Transition 99

The quarterly journal Transition, founded in Uganda in 1961 by a writer named Rajat Neogy, was revived in 1991 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Having spent half of the previous year as a volunteer in Zimbabwe, I was hungry for intelligent writing about Africa and the African diaspora, and I became a Transition reader and subscriber right away. Since then, I have published three reviews in Transition: the first on Doris Lessing’s African Laughter, the second on Chester Crocker’s High Noon in Southern Africa, and the third on Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti.

(By some quirk of fate, every issue I’ve appeared in has featured a shudder-inducing cover. Issue 59 had a photo of Clarence Thomas, issue 60 showed the charred corpse of a Bosnian civilian, and issue 66 pictured O.J. Simpson with the African American wife who preceded Nicole Brown Simpson. That issue was titled “The Crisis of African American Gender Relations.")

Transition has a modest circulation, and its publication history hints at some problems. Issues 51 through 68 were published by Oxford University Press, 69 through 94 by Duke University Press, 95 through 97 by Soft Skull Press, and 98 and 99 by Indiana University Press. Gaps between issues were sometimes so long that I thought my subscription had been lost, or that the journal had quietly expired. Yet just when I had almost given up hope, a new issue would appear, and it was generally worth the wait.

Issue 99 is one of the best in some time. Nuruddin Farah describes looking for his family home in a devastated neighborhood of Mogadiscio, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects on Chinua Achebe, the Biafran war, and what it means to write an “authentic” African novel. Plus, two essays uncover the neglected political and economic factors behind the genocidal killings in Rwanda and Darfur. “Coffee and Genocide” by Isaac A. Kamola shows how the high price of coffee in the 1970s and 1980s enriched the Hutu elites of Rwanda and how the later collapse of coffee prices led to economic and political crisis. “The Year of Fanatical Thinking” by David Mikhail argues that in 1996 the UN Security Council had an opportunity to pass strong sanctions against Sudan, which was being used as a training ground for terrorists. Once the country completed building its oil pipeline, Sudan had a powerful ally and customer in China and the money it needed to buy the fighter planes and other weapons used against Darfur.