Editorial

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Ulli Beier: A Pagan Yoruba Man in Christian Bayreuth

Amatoritsero Ede

(in Memoriam)

I fly from Lagos to Frankfurt straight into the winter breath of December in 1994. Huffing and puffing my way across Germany for the next several months, I end up in Bayreuth in 1996 to pursue a one-year German language intensive preparatory class towards full-blown studies. It is here in this sleepy university town which speaks a drowsy and guttural low German, that I learn from Paul Onovoh, Nigerian PhD candidate at Bayreuth University, that there is a Yoruba man in town who lives in a residence aptly referred to as ‘Iwalewa Haus.’ He is white and his name is Ulli Beier. Of course Beier (also known as Obotunde Ijimere) is so detribalised that I do not think of him as German, any more than I consider Susanne Wenger Austrian. Wenger, a boon companion of Beier’s earlier years, initially comes to Oshogbo with him around 1950 and never leaves but remains in that small Western Nigerian town as an Osun devotee and later priestess, for the rest of her life.

I find it amusing that I think of beer when I hear the familiar name, Beier. Perhaps this is mere phonetic and visual accidence, due to a lifelong habit of pronouncing and reading English, even as I engage serious graduate level German? But there is playful mischief involved. My overactive imagination adds a truly ‘local’ colour. Everyone knows that Bayern is notorious for its annual Oktoberfest – that gay and sunny communal drink-fest full of beer and bratwurst where Bacchus himself would feel completely at home. Beer. Ulli Beier. I cannot believe he lives in this dusty, moat-eaten town; why not neighbouring glamorous Munich, or sophisticated Frankfurt, picturesque Bonn, or world–renowned Berlin? I am giddy while mispronouncing his name. The drunken feeling evoked does not come from Oktoberfest beer draughts served by those rumoured big-bosomed, Amazon German waitresses with matronly girdles. It is rather due to Beier’s legendary exploits as an astute promoter, pioneer and bedrock of Modern Nigerian culture from the time of dinosaurs – when literary and arts patronage was not fashionable across Africa.

In the colonial-era-dawning of modern Nigerian literary and visual arts Beier, himself a writer, did not only act as the usual expatriate literary critic, educator and scholar but also as patron, facilitator, curator, translator, anthologist, publisher and mentor to fledgling writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo or Mabel Segun and dramatists like Duro Ladipo. His Mbari club, spanning 1961-1967 – echoed in the Mbari-Mbayo Art centre in Oshogbo and its gallery of early Oshogbo School visual artists – was an important cultural watering hole for foundational Nigerian writers as well as a bridgehead linking early Nigerian literary activities to continental and metropolitan fashions and movements. Through his cultural networking and promotional activities he inserted modern Nigerian cultural production into twentieth century post-war liberating and anti-colonial energies. This is within the atmosphere of a phenomenon scholars now refer to as black internationalism as it is exemplified and practised within the Negritude Movement, Harlem Renaissance and Indigeneism in Paris, New York, Latin America and the Caribbean respectively. The Mbari Movement, co-founded in Ibadan by Ulli Beier, can be added to that complex. Living in the same town with this genie and breathing the same air is quite overpowering. I decide to seek Beier out, shake hands with history and be done with it.

Iwalewa Haus is in the ‘Stadtmitte’ – that is, at the heart of Bayreuth, and around the outer perimeters of a busy inner-city central bus terminal, and hospitality and shopping district. Far enough away from the madding crowd, it sits right on the lip of windswept, narrow Münzgasse Street, number 9, with just a narrow sidewalk separating it from the occasional traffic. It is a nondescript, leaf-veined block of building perched on a narrow, slightly winding incline. The façade carries the timeworn and famous sign, IWALEWA HAUS, vertical and aslant away from the front door with which it forms a 90-degree angle. Except for that sign, the murals on the walls outside, and carved wood doors, the building can easily pass for the residence of an eccentric graffiti artist. Only when you enter is there a suggestion that this is a veritable institution built over a half century across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and finally housed here in a small, quiet German town.

I press the doorbell. Georgina Beier, the woman of the house, opens the double street doors with a smile. I am expected. She leads me into the foyer, up a staircase and to the main level of the house and a hallway, which appears to be an art gallery, albeit one where nothing seems to be for sale. Creating the atmosphere of a permanent exhibition, large paintings, adire and batik cloth adorn the walls and sculptures dot the hallway. There is no real furnishing; it is mostly exhibition space in the corridor and in the adjoining rooms, with the occasional office workstation. As I later discover on subsequent visits, it is the same on all of three floors except, perhaps, for the uppermost, which is also living quarters for Ulli and Georgina.

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13 Responses to “Editorial”

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  1. Ololade Bamidele says:

    Very interesting editorial. Takes one back to the modern foundations of the Nigerian artistic culture (literary/scribal and visual), and the role of the agency of pioneers like Beier and Wenger in this. Totally enjoyable read, articulated with a delightfully poetic and linguistic mischief…

  2. Chielozona Eze says:

    Thanks for taking me through this important hermeneutic journey. I hadn’t known the meaning of Iwalewa. What a deep lesson.

  3. Yemi Soneye says:

    Interesting editorial. Beier’s query of you however contains an assumption which I find incorrect. The assumption that most Yorubas did introspective comparisons between foreign gods and their gods and chose to run after the former can hold only if Yoruba scriptures were available to foist an objective comparative process upon the Yoruba who is in the process of choosing a spiritual anchor. The oral tradition of the Yoruba belief has barely contended with the written conceptions of Christianity and Islam. It has rather allowed convenient depictions, as oral traditions are bound to do. The depictions for instance by influential Nollywood’s movies of Yoruba gods – that Beier got acquainted with and knew in his cultural promotions – as pernicious and unappealing as their scripts demand. It is hoped that such works of Beier, Wande Abimbola (who put Ifa divination poetry into paper) and others spur the concreting of the Yoruba oral tradition with paper (not to proselytize the Yoruba but to at least make him aware of the models such query as Beier’s assume he knows).

  4. Karen says:

    The beauty of character. I will hold that in my heart.

  5. Cajetan Iheka says:

    Interesting piece. The iwalewa motif strikes me as poignant today with the bastardization of religion in Nigeria. With private jets now added to the paraphernalia of some forms of Christianity, Beier’s life, and this editorial invite us to rethink our values and what we consider important. Thanks, Ama, for celebrating an ancestor!

  6. dami ajayi says:

    Interesting read. The piece is however more interested in the journey than the meeting. What about the CIA funding Mbari? Absolute silence about that. I suppose this piece is about finding home in the diaspora like my friend Seye Abimbola did when he visited Ulli Beier in Australia. Yemi might be wrong in that regard, taking the Beier rhetoric to heart, but hey, we bring our bios to discussions.

    • demosloft says:

      Dami, Provocative point about the funding of Mbari; I have heard rumours to the effect. While the saying goes that you don’t look a gift horse in the teeth, I think such an important piece of information ought to be discussed openly especially given the persistence of neo-colonial imperialist control of african cultural processes. However, the good Mbari did cannot be overlooked. If we are to trace the sources of any kind of funding for the arts around the world, it would be shocking what contradictions will be unearthed. Think about the Nobel Prize for example and the source of its original endowment – a business in dynamite – which kills people or killed people at some point… The subject of patronage and ethics is a topic I would love to discuss in another place and time.

  7. Salma Bani says:

    Very stylistic editorial, clear simple and concise but rich, it reflects not only Nigerian religion, also Modern society like European society. A true combination of non fiction and fiction,

  8. Adesinaakindele says:

    Mbari was in UNN while Mbari-Mbayo was in UI. Beier and Wenger were mesmerized by the magical powers displayed by the Yorubas in the name of the traditional deities. It beggars belief that Wenger(PhD) would leave Beier and be amorously involved with an ‘illiterate ‘Ifa diviner. Awon Yoruba yi owo pada fun won ni!

    • demosloft says:

      Sina,

      The Ifa diviner was not illiterate. He had the wisdom of the ancients. Wenger was an extra-ordinary individual, advanced soul
      and a free spirit. It was within her rights to choose a path and to see what ordinary folks like us cannot see in that ‘illiterate’ Ifa Diviner. Her life proved that she made the right choice. She enriched a whole generation of people. Wenger and Beier were friends their entire life; I am sure Beier was very happy for her and the path she chose.

  9. James Yeku says:

    Very insightful editorial. Although the constant reference to a “pagan” imaginary appears to me to affirm a major signified of colonial rhetoric and its semiotic of cultural dispossession. The term evokes an exotic model on which Africa was constructed by an ignorant ethnographic tradition which Beier himself could never have been associated with. Apart from this, here is a useful piece, and thank you.

    • demosloft says:

      Hello James, I am surprised that you understood the exact opposite of what I intend when I deploy the word, ‘pagan.’ The constant reference to, and positive context of its deployment, is meant to save the word, pagan, from its negative ethnographic connotations in the colonial library. That idea that African religion is indeed sufficient unto itself is at the heart of the essay. If you read between the lines, you will note that describing Beier, Wenger and practitioners of African religion as ‘pagan’ is an ironic underlining of the ethical imperatives in traditional religion as compared to modern forms of worship with their increasing amorality, fundamentalism and oftentimes violence – both emotional and physical. For example, When did any African religion ever go to war with another religion to prove itself or try by force to proselytize or ‘win souls’? I emphasized the genteel and dignified nature of traditional religion (demonized as ‘pagan’ by old school Western ethnography) with the term ‘Iwalewa’ and ‘Iwapele.’ Please, cast a second look over this essay; perhaps you read in a hurry.

      • James says:

        It appears my reading of the editorial is not too far from the points you brilliantly reiterate here, only that I was alarmed by the constancy of that ‘rebel’ referent, pagan-whose use, I suspect, may actually do more to relegitimate a warped articulation of the exotic in Western anthropological discourses than its implicit sense of the ironic. Perhaps the most effective way to denaturalize an idea is never to invoke its regimes of signifiers. It is great, though, that the overall intention of the piece licenses African indigenous practices as self-sufficient sites of being and becoming.

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