Transition was founded in 1961 in Kampala, Uganda, by the Ugandan-Asian editor Rajat Neogy. It quickly became one of the most important intellectual and literary magazines in Africa, publishing essays, fiction, poetry, and polemic by writers including Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Paul Theroux, and Ali Mazrui.
Issue No. 39 — the last issue published before Neogy was imprisoned by Idi Amin's government — is one of the most historically significant issues of any African journal.
The magazine was revived in 1991, published by Oxford University Press as an official publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, and edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with Wọlẹ Ṣóyínká as chairman of the editorial board — a line of descent the new series states openly on its half-title. The board of the new series reads as a roll-call of the period: Dennis Brutus, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Manthia Diawara, Carlos Fuentes, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Paulin Hountondji, Abiola Irele, Bìódun Jẹyifọ, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, V. Y. Mudimbe, Derek Walcott and Cornel West. New-series numbering restarts with Issue 51 as Volume 1, Number 1.
Alongside No. 39, the Library holds three numbers of that revived series — 63, 65 and 74 — spanning the middle of the Appiah and Gates editorship.
