Story of Ulli Beier
Ulli Beier landed in this country on
October 1, 1950 and while the precise date—October 1—may be merely fortuitous
and of no significance, the period around 1950 is of great moment. By then,
Obafemi Awolowo and his Egbe Omo Oduduwa had self-transformed from a cultural
organization into a political party, but even now that the Action Group party
is remembered mainly for its great deeds in the Western Region, it is still
important to remember its cultural origin. Secondly, obviously, Awolowo and his
co-founders of Egbe Omo Oduduwa did not start on a tabula rasa: there had been
a Yoruba cultural renaissance—or an attempt at one—before them.
But
rather than look up to the new Western-educated Yoruba elite who were bent on
modernizing the society from without, Ulli went back to the source of the
cultural fire, as it were, for his own edification, education and illumination.
Hence the first half of my title: ‘Among the orisa’, for it was to the orisa
themselves and their human representatives on earth that Ulli went.
Soon
after settling down on the temporary campus of UCI at Eleyele, Ulli started
exploring his new environment—by foot. Leo Frobenius had given a wonderful
description of the Sango shrine in Agbeni, and it was one of the first places
he asked directions to and visited—only to discover that the shrine was no
more. Within his first few months, he made friends with Dr. Awokoya, whom he
accompanied home to Ijebu one weekend. Once arrived in Ijebu-Ode, Ulli
immediately disconcerted his host by asking to be taken to a babalawo!
Dr.
Awokoya was part of the new Yoruba political elite bent on ‘modernising’ Yoruba
society as fast as possible, and babalawo for him represented the tradition
that the westernizing elite was escaping from. He therefore had great
difficulty acknowledging their continued stubborn existence, and certainly most
uncomfortable actually being seen in the house of one! But so persistent was
this white man with his awkward request that he had to take him to one—with all
the reluctance in the world. Ulli duly met the babalawo and was impressed, not
by whether the man’s divination was accurate or not, but by a combination of
other things: the priest’s modesty, the sheer music of the language in which he
chanted (of which, of course, Ulli did not understand a word!), and by the
simplicity and luminosity of the whole process. That experience was the
beginning of a special relationship with Yoruba religion that Ulli had all his
life.
That
life-long relationship is encapsulated in Ulli’s oft-repeated statement—which
he still repeated to me in 2008 in Sydney: “If I had been born an African,” he
always said, “I would have been born a Yoruba man, and if I had been born a
Yoruba man, I would certainly have been a Sango worshipper.” First in Ilobu,
then in Ede, and finally in Osogbo where he stayed longest, Ulli was friends
with all the baba mogba, all the elegun Sango, and the ordinary worshippers of
this deity. But contrary to the fiery and oftentimes destructive personality of
this deity, Ulli found the actual worship very calm and calming. He attended
every ose Sango (the ‘weekly’ devotion) that he could, contributing his own
modest means to maintaining the shrines. The worship, he said, was always simple,
brief, and soothing. His ‘adoption’ of Sango may have been due partly to the
influence of Oba Laoye, the Timi on the throne in Ede when he settled there,
but I think it was also because he and Sango were ‘kindred spirits’ in certain
respects: for instance, Ulli too had a fiery temper which he kept under control
most of the time, but which occasionally flared into a scorching fire. Also,
the Ede-Ilobu-Osogbo axis was famous for Sango worship right up to the 1960s
and the oba of these towns were great patrons of the religious cults—as well as
of the arts in general. Given all of this, it was almost inevitable that once
he became part of the Duro Ladiipo theater, the story of Sango’s reign as
Alaafin of Oyo would be dramatized by the company, flaming temper, tragic
suicide, deification and all. The production of Oba Koso, on which Duro
Ladiipo, Ulli and Georgina lavished so much theatrical and artistic ingenuity,
was clearly a labour of love for a soul-mate.
And Ulli’s relationship with the
Sango priests and worshippers was really intense. Of the numerous elegun Sango
between Ede at one end and Ila-Orangun at the other in those days, he was
especially close to two: Bandele of Otan-Ayegbaju and Ajofoyinbo of
Ila-Orangun—the ‘oyinbo’ for whom the latter danced being no other than Ulli.
Both were frequent visitors at his 46 Ibokun Road residence in Osogbo, with the
latter in fact staying several days at a stretch. His description of Bandele’s
possession dance was always vivid, and his photographs of Bandele in trance are
some of Ulli’s most memorable pictures. In the two dancers, he always said, he
saw the two sides of Sango: while Bandele came out roaring and danced very
energetically to bata, Ajofoyinbo’s dance was always gentle and sinuous,
thereby portraying the suffering, tragic Sango.
But
it was not Sango alone that Ulli felt close to among the Yoruba deities. Of the
over seven hundred photographs that he took and lovingly preserved (the
negatives and slides of which are now in the archive of CBCIU Osogbo), more
than one hundred are of the different Yoruba deities—their icons, priestesses,
priests and festivals. There is a particularly memorable one of the priestess
of Sonponna in Ilobu. The face of the priestess, so vividly captured in the
picture, is actually the ‘face’ of that deity of suffering for, contrary to
popular conception, Ulli believes that Sonponna, though the deity of small-pox,
is more the Yoruba embodiment of the inescapability of suffering—physical and
emotional—in this life, and how to cope with it. Evident in these photographs
are not just the eyes of a good photographer, but a person who loved and
respected the people he photographed. Indeed, Ulli said several times that he
never could photograph or interview his subjects the first time he met them; he
always needed to come back several times and get thoroughly acquainted with
them before he could start intruding his camera on them.
Next
in number to the photographs of the deities are those of Yoruba oba,
particularly those of his friends, mentors and teachers: Timi Laoye of Ede; Oba
Moses Oyinlola of Okuku; Oba Adenle, the Ataoja of Osogbo; Oba Adegoriola of
Ikere-Ekiti; and a few of Ooni Aderemi. This of course was not surprising, for
Yoruba oba in those days were truly the custodians of culture. While Oba Moses
Oyinlola, though a Christian, celebrated all the festivals of his town with
great gusto and conviction, Timi Laoye, an accomplished dundun drummer for whom
Ulli arranged a tour of Europe, took pains to explain the deeper and more arcane
aspects of the culture to Ulli—he even sponsored Ulli into the ogboni society.
Lack of time would not allow me to go on and on about this aspect of Ulli’s
life in Yoruba society, but what is important to stress here is that, in a way,
Ulli led two parallel lives in Yoruba society.
There is the life of Mbari Club
Ibadan and Osogbo Art Movement (which really was Georgina’s baby, Ulli being no
artist though a lover of art—“From childhood,” he said, “I could never sleep in
a room without at least one work of art hanging on a wall”) that everybody
knows, which is also the life of all his equally famous writings, magazines and
numerous other publications, especially the anthologies of Yoruba poetry and of
modern African poetry in English. But deeper than all of that, and of more
value to Ulli personally, is the other life: the full immersion in the life of
Yoruba oba institution, in the Yoruba orisa tradition and its variety of
priests and festivals and poetry, and in the lives of ordinary people (both in
Ilobu and Ede, he lived right in the market place).
It
was among the traditional Yoruba intellectuals that Ulli Beier felt truly at
home, and that his ever restless spirit found rest, nourishment and
fulfillment. He kept the two parallel lives strictly separate for most of the
time; but perhaps they met once—in the theatres of his two great friends Duro
Ladiipo and Kola Ogunmola. His collaboration with the former in the production
of Oba Koso is well-known, but not so well-known is the fact that it was Ulli
who translated Hugo Hoffmansthal’s Everyman for Duro’s company; Eda, the
resultant Yoruba adaptation, remains Duro’s next most popular play. That Ulli
chose this medieval play to translate with Duro and put it on his stage showed
how observant he was of his adopted society: after more than a decade living in
it, he was beginning to see how crass materialism and sheer hedonism were
creeping into the society.
There
is no space here to give a detailed account of his equally deep friendship and
association with Kola Ogunmola, so suffice it to just mention that he played a
decisive role in getting foreign grant for Ogunmola’s Yoruba stage adaption of
Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard, a work in the realization of which the
theatre arts department at Ibadan and the artist Demas Nwoko (a member of Mbari
Club) also played crucial roles.
In
view of all this, though it may sound like nitpicking to do so, I still must
correct the popular impression that Ulli was ‘a scholar of Yoruba culture’ in
the sense in which we understand that term. Ulli came more or less as a refugee
from Europe and found welcoming arms among the Yoruba people who also happened
to have a very great culture at that point in time, and who were extremely
tolerant. This was the life he met in 1950 and lived for almost a decade. But
by the end of the 1950s, Ulli began to discern that the great culture was
already declining fast: each passing year saw fewer and fewer followers and
spectators at the festivals and ose Sango or that of any other deity. The combined
forces of colonialism, western-style education, Christianity and Islam, all
together termed olaju in Yoruba(wrongly, in my view), were beginning to take
their toll. These forces were too great to be resisted by any one, least of all
Ulli. But their strength, he thought, could in fact be used to modernize the
culture from within. This thinking motivated the other life—the life of Mbari,
Mbari Mbayo, and of publications like the magazines Odu and Black Orpheus.
This
was at home here in Nigeria where all that Ulli desired to do was to give
something back to a culture that gave him so much. Abroad, all his efforts,
both then and subsequently in Papua New-Guinea and in Bayreuth (as first
Director of Iwalewa Haus), as well as in Sydney, Australia was to let others
see, know and appreciate what he found in that culture.
Ulli Beier’s literary productions
are more or less well-known: the excellent anthology of Yoruba poetry and, the
no less pioneering anthology of modern African poetry in English which he did
with Gerald Moore; another anthology of essays on modern African literature;
plus the founding, editing and publishing of Black Orpheus and Odu, both of
which, we now know, he did virtually alone (otherwise, how come the two
journals died the moment he left?)
Less
well-known, however, are the numerous essays he wrote and published in
magazines and little journals all over the world, all of them specifically on
Yoruba culture, society and traditions. It is on these I wish to concentrate in
this last part of my paper. But again, I need to preface that overview of the
essays with a few remarks.
Writing
about any aspect of Ulli Beier’s life-long relationship with Yoruba society, I
have come to conclude, is not an easy task at all. To start with, that
relationship was as multifaceted and multilayered as it was intense and unique.
Then, it was a relationship of emotional involvement in which he viewed his own
cultural identity as that of a Yoruba man.
The
well-informed books and essays he wrote about several aspects of the society
were only by-products of his immersion in the culture at the higher level of
Yoruba kingship institution, Yoruba traditional religion and its festivals. The
involvement at this level meant that he never could write about these things
with the objectivity of a disinterested academic: all his writings were one
long and untiring advocacy for the society he had made his own by choice. So
this presents anybody writing about him and his writings a huge problem -
especially if that person happens to be Yoruba: how do you write about a man
who wrote so glowingly, and with such obvious conviction and passion, about
your own society - how do you write about such a man without descending into
hagiography? This is a particularly important question if one considers that
our missionary-colonial Western-style education was (and remains) designed to
lead us away from our society and culture and here was a man who took it upon
himself to show us some things that could lead us back. And at any rate, since
he was not a ‘scholar of Yoruba culture society’ (a term he himself always
quick to reject), it means that his writings were not for ‘fellow scholars’
and, indeed, as will be seen presently, he neglected all the rules of scholarly
writing. His writings, rather, though well-informed and even researched, were
for the information, education and edification of the general reader.
But first, a brief discussion of the
circumstances surrounding the writings. Ulli Beier was an intellectual, but a
non-academic in the conventional usage of that term. In this wise, he might
simply be described as a non-academic intellectual. Throughout his active
years, he chose to remain at the margins of whichever university he found
himself working in. He remained a generalist who wrote only on what interested
him—and he was interested in everything Yoruba. He was also a non-conformist in
what he wrote and how he wrote them. It was this freedom from academic
conventions that allowed him to write about Yoruba society the way he did. Here
was a man who did not come to study the society but adopted it as his own while
his marginal position gave him the freedom to write about it as an interested
insider.
Ulli
Beier came to Nigeria with a selective cultural baggage: while thoroughly
disenchanted with Europe and rejecting many things European, he nevertheless
was a great lover of baroque music; his father had taken him to all the great
museums in Berlin, Paris and other European capitals, and so he was deeply
steeped in the ancient cultures of the Near-East; he was also conversant with
much of contemporary European literature, art and theatre. But once he settled
down and, as it were, fell in love with and adopted Yoruba society as his own,
he underwent a permanent transformation, the stages of which can be outlined as
follows: from the mono-perspective of an outsider to the dual perspective of an
insider-outsider (an insider who never lost the outsider ways he brought in—he
never ‘went native’), to that of an insider who latter acquired multiple perspectives,
but with the Yoruba insider-perspective as the measure of all others.
Thus,
although very familiar with the culture of his native Germany, and although he
had more than passing familiarity with those of India and Papua New Guinea and
Aborigines of Australia, it was from the perspective of his Yoruba cultural
identity that he gauged them all. His initial marginal, insider-outsider
position in Yoruba society allowed him to see Yoruba society differently: to
value things in it that the natives themselves no longer valued, to draw his
Yoruba readers’ attention to, and promote, things that they wrote off as of
little or no consequence, and to not take for granted practices and traditions
that his friends thought would always be there. He of course could not arrest
the changes that were taking place, but he could at least write about those
things that were being overtaken as a witness. In other words, his motivations
were almost the exact opposite of those of the normal academic.
The sheer quantity of Ulli Beier’s
scholarly writings is truly prodigious—and equally breathtakingly varied. As
far as Yoruba society alone is concerned, he wrote on virtually every aspect of
it. He wrote on Yoruba myths and their psychological significance; on Yoruba
deities and their shrines; on Yoruba attitude to dogs and dog magic; on Yoruba
kings and their festivals; on D.O. Fagunwa’s novels; on the difficulties of
translating Yoruba poetry into English; on Yoruba sculpture; on electioneering
campaigns and campaign songs; on children’s songs and toys; on Yoruba textile
production; and on and on. One characteristic of the essays is that of the
passionate belief, till the end of his life, in the values and ethos of the
culture, especially in its capacity to generate change and growth from within.
Another is that all came out of just plain curiosity and empathy, and all are
suffused in the light touch of geniality and gentle humour.
The
essays span a period of about 30 years, most of them being written between the
early 1950s and the mid-1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, and in
Bayreuth, Germany, Ulli Beier continued his work on the society by engaging in
long, ruminative, retrospective and searching dialogues with Yoruba
intellectuals like Wole Soyinka, Biodun Jeyifo, Rowland Abiodun, Sophie Oluwole
and others. As Director of Iwalewa-Haus of the University of Bayreuth, he also
facilitated artist-in-residence visits for some of the original Osogbo artists,
when he encouraged them to write their autobiographies. In other words, a kind
of socio-cultural account of how Yoruba society has changed between 1950 and
the 1990s can be gleaned from his writings alone! His essays constitute an
account of a man who saw, learnt and did much, and who also witnessed changes
much more drastic than anybody could ever have imagined between 1950 and, say,
1980. There may be a tinge of romanticization in some of his essays, but there
is no indulgence in sentimentalism and nostalgia in them.
Ulli
Beier’s singular cultural base, Yoruba society, gave him an emotional and
ethical perspective from which he continued to approach and judge all other
societies, as well as personal engagements with them. He thereby proved that
the ethnic can be universal—that in fact, there is something universalistic in Yoruba
culture, as another scholar of the society, J. Munoz, has argued in a book, and
as Yoruba religion in the new world is tending towards now in the second decade
of the 21st C. In this matter of the potentials of Yoruba culture as a
‘universal culture’ it was in the area of music that he made his greatest
efforts. In Germany, performance by Yoruba dundun and bata musicians in one of
the ‘cathedrals’ of German classical music was an annual ritual. He got them to
play with musicians from countries like Norway, the USA, Germany, Indonesia,
Egypt and India in yearly public festivals (to which he also brought musicians
from Senegal and The Gambia). It is also there in his critical essays on
Leopold Sedar Senghor and Richard Wright.
Because Ulli Beier’s cultural
integration into Yoruba society was not among the then emerging
Western-style-educated elite but among those who still embodied it in their
daily practices, it is also a different kind of intellectual perspective. In
this, he was lucky, for Yoruba culture, always stronger in orthopraxis than in
orthodoxy and doctrine, provided him much food for intellectual contemplation
on its verbal arts, religion and institutions.
The
essays written in the 1950s and 1960s reflect the political and intellectual
climate of the period. The Yoruba cultural nationalism that had started so
optimistically toward the end of the 19th C had all but petered out; Yoruba
historiography too had been reduced to rival local historiographies in which
individuals from different Yoruba sub-ethnic groups and towns produced
pamphlets meant to redress the omissions or ‘wrong’ accounts given by Rev.
Samuel Johnson in his monumental work. In this narrow-minded politicization of
Yoruba history Ulli Beier intervened with his critical essay “Before Oduduwa,”
and the result was a renewed general interest in the pre-colonial periods,
followed by more vigorous scholarship in them.
In
several of his essays Ulli Beier also took a different tack in attacking the
subtle but more powerful erosion of the African’s belief in himself, in his
history and culture, that Islam and then Christianity and Colonialism had
wrought. Indeed, precisely because these new religions and politico-cultural
realities created a new elite in whose interest it was to naturalize and
promote them, their more deleterious effects were glossed over while the
‘evils’ of the indigenous religious system were exaggerated. Ulli Beier did not
of course announce his counter-project in the essays dealing with this aspect,
but simply pointed to what materials were available and where to look, and how
they could be used in the much-needed projects of historical reconstruction and
cultural self-renewal. The essays on Oduduwa, on Yoruba myths and their
possible psychological use attest to this counter-project of his.
Odu,
the journal which he founded and edited, was a cultural journal specifically
devoted to Yoruba studies and meant for a Yoruba audience. The numerous essays
he published in it were accordingly not only about that society but also addressed
to it. As the essays were not meant for the A&P (Appointments and
Promotions Board) of the university, they are characterized by a semi-informal
style and intimate tone: here was one Yoruba man addressing other Yoruba people
with the aim of getting them to ‘do something’. Odu also published articles and
poems in Yoruba—this at a time when the craving for English was already on, and
to ‘speak vernacular’ in schools was a punishable offence.
As
many and varied in subject as Ulli Beier’s essays are, there are unities in
them: unity of subject; unity in the personality of the author. Recurrent in
all of them is a personal tone (which I have already mentioned): the warm,
friendly tone of an insider sharing his knowledge, experiences and encounters
with other insiders. The personal pronoun with which he most often addresses
his reader also discloses a personality that just wants to satisfy the
curiosity and hunger to know the society whose every aspect so deeply
fascinates him—and to share that knowledge with others. For instance, only a
person so deeply fascinated could have written two articles on Yoruba people
and their dogs: “Yoruba Attitude to Dogs” and “Dog Magic of Yoruba
Hunters,” or for that matter, “Children in Yoruba Society”.
Finally,
there is what I would call Ulli Beier’s ‘humanism’. Implied by this term is
also that idea of the Renaissance Humanism, for the breadth and interests of
Ulli Beier were wide indeed. But, more appositely, what is meant by it here is
his deep and abiding interest in human beings: human beings as distinctive
personalities and individuals, rather than human beings in the abstract. If the
essays reveal the personality of Ulli Beier, that is because they say much
about the individuals who embodied or shouldered the burdens of the
institutions and traditions he wrote about. Who these individuals are is of as
much interest to him as the traditions, institutions and practices that are the
subjects of the essays, be they Yoruba oba, priests and priestesses of the
various orisa, or children. The numerous photographs he took also testify to
this. He could, for instance, have written academic papers on the Yoruba
Travelling Theatre based on his intimate connection with Duro Ladiipo and Kola
Ogunmola, or on the Osogbo Art Movement. He chose, instead, to write devotional
memoirs on the two. It is perhaps this interest in human beings as persons,
more than anything else, that makes his essays very readable narratives and not
grand theories or impersonal analyses.
Any sustained consideration of Ulli
Beier’s activities and essays is bound, at some point, to be confronted with a
question: of what use are ‘studies’ if they cannot add to or improve the
cultural, social, political and even economic life of the society or people so
studied? The question, indeed, is almost inevitable, for here is a man who did
not come to study anything, but whose practical contributions to the society
have been so seminal. Also, the question forces itself on us because the
concrete contributions for which Ulli Beier is justly famous contrast so
starkly with whatever routine academic studies in Africa have been able to
achieve—especially by African scholars themselves in the area of culture. To
raise the question is to portray Ulli Beier in a better light, so it must be
quickly noted, perhaps, that he had a paradoxical advantage: he came to Nigeria
equipped only with a B.A. in English Literature and a Diploma in Linguistics—in
short, not yet a specialist in any field, his mind was still open to all
things. But the reason why he took the Diploma course in fact explains those
later concrete achievements better: so as to be better able to teach children
with speech handicaps in London (he would, in Nigeria in the early 1950s, try
to use art as therapy for mentally-disturbed patients at Aro Mental Hospital,
Abeokuta). In other words, from early in life, he had always wanted to put
whatever academic knowledge he acquired to practical use.
Academic
studies ‘for its own sake’ in any particular field of course has an illustrious
history in the West, for even scientists whose discoveries lead to
technological inventions, advances or improvements do not start with such
practical use in mind, no matter how vague. In the West, however, the
university is a cultural institution fully integrated not only into other
cultural institutions, but also into the social, political and economic ones.
But even then, different Western nations have, from the beginning of the
Renaissance, found the need to create separate agencies for the development of
the arts: art schools, music schools, acting and dance schools, etc.
Universities may do critical studies of the arts, but the discovering and
nurturing of talents are left to such agencies. Ulli Beier quickly found that
the colonial university he came to in 1950 was by its very constitution hostile
to native culture in all its forms. Hence the founding of Mbari Club, Ibadan
(plus its organ Black Orpheus), the organizing of a Yoruba conference, the
founding of Mbari Mbayo in Osogbo and the active support for Duro Ladiipo and
Kola Ogunmola and, finally, the founding of Osogbo Art movement and the
nurturing of the young artists who constituted the movement.
It
may be as a result of retrospection long after these events that Ulli said that
one motivation for these activities was the desire to give something back to a
culture and society that was giving him so much. I personally do not think so,
and, in any case, the lesson is there for us all to learn: in the present state
of both our culture, doing studies alone will never do; we need to also be
putting something back. Ulli Beier’s advocacy essays constituted another way of
putting something back.
What
Ulli Beier and the Yoruba cultural nationalists before him were embarking upon
was a gradual secularization of Yoruba culture in all its aspects—and this is
why ‘renaissance’, rather than ‘revival’, is a more suitable term. But now the
wheel seems to have turned full circle, for the trend now is in the opposite
direction: the pervasiveness of religion, especially Christianity in our
society, has meant giving all the orisa and what they stood for such horrible
names as are alien to their nature.
The
ethical, philosophical and aesthetic essences embodied by these orisa which the
cultural nationalists and Ulli Beier were trying to distil and make available
to everyone, have been abandoned, together with the distinct cultural identity
that they gave Yoruba people. Even our language, on which the early
nationalists fought and won a big battle against the missionaries around 1893,
will soon become a threatened language. While ‘culture’ is on every one’s lips,
there has been a narrowing and constricting of the term—and, worst of all, a
separation and compartmentalization of it. We have moved from names like
Esubiyi and Agbebi to horrid contraptions like Jesubiyi, Peculiar, Precious,
Jesunifemi and Jesuferanmi. What is in a name? you might ask. If Ulli were
here, we might ask him: he, after all, was the ultimate signifying monkey who
signified on names like Akanji Arabagbalu and, most culturally enigmatic of
all, Obotunde Ijimere.
Extracted from a Speech written by
Prof. Wole Ogundele.
