Posted
Wednesday, August 28
2013 at
20:49
In Summary
So, politics killed Transition and, like a lot of good things Africa has lost to the West, now it is an American institute.
There is an animal called civil political and
public policy debate. If you don’t know it, you are forgiven; it died
long in Kenya, and almost everywhere else you look in Uganda, Tanzania,
Nigeria, Ghana, name it.
For example the current arguments for and against a
referendum in Kenya mostly sound like battle cries. The controversial
suspension of Gladys Shollei as Chief Registrar has turned into
something akin to a gladiatorial pit from ancient Rome.
Question is why do we shout, threaten, vilify and demonise instead of calmly debate public issues?
Let us go back some years back. There was a
wonderful journal of ideas called TRANSITION, published in the Uganda
capital Kampala. Every major debate in East Africa then ended up in
Transition, where the intellectual minds of the region tussled without
hurling insults or stones.
Here is what a Wikipedia entry on Transition has to say:
“In 1961, at the age of twenty-two, Rajat Neogy
founded Transition Magazine: An International Review in Kampala, Uganda.
Transition was designed to be the literary organ of East African
writers and intellectuals. Transition quickly became Africa’s leading
intellectual magazine, publishing such diverse figures as Tanzanian
President Julius Nyerere, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer (Nobel
laureate), Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and Americans James Baldwin
and Paul Theroux.
“In 1968, the Ugandan government jailed Neogy for
sedition; the magazine had criticised President Milton Obote’s proposed
constitutional reforms. After Neogy’s release, Transition was revived in
Ghana in 1971. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka took over as editor in 1973.
During Soyinka’s tenure, Transition became still more contentious: the
cover of one issue sported a cartoon image of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin
with Karasi! (“Finish Him!”) written across his face. Transition
continued to make a name - as well as enemies - for itself until folding
in 1976 for financial reasons.
“Henry Louis Gates, Jr, a student of Soyinka…and a
frequent contributor to the Ghanaian Transition, brought the magazine
back to life in 1991. Now based at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute for
African and African American Research at Harvard University. Transition
(today) bills itself as “an anchor of deep reflection on black life and a
map charting new routes through the globalized world.”
So, politics killed Transition and, like a lot of good things Africa has lost to the West, now it is an American institute.
There is nothing remotely close to Transition in
Africa today. So how did we stop talking to each other and took to
talking at each other?
I think the slow death of civil debate in Africa
started in the 1970s in the era of one-party dictatorships and military
tyrannies. It became too risky for individuals to take on regimes or to
champion good causes, so they found safety in numbers. Thus they
organised in civil society groups where it was much more difficult to
target them individually. Secondly, because freedom of assembly and
political association was banned, they could only organise in cultural
groups and in safe districts or regions, which were usually their home
areas. This meant they often organised around their tribes, which would
protect him.
In Kenya, anti-KANU politics took sanctuary in
Central, Western, and Nyanza. Now when you organise among “your people”,
you appeal to their fears and hearts, not their hopes and heads. It is
passion and insecurities that keep ethnic or religious groups united,
not cold logical ideas.
source: The citizen
source: The citizen
