Transition: An International Review (2009) Issue 101.

In these pages we have recognised a few other quality serial publications such as Granta and Botswana Notes and Records. Honouring Transition is long overdue - it will soon be 50 years old as an eminent literary journal for Africa and the Majority World. Transition began in Kampala, Uganda, in 1961, the year before independence. The decade of independence in African South of the Sahara had begun with Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960. Tanganyika was to follow in 1961 and Uganda in 1962. The first All-Africa Writer's Conference was held in Kampala in July 1962 at Makerere University College, partially as a result of the impact of Transition.

Ironically, that pioneering Mbari gathering was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom that was also backing Transition and Black Orpheus in Ibadan, Nigeria. Ironic, because later it was revealed the Congress was a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) front (designed to support left-of-centre intellectualism and development in Africa South of the Sahara). The Mbari Club had only just started in Nigeria in March 1961.

The first All-Africa Writer's Conference was attended by Rajat Neogy, the founding editor of Transition and a wide range of writers from Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka to Ali Mazuri, Rebeka Njau, Okot p'Bitek, John Nagenda, James Ngugi (to become Ngugi wa Thiong'o), Ezekiel Mphahelele, Lewis Nkosi and many others. It remains one of the most exciting gatherings I have ever attended.

Following the coup by General Idi Amin Dada against the Obote government in Uganda in January 1971, Transition was able to move to Accra, Ghana, and continued to be published there for a number of years. It reached numbered into the 40s in issues, and then died, as did Rajat Neogy in California later in a sleazy hotel. Transition was then resurrected by three people who have now been with the new series for nearly two decades: Wole Soyinka, the Ghanaian writer Kwame Anthony Appiah, and the African American scholar at Harvard University, Henry Louis Gates Jr (recently in the news being arrested and handcuffed by the police for breaking into his own home-racism in America simmers and resurfaces continuously). Transition has been published by Oxford University Press in New York City, then Duke University Press in North Carolina, and now by Indiana.

In Transition 101 Ngugi wa Thiong'o has a piece attacking the concept of "tribe". There is nothing new in this, as for decades, even before the years of independence, tribe was perceived as a category used by the colonial powers as part of their strategies to divide and rule. Ngugi adds to the debate with observations like: "Thirty million Yorubas are referred to as a tribe, but four million Danes as a nation". In the context of the 2007 political crisis in Kenya he notes that the debate was dominated by "Tribe X versus tribe Y".

Yes, the two leaders divided along a line that could be imposed in this manner but, "What did not fit into that neat composition was often glossed over. For instance, Kikuyu and Luo people never shared boundaries, so the claim that they could have been traditional enemies defeats reason and common sense, but analysts were undaunted in their persistent use of the formula. Even the fact that the two leaders had followers across other communities, or the fact that much of the gruesome anti-Gikuyu ethnic cleansing came largely from Eldoret North, a Kalenjin area, and Narok, an areas under Maasai dominance, was ignored in order not to muddy the waters of the familiar formula of Tribe X versus tribe Y".

Ngugi goes on to again call for an examination of the "only two tribes in Africa "the Haves and the Have-nots". "These are to be found in all communities in varying degrees of intensity. But the Haves of one community tend to point to the Haves of another community as the only Haves, or label an entire community as the Have-it-alls". Nugugi then extracts the role of the warlords in this analysis, as they are "often millionaires themselves, then emerge as the defenders of the community against the enemy community of Haves ... this allows them to talk about ethnic purity as the key to economic and political liberation ... they make sweetheart deals with Western companies ... the Congo provides the best example ... the so-called 'tribal' wars - meaning among the political warlords - there is always the outsider who wants to see what he can pick from the ruins. So I should note the real existence of the third 'tribe'; the corporate tribe of the West".

Rita Dove, former US Poet-Laureate, has five poems here from Sonata Mulattica her new book of poems just published this year. Then Transition 101 presents a short story, Our man in Geneva wins a million Euros by Petina Gappah, a trial lawyer from Zimbabwe now working in Geneva, Switzerland. This is a delightful tale about what happens when a person is sucked into believing in Internet winnings, how the scam attracts, holds, and perverts, as the individual falls deeper into the trap, and in his effort to extricate himself, plunges further. As often in Transition the illustrations are not directly related to the story, but complement it amazingly well. These are by C. K. Wilde from his Currency Collage, and wild they are, from Quixotic Ambitions and Alternating Currency to Money Bee. Does Wilde have the last joke on his collectors?

Then there is a chilling documentary story, Making Peace with the Sea: One Man's Life after Gun Violence in the New South Africa by Capetonian Rebecca Rosenberg. Yesterday I was an active young man, dealing in stolen VW Golf parts from vehicles we would hide on the flats, strip bare and resale in bit and pieces. Today I am paralysed from the neck down, having been shot in the neck in an argument, with the bullet severing my spinal cord. South Africa, along with Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, have the highest murder rate in the world. I am alive, but I should have been dead. The author met Luxolo the day he was hospitalised. Months later he has made little progress - he can wiggle a few toes. He interprets a dream, "All I know is I don't regret anything ... what happened was how it was supposed to be, by the stars in the universe". Luxolo's story is illustrated by photographic stills from Darrell James Root's award winning film Yesterday (2004) "a visual meditation on life in a remote African village".

Transition 101 contains an essay by Moradewun Adejunmobi, who taught at the University of Botswana (UB) and is now in California, on "Urgent Tasks for African Scholars in the Humanities". She suggests that "the ravages caused by the politics of autochthony call for urgent intervention from African scholars in all fields, especially the humanities".

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, head of the department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, addresses "African Studies and Universities since Independence". His most recent book is The Study of Africa (2007). Among other selections there is a fascinating book review by Safoi Babana-Hampton of Pap Ndiaye's La Condition Noire (2008) a.k.a The Black Condition. She teaches French at Michigan State University.

It can be seen that Transition 101 as with all the others speaks to the needs of scholars and concerned people throughout Africa and the Majority World.

Transition-Looking Ahead. Indianapolis, Indiana. Indiana University Press, 158 pages, paperback, US$18.50, pISSN 0041-1191.