K. Anthony Appiah (left), Michael Vasquez, Kelefa Sanneh, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Photo by Jon Chase.

Nobody's sure what to call Transition. Is it a lowbrow academic journal? A highbrow magazine? An illustrated book? The Village Voice has called it "the only decent forum for black intellectuals." The New York Times terms it "a high-IQ multicultural Wired." Is it "impish"? (Dissent says so.) "Urgent"? (The Times Literary Supplement.) "Important"? (Foreign Policy.)

"We aim to be a clearinghouse for the freshest, most compelling, most curious ideas about what it means to be black -- indeed, what it means to be human -- today," says Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities and one of Transition's editors. "There is no party line."

With his longtime friend and collaborator, Professor of Afro- American Studies and of Philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah, Gates has made Transition a venue for unusual (and sometimes contentious) writing on race and identity. The official publication of the W.E.B Du Bois Institute, Transition - like Afro-American Studies itself - has become a fixture on the intellectual landscape of America. But this journal did not emerge ex nihilo. Like many another American cultural artifact, Transition came out of Africa.

The original Transition got its start in Kampala, Uganda, in 1961. The brainchild of a 21-year-old writer of Indian descent named Rajat Neogy, it quickly became Africa's leading intellectual magazine, publishing such diverse figures as Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and Americans such as James Baldwin, Paul Theroux, and a then-unknown graduate student who signed himself "Skip Gates." Edited in the early 1970s by the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka (who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature), Transition continued to make a name - and enemies - for itself until its demise in 1976.

This month, on the occasion of its 75th issue, the American Transition celebrates its African roots with a compendium of writings from its earlier incarnation.

"We tried to reunite the entire extended Transition family," Appiah notes. "It was fascinating to immerse ourselves in the past, tracking down over 30 writers. It was quite incredible, really. Some of these people made fantastic contributions to Transition and then never wrote again, at least not for a general audience. Some of them are now dead. But so many of our writers - nearly all of the most promising intellectuals of Transition's first period, the era of decolonization and independence - ended up here in the West."

It is this period that Transition celebrates its the anniversary issue. In his introductory essay Executive Editor Michael Colin Vazquez notes that Transition first appeared in an era of unbridled optimism. New African nations were emerging after a century of colonial oppression - 17 in 1960 alone. And, Vazquez continues, the world of publishing was undergoing renewal as well, with energetic writing in little magazines, and the birth of the "new journalism" in Esquire and other glossies. The time was ripe for a lively, argumentative journal covering Africa and the black diaspora.

Transition immediately forged a distinctive style. "There will be no birth without miscegenation," Neogy wrote in an early editorial, signaling the magazine's commitment to pluralism in both subject and voice. Never afraid to offend, Transition frequently invited controversy with articles about literary and racial politics, sex, stereotypes, and war. Its letters section often bristled with invective, as when a horde of irate Peace Corps volunteers objected to Paul Theroux's article "Tarzan Was an Expatriate."

In 1968, the Ugandan government jailed Neogy for sedition; the magazine had criticized President Milton Obote's proposed constitutional reforms. After Neogy's release, Transition was revived in Ghana in 1971; Soyinka took over 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!") splayed across his face. Transition was unlike anything else, in Africa or abroad, and when it folded in 1976, it left a void.

Gates, a student of Soyinka's at Cambridge University and a frequent contributor to the Ghanian Transition, brought the magazine back to life in 1991. Now based in the United States, Transition bills itself as "an international review of politics, culture, and ethnicity from Beijing to Bujumbura." Gates is philosophical about the magazine's expanded purview. "Africa is thoroughly in the world and the world is in Africa," he observes. "Transition reflects the centrality of both to each other."

In its eight years, the magazine has won an array of awards for design, international reporting, and general excellence; its essays and interviews have been reprinted around the globe. In 1998 Transition received a generous grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Transition 73, dedicated to black writing about white people, was the best-selling issue in the new Transition's history.

For the anniversary issue, the editors culled some of the most important essays and interviews from Transition's first 50 issues: Gates' conversation with the fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver; Paul Theroux's examination of anti-Asian bigotry in Africa; Chinua Achebe's report from the battlefields of Biafra; Wole Soyinka's devastating account of his two years as a political prisoner. Special sections revisit the magazine's controversial coverage of Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah; the evolution of apartheid in South Africa; the incendiary debates over the status of African literature written in English.

There are many surprises. "Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a eulogy for John F. Kennedy on the first anniversary of his death. And it appeared only in Transition," Vazquez relates. "It's amazing, a sober appreciation of JFK as a racial realist and a principled defender of human rights. And it's been lost for 30 years - Taylor Branch, King's biographer, had never heard of it until we told him about it."

Transition's future plans, says Vazquez, include bringing back the letters section, as well as a regular emphasis on travel writing - but not the kind usually featured in glossy magazines or literary journals. "Travel writing is actually one of the oldest genres in African-American letters," he insists. "The first slave narratives were a kind of travel writing - think of Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo from what is now Nigeria, describing his maritime adventures in the West Indies, Turkey, and the Arctic." The next issue, which introduces these "dispatches," features the reflections of an African American among the Gypsies of Romania, an account of life with the Zionists of Mauritius, and a quasi-anthropological report on sex tourism in the Caribbean.

"Like every magazine in the world, we're trying to create a readership," says Deputy Editor Kelefa Sanneh. "But we're also trying to create a writership," nurturing authors who are willing to "turn the tables on genre." As Vazquez says, Transition "may look like a journal" - the anniversary issue is a thick 420 pages - "but it reads like a magazine."