On the Trail of Transition

Abstract

So there we were again, an all-Nigerian delegation, thirty-five years after the Conference of African Writers that first brought me to Uganda.We had serious business, but I had an agenda of my own, consisting of two parts. One was to track down the birthplace of Transition. I did not intend to put a plaque on the wall, but I was, after all, visiting Uganda for the first time in some thirty eventful years of Africa's endless transition: post-Idi Amin; postMilton Obote's second coming; postJulius Nyerere's Ujaama; post-apartheid; postmortem Christopher Okigbo, who fell in Biafra; postmortem Robert Serumaga, disappeared in Moi's Kenya; but, most poignantly, postmortem Rajat Neogy, who gave us Africa's first forum of intellectual and artistic eclecticism. He was an inescapable presence at the Writer's Conference. So there was nostalgia, yes: a remembrance of friends gone, things done, battles lost and won. My second project was the very antithesis of nostalgia. When we set out from Nigeria in I962, we had been on an excursion of creative buoyancy and high optimism. Now we were returning in a season of despondency, of which the most gruesome manifestation was the massacre in Rwanda in I 994. I needed to visit Rwanda to confront the realization of my direst predictions. Had I not cautioned that the fashionable incantation of a humanistic African past might prove a romantic illusion in A Dance of the Forests, the play I composed for Nigeria's independence and read at the Writer's Conference in I962? Perhaps it was fitting, then, that our mission this time was purely political: to press African governments in the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group for sanctions against Sani Abacha's Nigeria. (The politician of I998 confronts the artist of i962?) Our earlier incursion into Kampala had focused almost entirely on culture: we went to join a convocation of writers and intellectuals from every corner of the continent. In I962, we were a motley group: poet,