journal, apropos of his encounter with the 
Brazilian worshippers of Yemoja who 
miss-understood a Catholic ritual of 
confrontation as identification with 
Yemoja? Would it be sufficient to merely 
state that knowledge has one root and 
several branches? 
As an editor, Beier was strongwilled 
enough to publish what his instincts 
adjudged worthy and asa critic intelligent 
enough to know that his duties included 
promotion of the new artists. Whatever 
was made of his views on Okigbo and 
Clark as 'gradually chiselling a large 
chunkof experience' (Okigbo) and 'writing 
under a form of compulsion' (Clark), it is 
not in doubt that the assessment was 
made honestly and with consideration. It 
would be important nevertheless to know 
why Soyinka and Mphahlele left the fold 
so early in 1963 (the former even 
disassociated himself from the journal - 
certainly not, as was once rumoured, over 
the imperialist notion behind the name 
'black orpheus'?) and why lr°le and 
Clark shouted 'Not Again!' when they 
learnt Beier was returning to Nigeria. 
Benson thinks this might have to do with, 
among other reasons, the remark Beier 
was said to have made in 1 966 that 'all 
the talents had gone east' with the outbreak 
of the Biafran war. He also disbanded 
Mbari Club before leaving Nigeria, 
perhaps he could have handed it over like 
the journal; afterall, he was only one 
person and the club once had Okigbo, 
Dennis Williams, Soyinka, Clark and Beier 
himself deliberating on the 
appropriateness of a publishing deal 
with Longmans whose representative in 
N igeria, Julian Rea, was Soyinka's friend. 
Clark and Irele were able to publish 
only seven editions in four years (Black 
Orpheus was meant to come out thrice in 
a year). A publishing deal with the 
University of Ife Press which Hans Zell was 
going to set up did not work out. And 
when the editing devolved to Clark and 
his wife, Ebun, in 1 974 when both were 
teaching at the University of Lagos, they 
issued three numbers, finally handing 
over in the 70s to the critic Theo Vincent 
of the same university. Vincent published 
two editions in 1 982 by which time the 
standards had fallen way behind its 
predecessors'. This decline paralleled that 
of the intellectual industriousness in 
N igeria. For by the turn of the decade the 
economic rot had set in: the Eighties 
began with austerity measures and ended 
with the Structural Adjustment Programme. 
Intellectuals began to flee to other places 
while intellectual work reacquired its 
original reputation as the lot of those 
blessed with the oath of poverty. 
With Neogy the story was different. 
He had negligible editorial background 
compared with Beier's. Again, East Africa 
was not as culturally active as West. 
Makerere University in Kampala, though 
prestigious had not given rise to an artistic
movement around which a literary journal 
could flourish. The first writer of note from 
independent East Africa, Ngugi wa 
Thiongo (then James Ngugi) was not to 
emerge until 1 964 when his Weep Not, 
Child was published. But Neogy's choice 
had simplified matters. According to 
Benson, 'Neogy seems to have been torn 
between providing a more thoughtful 
alternative to the political, social and 
economic reporting of the tabloid press 
and providing an outlet for young artists, 
poets and writers as Black Orpheus had 
done.'
The first issue of Transition testifies 
to this. From all accounts, what the region 
lacked in literature it had in politics. 
Ugandan politics became volatile as 
independence approached. Sir Edward 
Mutesa II, the Kabaka of Buganda had 
been deposed in 1953 by the British 
colonial government when he opposed 
the centralization of the country ancj jn 
effect the subordination of his inherited 
kingdom. Echoes of the noise generated 
by the face-off could still be heard, and the 
issue of Buganda autonomy remained a 
central one in the country's politics. So 
much so that an article in the first issue, 'Is 
A Party System Possible in Africa?' 
contributed by Ivor Jennings foreshadowed 
the issues such as the rights of minority 
groups that led to Transition's trouble with 
the Obote government seven years later. 
Another controversial article on race 
relations in East Africa was published in 
that edition and like Jennings' dealt with 
an issue of no mean consequence in the 
7rans/f/on-Obote debacle. 
It would seem that this decision to 
go beyond Black Orpheus's preoccupation 
with the arts had less to do with the fact of 
'literary barrenness' (Taban Lo Liyong's 
phrase) in East Africa than with Neogy's 
own identity in Uganda. A Ugandan of 
Indian descent who had studied political 
science in England and been married to a 
Swede and living in a country where the 
tribe was vital to politics and the race 
question always on the boil - he would 
later be denied citizenship of Uganda - 
Neogy's description of himself as an 
outsider could not be more correct; only 
that this self-consciousness placed him in 
a position to see the issues with an 
intellectual's eye. His political values would 
4 7, Ibokun Street, home of the Beiers in Osogbo, 
provides a view of the city's rusty corrugated iron roofs. 
be universal and he would tend to favour 
the traditions from which liberal politics 
had developed. All these were obvious 
from the first edition, but it would be a 
disservice to that premier copy to suggest 
that it carried only politics. 
Although, there were no new creative 
works, the edition made up for the 
inadequacy by publishing eight reviews. 
Later it published a number of poets and 
writers including Ngugi, Lo Liyong, John 
Nagenda, Okot 'Bitek, Ata Aidoo, David 
Rubadiri, Okigbo, Achebe, Awonoor, U 
Tamsi, Soyinka and Brutus. The East 
Africans were having their first exposures 
outside campus literary reviews, but others 
like Soyinka and Brutus had appeared in 
Black Orpheus. Even though U Tamsi first 
appeared in Transition, it was his 
appearance in the other journal that gave 
him more prominence, perhaps due to 
Beier's inclination for the surrealist 
aesthetics that remain the defining spirit of 
the Congolese poet's ouevre. The 
Okigbo had made his hubristic statement 
about writing poetry only for poets did 
attract some attention to Transition. But 
increasingly, it became valid to fear that 
the magazine was condemned to either 
play second fiddle to Black Orpheus or 
find its place in the very heart of African 
intellectual and cultural politics. 
There had always been some kind 
of tension between the intellectual and the 
political elites in Africa. Since political 
independence was secured by the latter 
who were themselves intellectuals (recall 
the attempts at defining the nationalist 
politics at independence in the writings of 
leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou 
Toure, Senghor, Julius Nyerere), the 
conviction was dominant that this set of 
leaders, coming at the time they did, had 
a messianic role, and the direct result of 
this thinking was the deification of most of 
the men and the despotism which marked 
their regimes. But the emergent intellectual 
elites had a more or less professional view 
magazine would 
continue to feature 
contributions from 
these individuals 
either as essays, 
r e v i e w s , 
c o n t r o v e r s i a l 
exchanges, etc. 
S o o n , 
however, teethin9 
problems forced 
Transition off the 
streets (between 
January and June 
1962) after the 
third issue. The 
project had been 
begun with the little 
money Hume 
raised from 
advertisement and 
Neogy's own 
money, and 
returns weren't too 
impressive. An 
i n t e r n a t i o n a l 
conference in 
Kampala in 1962, 
reminiscent of the 
one in Paris in 
1956, where 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol.11 NO)
of their calling; 
they owed it a duty 
to the society to 
debunk the myth 
that was turning 
much of the 
continent into 
republics of fear 
and repression. 
Transition arrived 
early to referee in 
the 'tensionsoaked' 
match. 
From left, Ulli Beier, Jacob Lawrence (in glasses), Dennis Williams (in striped 
gown) and Duro Ladipo (striped cap) during a 1963 art workshop in Osogbo 
E q u a l l y 
important was the 
need for the 
intellectuals to 
reassess (and in 
cases debunk or 
defend) the values 
that came out of 
the contact with the 
West as these had 
to do with the direction African literature 
should take. In a manner more 
controversial only in duration than Black 
Orpheus's handling of the validity of 
Euromodernist aesthetics for the arts and 
literatures of recently deoralised societies, 
the pages of Transition became the 
battlefield for such questions as African 
socialism, pan-Africanism, the status of 
ethnic and racial minorities, political 
partisanship as against free speech and 
literary 'universalism', the use of 
indigenous languages versus Western 
languages and the role of Western critics 
and literary standards. It arrived early 
enough and after an initial period of 
blundering in the lurch of an overrated 
potential, Transition found itself at home. 
Between 1963 and 1966, the 
magazine became more drawn to political 
and intellectual controversies of the most 
sophisticated order. This major shift 
coincided with the arrival of sponsorship 
from the Paris-based Congress for Cultural 
Freedom. (Mphahlele, the congress 
representative had in 1 963 (?) introduced 
Neogy as he had earlier Beier). The 
congress was being funded by the Fairfield 
Foundation, in turn funded by the American 
Central Intelligence Agency. Both Neogy 
and Mphahlele and indeed Fairfield's 
executive director, John Thompson were 
to be embarassed by this link when it later 
African Quarterly 
on the Am 
Vol.11 NO} 
emerged but the fact of CIA funding of a 
journal that apparently innocuously 
criticised the political and economic styles 
of Nkrumah and Nyerere ranked, beside 
the face-off between Transition and the 
government of Milton Obote, among the 
nemesis of Neogy's career and of course, 
Transition's. 
But before the fall, writers, and poets 
trashed out the language question, 
following a contribution ('The Dead End of 
African Literature') by Obi Wali, then 
doing graduate studies at Northwestern 
University in the United States. He was in 
essence reacting to the proceedings of the 
Kampala writers conference and his 
submission was that if African writers wrote 
in languages other than indigenous ones 
(spoken by their audiences) they would be 
naturblly doing harm to the new literature. 
'Until these writers and their western 
midwives accept the fact that any true 
African literature must be written in African 
languages,' he argued, 'they would be 
merely pursuing a dead-end, which can 
only lead to sterility, uncreativity, and 
frustration.' 
So touchy was this issue that it drew 
reactions from as many as 13 writers and 
critics including Soyinka, Achebe, Moore, 
Williams, Peter Nazareth and continued 
to rage on for two years. Although he sent 
a response which 
amounted to 
'recapitulation', 
Wali, writing 
again on related 
question of how 
western concepts 
of the isolated 
individual in fiction 
had dominated 
A f r i ^ jn letters, 
earned the praise 
of Irele who, 
reviewing the first 
32 issues of 
Transition in the 
journal of African 
Studies in 1967 
singled his piece 
out for drawing 
attention to the 
lopsidedness. 
Irele's position on 
this issue is 
somewhat enthusiastic, for according to 
Bension, he had prevailed upon Clark for 
publish the similarly tempered article 'The 
LegacyofCaliban' in BlackOrpheus. Part 
of the excitement of this period was the 
range of involveemnt of writers from several 
parts. Isn't it interesting tohave Ama Ata 
Aidoo review Mokwugo Okoye's African 
Responses scathingly and with a 
deprecating laugh, to know that at a point 
Transition sold 17,000 copies and paid 
as much as $ 150 per article, that Okigbo 
was supposed to be the West African 
editor in 1 963? 
Political controversies became the 
rule with the arrival of Ali Mazrui and 
Theroux, both to feature later (or sooner) 
on the list of associate editors that also 
included Awonoor, John Godblat and 
Raymond Apthorpe. Mazrui's style of 
playing on the symbolically paradoxical 
suited the magazine's outlook very well. 
He seied on a book review to comment on 
hero-worship, wrote non-violence as 
commentary on violence. He became most 
controversial with the piece of Nkrumah 
politics ('Nkrumah The Leninist Czar') 
which came out just after the overthrow of 
theOsagyefoin 1 966. Mazrui's argument 
was that Nkrumah had deliberately 
modelled himself on Lenin, copying every 
symbolic gesture of the Russian 
revolutionary leader. But he became a
czar in the opulence of his style, which to 
Mazrui was a case of double paradox. 
Not only Mazrui, but several other 
Transition contributors as well, took 
positions that were particularly critical of 
the socialist economies in Africa. Granted 
that there were rebuttals of most of those 
articles, but to step up a criticism of leftleaning 
regimes in that decade of intense 
western suspicion of communism was to 
make plausible and ironic the revelation 
of CIA sponsorship. 
Actually the funding had been 
merely coincidental. Neogy needed 
money and Mphahlele's recommendation 
met no resistance from Thompson. The 
Fairfield Foundation, in funding the CCF 
thought that political stability and 
economic integrity would keep Africa 
non-communist. It assumed that art and 
literature were necessary foundation for 
cultural unity, and what Transition 'an 
excellent literary magazine' stood for 
perfectly suited the foundation's purposes. 
'The decision to support Neogy's 
Transition was taken largely by Thompson 
himself on the recommendation of 
Mphahlele simply on the grounds that 
Neogy was a capable editor who stood 
for ideals that Thompson (but also Cord 
Meyer and others in the CIA hierarchy) 
wanted to see strengthened in Africa - 
that is multiparty democracy, freedom of 
speech; predominance of intellectual over 
bureaucratic, political, military and 
traditional tribal elites; and a continued 
cultural interchange with, and allegiance 
to, the West,' writes Benson. 
Neogy confessed to a 'helpless 
resentment' on learning of the link, and 
Mphahlele shouldered the blame, though 
he insisted he was ignorant of the CIA 
connection. Soyinka who later took up 
the editorship described the agency as a 
'subversive organisation whose principal 
rationale... appears to have been a policy 
of haphazard infiltration of everything 
and anything going, on the general 
principle that with such indiscriminate 
fishing, some terrapins may actually be 
hooked.' The issue was explained away, 
but it did lasting damage to the 
magazine's reputation. 
The incarceration of Neogy and 
Abu Mayanja which followed was as 
Ulli Beier 
damaging. The issue of constitutional 
reforms in Uganda touched on the 
independence of the judiciary and 
Mayanja who had been education minister 
under the Kabaka until 1964 criticised 
one vital aspect of the proposed 
constitution: the absolute powers conferred 
on the presidency in the name of 
Emergency Detention laws. It was an 
exciting controversy that drew in a member 
of Obote's cabinet, Picho Ali, and later 
Davis Sebukima, a student of Makerere. 
Now Neogy had a distinct style of letting 
government officials (especially) know of 
contentious letters he would be publishing 
(if these had to do with the government) so 
there could be response to it. But Ali's 
defence of the regime's policies did no 
justice to Mayanja's aggressive piece. 
Then on Friday, October 1 8, 1 968, 
as the staff set down to parcelling copies 
of the freshly printed issue No. 37, some 
'half-dozen men in immaculate black suits' 
entered the editorial office and arrested 
Neogy under the Emergency Powers Act. 
Mayanja had also been arrested, as had 
been Daniel Nelson, the British editor of 
77ie People, the government-controlled 
daily, whose arrest was an error. Neither 
Neogy nor Mayanja found this turn of 
events funny, and whereas Neogy's 
release was secured by March due to 
international media campaign pursued 
by his wife Barbara and Mazrui, 
and the weakness and stupidity 
of the government's defence in 
court, Mayanja would not taste 
freedom until August 1 970 when 
Idi Amin released him with other 
political detainees 
Suddenly, Transition had 
come full circle in Uganda, and 
by now it was clear it wasn't 
wanted Obote's position 
regarding the magazine was 
quite categorical: During a fivehour 
audience with Mazrui 
following Neogy's arrest the 
then president plainly said, 
'Transition is not Neogy and 
Neogy is not Transition', adding 
thatitwouldbea more tolerable 
product in Mazrui's hands. True 
Barbara Neogy spoke of plans 
to 'bring out a new edition' of 
the journal, but this was not to 
be, and it was just as well, for as Neogy 
later said 'to have continued to publish 
Transition in Uganda under these 
circumstances would have been a betrayal 
of the principles that it stands for.' After 
releasing Neogy, thegovernmentknowing 
Transition was a weapon, still went ahead 
to give it a really negative name: its editor 
was not Ugandan, the campaign 
contended, and the associate editors were 
not; the CIA funding meant foreign 
support and so there was no way it could 
project Uganda in a good light. Neogy's 
confidence in the political health of his 
country became so shaky, his own personal 
and intellectual life so disoriented by the 
experience of his incarceration that he 
promptly left the country, travelling to 
India, France, England and finally settling 
in New York. 
Then followed a period of 
prevarication on the fate of the journal 
and three solid years lapsed before 
anything was seen of Transition again 
And when it did come out, in September 
1971, its new location was Accra, Ghana 
where Neogy had moved to. With subsidy 
from the International Association for 
Cultural Freedom, he set up a more 
expansive structure for the magazine 
Kofi Busia's regime in Ghana, which to 
Neogy was the nearest to a government 
that is committed to freedom of expression' 
Afnctn Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol.1/ NO 3
wo* soon overthrown, and the Idi Amin 
regime in Uganda which Neogy had 
welcomed with enthusiasm became 
progressively repressive. 
Although he was able to stir some 
controversy in Ghana and Transition still 
had enough fire to be described as 
counterrevolutionary and partisan on the 
part of the'liberal bourgeois democracy' 
of the West, Neogy grew more and more 
demoralised and concluded plans to quit 
the editorship of the magazine. The 
choice was either Soyinka who like 
Neogy had just suffered incarceration in 
the hand of the military regime of Yakubu 
Gowon in Nigeria-and now on voluntary 
exile, and Awonoor, .at a time being 
considered by Neogy as editor of the 
Ghanaian edition. Soyinka got the job 
because according to Neogy 'it was 
thought in Paris that his was a more 
fundraising name.' It is important in the 
light of this change to note that Soyinka 
and Neogy had reacted differently to 
their imprisonment. While Soyinka saw 
his experience as confirmative of an 
historical pattern and was thus generally 
skeptical of. conventional certitudes (as 
Season of Anomy, A Shuttle in the Crypt, 
The Man Died and Madmen and 
Specialists, all testify) Neogy 
was believing enough to 
convert to Islam, the religion of 
Idi Amin. 
Soyinka has a nose for 
dictators, and his instincts were 
perfect about Amin. Oneofthe 
radical steps he took on 
assuming duty, and the most 
politically antagnoistic was his 
resolve to 'contribute Transition' 
toward the various efforts to 
terminate the nightmare of 
Amin's reign. He rejected a 
pro-Amin article by the 
Ugandan Erisa Kironde and 
for this was later accused by 
Mazrui of being a tyrant. 
Rajat Neogy (died December 1995) 
But there were more farreaching 
changes. Soyinka 
made up his mind to 
deemphasise the political 
aspect of Neogy's Transition, 
saying its tone had become 
unduly flippant and fingering 
Mazrui for this. Rather he 
preferred another brand of 
politicalness: the need to 
identify with the mass 
African Quarterly 
on the Am 
Vol.1/NO 3 
movements fighting for liberations in places 
like Guinea Bissau where Amilcar Cabral 
had just declared his country independent 
of Portugal. He even published a report on 
the revolution written by historian, Basil 
Davidson in what appears an aspect of the 
historian's book, The Liberation ofGuine. 
This did not mean the magazine 
would lose its independence; indeed, the 
impulsive need to maintain editorial 
integrity in spite of or even because of, the 
lingering story of CIA funding made 
Soyinka relinquish the funding by IACF, 
and this ensured that the journal had fewer 
source of support. He did even more; after 
about five issues he changed the name 
from Transition to Ch'indaba (from Zulu 
and Swahili meaning, 'Let the 'great 
colloquium of the people begin'), the idea 
being to identify with and celebrate pan- 
African unity. Nor was the magazine 
without its own share of controversy and 
internal politics. There was no doubt that 
Soyinka and Mazrui didn't see eye to eye. 
It was claimed that Mazrui resigned as 
associate editor, but the politics of that 
resignation has become less mysterious 
following an exchange in the relaunched 
Transition. 
Soyinka, accused by Mazrui of 
writing a review that perverted the 
message of the latter's television 
documentary, The African: A Triple 
Heritage, wrote, among other 
repudiations, that Mazrui 'persisted in 
attempts to prolong (his) influence over 
the journal even after (he) ceased being 
on the editorial board,' and confessed to 
'brusque dismissal' ar.yU.ve Mazrui 
wanted to raise any question over the 
running of the journal. Mazrui, who wrote 
first, contended that 'Wole's old Transition 
was once guilty of refusing to publish 
anything in favour of Idi Amin.' 
It was during his editorship that 
Chinweizu and his friends Onwuchekwa 
Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike, 
published their famous polemic against 
the Euromodernist tendencies in much of 
African writings, especially those of 
Soyinka and Okigbo. Their manuscript 
had been accepted for publication by 
Nwanife Publishers, Enugu. But it never 
appeared; after two years only pirate 
copies were seen. When Soyinka replied 
them and they still intended to raise issues 
with him, he declined to print them any 
more. They finally found an outlet in 
Okike, established by Achebe, in which 
they published a three-part 
critique in numbers 1 2 to 14 of 
the journal. These included 'The 
Hopkins Disease', 'The Leeds- 
Ibadan Connection: The Scandal 
of Modern African Literature' and 
'Soyinka's Neo-Tarzanism: A 
Reply.' These they later 
incorporated into the book 
Toward the Decolonisation of 
African Literature. 
The need for an alternative 
source of funding for Ch'indaba 
became urgent, lACF's support 
having been declined. What 
Soyinka did was to transfer the 
journal's management to Africa 
Magazine since he would soon 
return to Nigeria and didn't think 
it helpful to transplant the 
magazine again after barely six 
years. But while Soyinka went to 
pick a job at Ife in 1977, Africa 
magazine began to arrange for 
his succession by a Ugandan. 
But this was not to be; plans had 
not been completed when in 
1979 Amin's overthrow by 
Tanzanian forces led the 
successor-designate to return to
Kampala. Thereafter, there was no will on the part of Africa 
Magazine to revive the plans. 'For an intellectual magazine, 
Transition was actually rather long-lived,' observes Benson. 
'However much one feels it absence, the tragedy is not that it 
died, but that it left no progeny.' 
Yes,-a valid judgement in 1984/85, when Benson was 
writing. By the close of that decade, however, Soyinka had 
relaunched Transition (not Ch'indaba) in the US. With him as 
chairman of board and scholars Henry Louis Gates Jnr and 
Kwame Anthony Appiah as editors the new Transition proclaims 
itself as 'where the outspoken speak out', harking back to 
Neogy's pioneering work. The announcement carried 
in every edition is a capsule of the journal's old 
history. 'In 1961, some of Africa's most provocative 
thinkers started speaking out in a new magazine 
called Transition. It pulled no punches. The New York 
Times called it "Africa's slickest, sprightliest and 
occasionally sexiest magazine." Editor Rajat Neogy 
refused to listen when told by government officials that 
Transition was speaking a little too loudly. He was 
subsequently sent to jail. After 50 uncensored, 
unguarded, uninhibited issues, Transition ceased 
publication because of political and economic 
pressure.' 
The new Transition, having such people as 
Carlos Fuentes, Aime Cesaire, Nadine Gordimer, 
Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Abiola Irele as editorial 
board members, promises to carry on with the tradition 
of'tough-minded, far-reaching criticism.'It is published 
quarterly as an official publication of W.E.B. Du Bois 
Institute in the United States. There has been in the 
new Transition a certain controversiality that is 
stimulating. The three-part exchange between Soyinka 
and Mazrui is one instance; another on the politics of 
power initiated by the scholar Emery Roe received at 
least a dozen replies. 
The major difference between the new Transition 
and its predecessors is its emphasis is 'on African and 
African-American concerns'. But the old debate about 
the primacy of audience ought to have returned. The 
language, themes as well as the general intellectual 
inclination of most contributors to Transition, while 
reflecting the trends in academic circles across the 
world, appear to be coming from the glands when 
applied to the Africa of here and now. The journal 
does not pretend to be a gallery of new writing. It is 
basically an academic and cultural journal and nothing 
is essentially wrong with its preoccupations. Rather, 
its seeming distance from the African reality is a 
reflection of a general state of things that is deplorable 
and utterly meaningless. The people have failed to 
climb up to Gogol, as Anton Chekhov once lamented, 
but the life that obtains in Africa today is most perfect 
as a photograph of the people pulling Gogol down to 
their abysmal level and seeking to adapt him to their 
grinding poverty. Is this a failure of politics or of 
imagination? 
On reflection, one might say this is not 1957; midlife crisis 
begins at 40. One might go ahead and still ask why Transition 
and not Black Orpheus needed reviving, whether the state of 
creative and intellectual productivity in Africa today should not 
provoke a publication 'where a young poet can see his work 
published in three weeks' as Beier dreamt 30 years ago. Are the 
days gone already, or not coming, again, when just as the 
Mexican critic Han Stavans could write in the new Transition 
about the phenomenon of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Colombian, 
a certain writer from 'the region between Chad and tre Limpopo 
river' could assume a stature compelling enough to put an Indian 
critic to task? GR 
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African Quarterly 
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VolllN03