Editorial

Ulli Beier: A Pagan Yoruba Man in Christian Bayreuth

Amatoritsero Ede

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.

A View from the Balcony

Poet, Amatoritsero Ede in conversation with novelist, M.G. Vassanji

Amatoitsero Ede: MG, it is exciting to have you on MTLS. First, do kindly give us an idea of the central ‘gist’ of your very latest novel, which comes out this October.

M.G. Vassanji: The latest book is not a novel but what I call a travel memoir. It is called And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa. In it I describe my travels in Tanzania and Kenya, relating them to my own life, my experiences, and my interests. In the process I also unearth some little-known but fascinating histories. The book came about partly out of my frustration at seeing the places that I relate to intimately and that I love described in a “them-us” manner by fleet-footed travellers reporting to their constituents. One such writer is Paul Theroux, who wrote Dark Star Safari. He is an adventurous, an intrepid and brave traveller, and makes many interesting and valid comments and observations; in the 1960s he even spent some time in Uganda and wrote for a literary magazine there. But the tone of this particular narrative is “this is what Africa is like.” He does not know the language, shows no intimacy or empathy with the people or the landscape.

On Some Recent Worrying over World Literature’s Commodity Status

Sarah Brouillette

Scholars have been discussing world literature’s status as an elite commodity for a number of years now, beginning perhaps with Timothy Brennan’s important critiques, first expressed in the late 1980s, of celebrated “Third World” writers (see Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” Salman Rushdie). Since then a number of studies of postcolonial literature – a category of text that tends to be subsumed into the world literature canon – have argued for the importance of understanding that literature in relation to the markets for it (see Huggan; Watts; Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers). It recently became especially hard to avoid this concern, however, after Verso published Emily Apter’s Against World Literature and an editorial appeared in the widely read cultural magazine n+1 under the title “World Lite.” The basic narrative that these latter works construct is one in which the label world literature, for decades applied to a canon of classics curated by acquisitive publishers located in the West, signals now little more than a predictable set of moderately “different” works.

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