Rajat Neogy (1938-1995), Founder of Transition

Rajat Neogy is the Founder of Transition, the most daring and important literary and political journal of Africa’s 1960s.

…the ultimate purpose of a literary magazine will always be to herald change, to forecast what new turn its culture and the society it represents is about to take. It will do this by sometimes allowing prejudice and temporary obsessions to be aired [and] by being permissive to radical innovations.”  – Rajat Neogy

Transition was founded in 1961 in Uganda as an East African literary magazine. The brainchild of a 22-year-old Ugandan writer of Indian descent Rajat Neogy, it quickly became Africa’s leading intellectual magazine during a time of radical changes across the continent. 

In 1968, the New York Times applauded that ‘a questing irreverence breathes out of every issue.’ As a result, in October 1968, Neogy was arrested on charges of sedition by Uganda’s Prime Minister  Milton Obote under state of emergency regulations after publishing an article by the opposition Bugandan MP, Abu Mayanja, which lambasted the authoritarian turn of the Ugandan state. Neogy was placed in solitary confinement in Luzira Prison and soon named an Amnesty International ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ for 1968 before a highly public trial – Obote’s ‘showdown with the intellectuals’ according to the British newspaper, the Financial Times.

At the trial, it emerged that Neogy had not officially renounced his UK citizenship, acquired legally by his Indian descent under the 1948 British Nationality Act, due to an oversight. Despite his birth in Kampala, he was not a Ugandan citizen. He was stripped of his Ugandan citizenship, a country he considered home, and one he had passionately marketed through Transition.

Uganda had not only lost a genius, it had pulled the plug on one of the most daring publications from Africa. Neogy briefly moved to Greece with his wife and soon took Transition to Accra, Ghana, in 1971. He exiled himself to the USA after the demise of Transition in 1974, first to New York and, in 1976, to San Francisco.

He died, impoverished, in 1995.

His journal was revived in the African diaspora at Harvard University by Henry Louis Gates Jr. just before Neogy’s passing, where it remains to this day. It had since refashioned itself as an international magazine about race and culture, with an emphasis on the African diaspora. 

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Source & Photo credit : Transition/ Facebook