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Transition 101 has arrived, featuring poetry by Rita Dove, fiction by Petina Gappah, and an imaginative work by Miranda Pyne exploring the life of a polygamous African family living in Paris. An essay by Souleymane Bachir Diagne examines the history and meaning of human rights in Africa, while Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o critiques the notion of tribe so often invoked to explain strife on the continent. Paul Zeleza looks at the history and evolution of African studies since independence, and Rebecca Rosenberg reports from South Africa on the problem of crime and the burden it places on the healthcare system and on families. The issue also offers review essays on Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums and Pap Ndiaye’s La condition noire, in addition to a glimpse at a recent exhibit of Suesan Stovall’s thought-provoking works of collage.

Transition Magazine is the organ of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. It is an international review of politics, culture, and ethnicity from Beijing to Bujumbura. While other magazines routinely send journalists around the world, Transition invites the world to write back. Four times a year, its far-flung writers fill the magazine's pages with unusual dispatches, unforgettable memoirs, unorthodox polemics, unlikely conversations, and unsurpassed original fiction. Comic-book heroes in India, pop stars in Nigeria, white slaves in America, witches in South Africa, heart transplants in Japan: Transition tells complicated stories with elegant prose and beautiful images.

 

Founded in Africa in 1961 by a young Ugandan of Indian descent, Transitionquickly gained an international reputation for eloquent but tough-minded commentary. Contributors included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, and Nobel Prize-winners Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka. In 1968 the New York Times called Transition "Africa's slickest, sprightliest, and occasionally sexiest magazine." Transition attacked Africa's dictators, and the dictators responded in kind: the editor was imprisoned, and the magazine was forced to move several times. Throughout the 1960s, Transition articles tracked the fate of free speech and free association on the continent. Countless journalists from around the world--from the U.S. to Sri Lanka to Sweden to Somalia--made their mark on the magazine.

 

Transition was reborn in 1991 in the United States under the editorship of K. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as chair of its distinguished editorial board. In its reincarnation, Transition has been called "the only decent forum for black intellectuals" (the Village Voice), "a cheeky journal of culture and politics" (the New York Times), and "tremendously impressive . . . [home to] some of the smartest cultural criticism available anywhere" (the Nation). Recently, Transition won the Alternative Press Award for International Reporting for the fourth time. In 2001, the magazine was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in General Excellence. Essays from Transition have been reprinted in Best American Essays, The Beacon Best, Harper's, and the Utne Reader, while its fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and has been short-listed for the O. Henry prize. Contributors include Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, Kofi Annan, Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Richard Rorty, Paul Beatty, Maryse Condé, Christopher Hitchens, and Russell Banks.