The New (Asian) African: Politics and Creativity in the 1960s

Abstract

Just before independence, and in the years that followed in the 1960s, attempts were made by a professional Asian elite in the three East African countries to formulate a genuine African identity for the Asians; at the same time, in the exuberant literary climate of the time, young Asians at the universities, particularly Makerere, seeing themselves as Africans, began to write poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. The magazine Transition was founded by one of these Asians, Rajat Neogy. This article examines those attempts at a new identity and literature, until political circumstances killed them.