I take a seat on one of the occasional cane chairs or benches lying around the rather empty exhibition hall, while Georgina disappears into the upper levels of the house. While I wait for Beier, I decide to explore. I stand up and move from room to room, a guest at an exhibition. I note that the paintings are reminiscent of the Oshogbo School: they are replete with traditional Yoruba motifs, religious and otherwise. Some Igbo influences are discernible too. But it is disproportionately a collection of Yoruba art. In short, Iwalewa Haus, from all appearances, is a gallery of mostly Yoruba painting and artwork, interspersed with work from Eastern Nigeria and other parts of the continent. While I am in contemplation, I hear a voice at the door. It is Beier. We proceed to an office off the hallway where we could sit across from each other and have a conversation.
He is of a slight, well-kept built, average height, and grey-headed. His seeming frailty is that of a taut bow. I can feel the resilience and energy in his frame. And the eyes are keen as blades and penetrating, yet with a soft and wise film over them. We make small talk before he suddenly lets off a sharp arrow out of his bow: “Why do Nigerians run after foreign gods when they have traditional models aplenty – like the Orisha religion?” It is a sobering thought, which invokes another time, another place and a different mental space.
We enter a pagan time capsule and are shut out of a suffocating Christian evangelical Bayreuth, and Germany. Without actually referring to her he has invoked the person of Susanne Wenger, a good pagan, with his remark; and recalled Oshogbo and their work together there in another life. It occurs to me that he never really left Nigeria spiritually. The essence of Oshogbo and its ambience is recreated in the paintings and artwork collected at Iwalewa Haus; their religious undertones is a form of communion and devotional service to the Osun Oshogbo groove where such artworks are represented in their sacred form in stone sculptures, and where Wenger is still artist in residence and Osun priestess, carrying on in her and his behalf, while he devotes himself to the secular, scholarly, and the deceptively mundane – such as Iwalewa Haus.
A pagan Yoruba religious and social worldview is captured in the compressed axiomatic substantive, ‘Iwalewa’ – literally meaning ‘character is beauty,’ and (in its expanded adjectival form) ‘only those who have character are truly beautiful.’ ‘Iwa,’ character, is a necessity for any true devotee of pagan Yoruba religion, whether it is of the Ifa or Osun variety. In Ifa, this phenomenon is referred to as ‘Iwapele,’ synonymous with ‘iwalewa.’ At a point in our conversation, he emphasises this with an anecdote.
When Beier arrived Ibadan in the early 1950s to take up a teaching appointment at the Extra Mural Studies Department of what was then the University College, according to him, Ibadan was mostly rural. People were so pure-hearted in their pagan devotion, honest, true and beautiful that he never needed to remove the ignition key from his car, the doors of which he also left open sometimes. No one would steal the car. He could leave it at any spot in that town all day and it would be waiting when he got back. Such is the purifying strength of Yoruba religion. The moral he is pointing at is that those were the days of innocence, that with the modern desertion of Yoruba religion, such purity of character, that ‘iwalewa,’ has also deserted the average Yoruba, or Nigerian by extension.
Iwalewa Haus itself, as cultural centre, is then a reminder of the requirements for a true pagan devotee of Yoruba religion; a kind of religious grove, a place of worship, with Beier as its priest if we go by the example of his life. ‘Iwalewa’ as a Yoruba religious axiom and requirement for worship sums up the esoteric dimension of Beier’s cultural work, which, through the beauty of his character, transcends race, language, geographies, gender and all other material and limiting suffocation such as popular modern religion, politics and other kinds of shortness of sight. I sit there as Beier’s vision of pagan ritual and liturgy unfolds. I do not need much convincing from this detribalised, white Yoruba man in Germany wearing a traditional tie-and-dye shirt. The proof is in his life spread out before me like an Ifa divination chain. Through honest, pagan vigour he founds the Mbari-Mbayo Literary and Arts Movements, without which there will be little of modern Nigerian culture to speak of. It is an occasion for rejoicing because Ulli Beier is not dead but has merely joined his pagan Yoruba ancestors.
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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…
Thanks for taking me through this important hermeneutic journey. I hadn’t known the meaning of Iwalewa. What a deep lesson.
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).
The beauty of character. I will hold that in my heart.
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!
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.
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.
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,
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.