Amatoritsero Ede<\/span><\/p>\n (in Memoriam)<\/i><\/p>\n 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 \u2018Iwalewa Haus.\u2019 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018local\u2019 colour. Everyone knows that Bayern is notorious for its annual Oktoberfest \u2013 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\u2013renowned 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Iwalewa Haus is in the \u2018Stadtmitte\u2019 \u2013 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 M\u00fcnzgasse 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 fa\u00e7ade 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cWhy do Nigerians run after foreign gods when they have traditional models aplenty \u2013 like the Orisha religion?\u201d It is a sobering thought, which invokes another time, another place and a different mental space.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 such as Iwalewa Haus.<\/p>\n A pagan Yoruba religious and social worldview is captured in the compressed axiomatic substantive, \u2018Iwalewa\u2019 \u2013 literally meaning \u2018character is beauty,\u2019 and (in its expanded adjectival form) \u2018only those who have character are truly beautiful.\u2019 \u2018Iwa,\u2019 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 \u2018Iwapele,\u2019 synonymous with \u2018iwalewa.\u2019 At a point in our conversation, he emphasises this with an anecdote.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018iwalewa,\u2019 has also deserted the average Yoruba, or Nigerian by extension.<\/p>\n 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. \u2018Iwalewa\u2019 as a Yoruba religious axiom and requirement for worship sums up the esoteric dimension of Beier\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":238,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2062","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2062"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2199,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2062\/revisions\/2199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}