Omoluabi: Ulli Beier, Yoruba society and culture 3927510793

Table of contents :
Cover
Imprint
Half title
Acknowledgements
Contents
Foreword by Wole Soyinka
Ulli Beier: Bio-Data
I. Introduction: Onijo pade onilu — The dancer meets the drummer
II. "Ona l’egbon" — The road is the senior brother
III. Osogbon'ile aro — Priests, kings and friends
IV. Ibadan dun — Black Orpheus and Mbari Club
V. Osogbo oroki — More friends, 'furious energies' and fun
VI. Iwalewa — Ife, 1971-1974; Bayreuth, 1981-1996
VII. The anxiety of image — Responses and receptions
VIII. Conclusion: Ori inu — In search of the real Ulli
Bibliography
Appendix
Notes on the photographs
Glossary of Yoruba phrases and words

Citation preview

WOLE OGUNDELE

OMOLUABI ULLI BEIER, YORUBA SOCIETY AND CULTURE X

BAYREUTH AFRICAN STUDIES 66

BAYREUTH African Studies Series

Publisher/Editor: Eckhard Breitinger Bayreuth University D-95440 Bayreuth Germany /R.F.A www. breitinger.org

This book is copyright. No part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnd.ddb.de

Price per copy: EUR 22.95 (plus postage)

ISBN 3-927510-79-3 ISSN 0178-0034 © 2003 Wole Ogundele © 2003 Cover design: Typo-Grafik Bayreuth, based on a photograph by Ulli Beier (Sango shrine in Ilobu with woodcarvings by Maku). © All photos by Ulli Beier except stated otherwise. Printed by D. Grabner, D- 96146 Altendorf

Wole Ogundele

OMOLUABI ULLI BEIER, YORUBA SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Bayreuth African Studies 66

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The list of persons and institutions to whom I owe a huge debt of gratitude for this book is long, but I can only mention a few of them here. The first

person to be mentioned has to be Professor 'Biodun Jeyifo. On one long winter night at his home in Ithaca when we had our usual rambling, endless

conversation, he casually mentioned one small, little-known but revealing contribution of Ulli Beier's to Europhone Nigerian literature. That rather ‘guarded secret’ set me wondering what kind of man Ulli Beier was and I shall remain for ever grateful for it. When about two years later the first

draft was completed, reading

through

he increased my

it, giving

invaluable

debt to him by enthusiastically

criticisms

and

contributing

fresh

ideas. When the work was just picking up, Professors Rowland Abiodun,

Niyi Osundare and Olu Obafemi found time out of their busy schedules to read the available draft chapters, offer suggestions and generally impress upon me the necessity of completing and publishing the work. Niy1 Osundare read them with the eye of a poet and stylistician; he raised

provocative questions and suggested ways of improving it. Later, Rowland

Abiodun facilitated the 'enabling atmosphere and means' for completing it.

The work could never have been completed so soon without the active encouragement of these three friends.

I also thank all members of the Nigerian community in Bayreuth — Femi and Funmi

Abodunrin,

Akin

Omoyajowo,

Afe Adogame,

Paul Onovoh,

Andrew Haruna — and its extended-family members, Richard and Bridget Kuba, Thorolf Lipp, Julia Loytved, Rick Taylor, Ulli Bauer and Tunji Beier. They all made Bayreuth such a cosy place.

Prof. Eckhard Breitinger and Prof. Janos Riesz, both of the University of Bayreuth, were very enthusiastic supporters who facilitated my SFB appointments in 1995 and 1996; they also encouraged me to complete the first draft before Ulli Beier left Germany. Prof. Breitinger read the 'raw data' and made useful suggestions as to how to transform them. I am extremely grateful to both. Gabriele Weisser read the final draft with the painstaking care of a friend, editor and scholar.

The Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) gave me the initial grant to start this work and I thank that organization for its generosity. I am also grateful to the SFB, University of Bayreuth, for taking over where DAAD had to stop in 1995, and for willingly renewing my sponsorship for another three months in 1996. Amherst College, USA, gave me the Copeland Fellowship, which not only enabled me to finish it, but also placed me within easy communication reach with Ulli Beier and my publisher. The original idea would have died at conception without the willing cooperation and involvement of Ulli Beier. A reticent man who does not see why people should waste their time reading about him, he nevertheless willingly agreed to tell his story once he believed in me and in the value of the project. Once he did, his enthusiasm equalled mine and the original idea assumed ever greater dimensions. His cooperation was unstinting even while giving me all the freedom I needed to write the story according to my own lights. All these 'gifts' at once humbled and energized me. This book 1s a testimony to them; I hope it also goes some way to justify them. Mainly those of the sensitive artist that she is, Georgina Beier's equally fundamental and diverse inputs into the project complement Ulli's in more ways than any acknowledgement page can reflect. To both of them all I can say here is: ki e pe fun wa. Finally, I thank Moji, Femi, Wumi and Segun for so cheerfully enduring the many months of absence. This book is dedicated to my grandmother, whose Yoruba world is also Ulli's.

CONTENTS Foreword by Wole Soyinka

7

Ulli Beier: Bio-Data

11

Chapter I Introduction: Onijo pade onilu - The dancer meets the drummer

15

Chapter II "Ona l’egbon" - The road is the senior brother

31

Chapter ITI

Osogbon'ile aro - Priests, kings and friends Chapter IV

Ibadan dun - Black Orpheus and Mbari Club

59 97

Chapter V

Osogbo oroki - More friends, 'furious energies' and fun

127

Chapter VI Iwalewa - Ife, 1971-1974; Bayreuth, 1981-1996

183

Chapter VII The anxiety of image - Responses and receptions

225

Chapter VIII

Conclusion: Ori inu - In search of the real Ulli

253

Bibliography

267

Appendix

271

Notes on the photographs

29]

Glossary of Yoruba phrases and words

299

FOREWORD BY WOLE SOYINKA

My most recent reunions with the remarkable subject of this book, Ulli Beier, cannot be said to have been very happy ones. In the very sparse lines that age has etched on his face, surmounted by an undiminished shock of hair, now white, one reads the anguished history of a people that he adopted as his, and from which he yet cannot, not even will ever detach himself. His elaborate plans for retirement into a place he calls home, to which he is evidently viscerally enmeshed, have been repeatedly thwarted — either by some petty conniving from whose who have benefitted most

from, indeed shamelessly exploited his presence or, more profoundly, by

the desecration of the land, and the dehumanisation of its people by a breed with which Ulli has absolutely no patience — the military. Ulli's affair with Nigeria was love at first encounter. There are not many people who breathe and live culture, and perhaps even Ulli was unaware at the time that he belonged to that minority breed — he would find this out on his first encounter with Yoruba culture especially, but also with other cultures such as the Igbo and the Ibibio, wherever, in fact, art and life are strongly intertwined, where the former does not exist merely as the

contents of museums and galleries. Lodged within such a perception of the unity of both art and life is of course a love of and respect of the environment, and a passion to defend it from social incontinence,

commercial greed or simply — thoughtlessness. Ulli's life saga (and that of

his former wife, the artist Susanne Wenger) are narrated in the near-pristine preserves that owe their continuing existence to his combative forays in their defence.

It is as much the thought — and often hard, depressing news — of the fate of

such environments, as the increasing evidence of the spiritual pauperisation of his adopted society that casts a blight on Ulli's memory. The triumphs, all masterfully captured in this work, are more than sufficient for a lifetime contemplation in contentment — the numerous talents that he brought to light from obscurity, the confidence that he imparted to marginalized communities, his innovations in adult education practices, his productive

forays into citadels of bureaucracy, ineptitude and calloused traditions, publications galore, which continue till today, as he collars one former collaborator after another to exchange and record, for posterity, his discoveries, his moments of illumination, and map both upward and downward trajectories of cultures that had given meaning and substance to his way of life. Despite the energy with which he pursues that last occupation, however, despite the excitement in his voice as he recalls, analyses and contextualises this or that facet of his perceptions, despite the renewed enthusiasm that he imparts to his interlocutors, on the public podium, at home, or in a café across a recording machine, the ultimate sense one obtains is that of a man who sees and mourns the wanton waste of a treasure-house that belongs to an unappreciative community. Does he feel the same about Papua New Guinea where he also sojourned, and whose unique arts and culture he also exposed to the world? I visited him at his home in Port Moresby. He appeared at peace with himself, had seemingly carved out a new haven, was persuasively ‘at home' and industrious as ever, but now, with the changes that time and politics have wrought in that (to us) remote corner of the world, I wonder what Ulh Beier's feelings must be. It is true — and he is the first to admit this — that he never really attained the same depth of empathy and belonging that the Yoruba world induced in him, but he certainly was more at home in PNG than he appeared to be in Bayreuth University, where he overcame the usual obstacles to establish IWALEWA-Haus, his Yoruba ‘home from home'. But that home was not home for him alone, but for the Osogbo and other artists — traditional, contemporary or simply original — whom he brought over to challenge and expand the artistic assumptions of his new academic/community base. Still, Papua corresponded to quite a tolerable degree to whatever Ulli sought out of existence, and Papua after Ulli's departure was most emphatically not the islands they were before the advent of the 'Ulli phenomenon’. One thing was certain nonetheless: Ulli Beier could not wait to return to his real home among the Yoruba, and when the opportunity came, he was more than ready. Was it a wise decision to return? Wole Ogundele tackles that issue with commendable sensitivity, as he indeed tackles some of the controversial decisions and ventures of Ulli Beier.

Indeed, without being fulsome or uncritical, Ogundele has captured for us the essence of the wanderer who came, saw, and was conquered, whose approach to life rescued the word "expatriate" from its usual negative connotations — privileged, alienated, presumptuous and condescending.

Many Nigerians will be amazed at the revelations in this book, amazed to learn

of the

life-beneath-appearances

of a culture

that was

trotted

out

routinely during arts festivals, Independence Day celebrations, visits of dignitaries (military and civilian) and other superficies of a robust culture that is still lived today, despite multi-directional assaults, surprised to learn that an "expatriate" plumbed the depths of this culture, fought battles on its behalf, and identified with its travails. Many others, however, fortunately, would regard this as perfectly normal, something to be expected from the discerning. Among the latter are those who responded and collaborated, both creatively and administratively — in colonial and immediately postcolonial nations, the latter was no mean achivement — with the Ulli invasion — a university here, a crowned head and chiefs there — selfrealising artists all over the place. For the one, Ogundele's book will be an act of education, for the other, a feat of celebration. And with the certainty that no conjunction of circumstances can ever repeat itself so precisely as to produce the same phenomenon, it is clear that Nigeria will never know

another Ulli Beier. Which comes to the same as saying: while we still can — let us celebrate!

ULLI BEIER: BIO-DATA 1922:

born in Glowitz, Germany

1925:

family moves to Berlin; father a doctor and distinguished musician who played chamber music and in various orchestras

1933:

family emigrates to Palestine; father's money confiscated by the Nazis

1938:

Ulli leaves school to start career as professional show jumper and riding teacher

1939:

passes London Matriculation as a self-taught external student

1940:

internment by the British as "enemy alien" after Italy enters the war

1941:

released to study Archaeology at American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem; does some excavations with Professor Fisher

1941:

1941-1947:

re-interned death

after 9 months,

upon

internment

as

by

enemy

alien;

Professor Fisher's

turns,

works

in barb

sudden

wire-

enclosed camp as stable boy milking 24 cows a day by hand, as gardener tending 3000 rose bushes; prepares for and passes B.A. General (English, German, History) of London University as self-taught external student; teaches and prepares 6 young German fellow internees for London Matriculation 1948:

avoids deportation to Australia in December by gaining entrance to University College, London, to read Diploma in Phonetics (only course open to foreigners)

1948-1950:

teaches handicapped and delinquent children in Special Schools of the London County Council, and children with heart and lung diseases in the Open Air School

1949-1950:

works out and teaches Evening Course in German Phonetics at University College, London

1950:

takes

up

University

appointment College,

as

Junior

Ibadan,

Lecturer

Nigeria,

in

in

Phonetics,

October;

starts

voluntary Extramural teaching once a week in Abeokuta 1951:

transfers to Extramural Studies Department and becomes Tutor for Western Nigeria; moves from Ibadan to Ede

1954:

moves

from

Ede

to Ilobu;

Summer

Conference

on

Yoruba

Culture; the magazıne Odu founded 1957:

Black Orpheus founded

1958:

moves from Ilobu to Osogbo

1961:

MBARI Club Ibadan founded; beginnings of the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company

1962:

MBARI MBAYO Club Osogbo founded

1966:

first and only promotion Associate Professor

1966:

leaves Nigeria in December

1967:

first son, Tokunbo Sebastian, born in London

1970:

second son, Olatunji Akanmu, born in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

1967-1971:

Senior Lecturer, University of Papua New Guinea; designs and starts courses in New English Literatures

1971-1974:

returns to Nigeria as Research Professor and Director, Institute of African Studies, University of Ife

1974-1978:

returns to Papua New Guinea as Research Professor Director, Institute of Papua New Guinean Studies

12

by the University

of Ibadan,

to

and

1978-1981:

famıly moves to Sydney, Australia; Ulli does freelance writing (book reviews and lectures)

1980:

Guest Professorship at the University of Mainz, Germany; Neue Kunst in Afrika exhibition organized; exhibition brought to Bayreuth

1981-1984:

retums to Germany as first Director of IWALEWA-Haus (founded in November 1981), University of Bayreuth

1984-1989:

returns to Sydney, Australia; freelance MIGILA House, a private cultural centre

1989-1996:

Director of IWALEWA-Haus, University of Bayreuth

1997-

returns to Sydney, freelance writing; revives MIGILA House; works on organizing his archive

writing;

founded

13

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ONIJO PADE ONILU - THE DANCER

MEETS THE DRUMMER

To introduce Ulli Beier is redundant. I will pay him tribute instead. Taban Lo Liyong Humanistic

discourse

has

which is peculiarly Western. Margaret Thompson Drewal

been

unable

to transcend objectivism,

I suppose that every first time author, especially of an academic work, does not plan to write a book originally. There is the nucleus of a subject, or an idea, which interests him very much, and which he pursues until the material grows out of hand and takes over. At that point the soon-to-be

author realizes that nothing but a book form will do for his subject. In such

a case, the eventual result, which is the book, may be a puzzle to the writer because he hardly can define it.

This work is such a hypothetical one, for whatever else might have been projected from the beginning, it was not a book. I did not know the subject at all, except remotely through some of his writings, and had only a vague, starting idea of the materials: the subject was somebody — a very remarkable somebody — who lived in Osogbo sometime ago and took the

impossibly ridiculous Yoruba 'pen name' Obotunde Ijimere; his reported

exploits had also bestowed on him a semi-legendary status. And like all legendary tales, a lot of the stories about him were either downright wrong, exaggerated or simply fictitious. I knew only these and no more. I was to discover, as the work progressed, that the truths about the subject (as a

person) plus his activities, were, if not as sensational as the travellers’ tales spread them over years, more interesting and of infinitely greater value. But I could not have known this at the beginning; nor could I have known

where the materials would lead, what form they would take when finally shaped into a coherent whole. The subject is Ulli Beier and the materials are his experiences of Nigeria (and especially Yoruba society) from 1950 till date, and that society's

experience of him. Both have unities and integrities of their own, separately and together; neither has to be reinvented in this author's mind, nor even drastically tampered with by way of radical (re)interpretations or theorizing. Ulli Beier exists as a human being; the things he did (and still does) exist as historical facts. Indeed, both together constitute the stuff of which bestselling autobiographies are made. As that autobiography is not yet forthcoming, the reader of this book has a right, therefore, to expect the next best thing — a complete biographical account. But although this book is biographical, ıt ıs not a life of Ulli Beier. It is not a full, detailed account of his life, though I hope it approaches a complete personality portrait. Perhaps a brief contextual background of its genesis may explain its modest scope as well as the seeming paradox of the book being biographical without being a biography. It was my accidental fortune (for the purposes of thıs book) that, being too young and far away from where he lived in those days in the Nigeria of the 1950s and early 1960s, I did not know Ulli Beier in person or by name, knew nothing at all about his activities, perhaps never even saw him at a distance, and heard of him only by proxy without knowing who the oyinbo in question was, or what he had done to deserve the reference to him. In later years I got to know him by name, came across more and more of his writings, and heard snippets of information about his life in Osogbo and Ibadan, all in a casual and random manner. When finally I met him therefore, I could not have presumed to want to write his biography. Being a student of literature now very much interested in cultural studies (and especially the culture of my own society), I was motivated to approach him for insights into Yoruba society; for a firsthand account of those events that happened in Ibadan and Osogbo in the 1950s and 1960s — the period of "African cultural awakening", as Peter Benson has called it (see chapter IV), and definitely of a short-lived Yoruba cultural renaissance. Most important of all, I wanted to know what motivated him. As the gains of that brief renaissance dissipated, as the period receded further into the past, the figure of Ulli Beier became iconic.

Still, even after listening to him for weeks and months and knowing the details,

16

not just of those

public

events,

but also

of his deep

personal

commitments, convictions as well as public interactions with the bearers and transmitters of Yoruba culture, the idea of a full-blown biography was out of the question. This book says very little about his childhood, youth and adulthood — not much, in short, about his personal life prior to his coming

to Nigeria

in 1950,

and even

less about his private life. Yet it

fulfills two essential purposes of biography: it 'dis/covers' and narrates the subject's life-myth; at the same time, it demythologizes him in the sense that it "corrects, restates or reinterprets false and distorted accounts" (Nadel 1984; p.176) of him. For want of a better categorization, this work might just be called a cultural biography. It combines some elements of a life with a highly selective

history of a period, and with the literary-cultural history of that period in Nigeria. It also describes certain Yoruba rituals and performances as witnessed and participated in by Ulli Beier. Most important of all, it describes his very close interactions with friends: kings, priests, writers, dramatists, artists, professors, politicians, asylum inmates, housemaids, houseboys, petrol station attendants, artisans, street-dancers, etc. Although

the concentration is on Nigeria and Yoruba society specifically, the account

of his activities given here is not — could not be — restricted to Yoruba society, nor even to the larger state Nigeria. Indeed, his subsequent peregrinations and works in other parts of the world highlight and strengthen that primary connection: like the snail which carries its house

along wherever it goes, Ulli Beier has carried his Yoruba influence with him everywhere else. Thus, although this narrative moves between four continents and spans more than five decades, there is one motif that runs

through it all: the identity of one man plus the quiet but remarkable deeds emanating from that uncommon identity.

Those deeds and achievements form an engrossing story in themselves, but they also prompt a series of more fundamental questions: what manner of

man is this? Why did he do the things he did? Was it something in him or something in the society and people he met, or a combination of the two? This book does not answer those questions in the direct intellectual manner of analysing the man and his activities, or uncovering hidden motives and psychological repressions and sublimations. It does not, in the manner of New Historicism, Poststructuralism, or any of the other current theories of the postmodern age, deconstruct either the man or the activities connected 17

with him, in search of silences, ruptures, gaps, lacunae, deferred or deeper meanings. Deeper meanings and/or significances there certainly are to Ulli Beier's story, which in itself ramifies within ever-widening cultural and socio-historical contexts, but this book does not go after such meanings in a consciously intellectualized fashion. Rather, it tries to address them by simply telling a story which locates him fullsquare in the centre of those activities, because he was at the centre of them. Also, rather than concentrate solely on literary and cultural histories and see them as products of impersonal historical forces and movements, the book focusses on human beings. Issues, movements, forces or academic controversies are dealt with here because they illuminate the conscious or subconscious cultural positions of their human agents. There is a built-in tendency now, in postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial intellectual thinking, to deflate human beings as positive agents in their own affairs, to ascribe all movements to impersonal forces which, in the end, can be fully accounted for and explained. While it is by no means my aim in this book to take on such powerful theories, I nevertheless wish to place on record the intrinsic worth and significance of a life: a life whose full story it may be possible to tell, but which cannot — and need not — be fully explained. It 1s not just the life of Ulli, but also of those he met and interacted with: people whose lived human experience impressed him and inspired him because in such experiences he saw meaning, integrity and beauty. They helped to give meaning, and a centre, to his own life. In his own turn, he sought to help others find meaning and worth in their own lives. This is especially relevant in colonial (and postcolonial) societies where the unequal colonial encounter erased much of the traditional meanings and values of life, and brought replacements that were (and still are) at best inadequate, at worst destructive. From the moment of his arriving in Nigeria in 1950, Ulli made deliberate decisions on how he was going to live in his new environment, and what he wanted to know about it. He was not driven to do what he did by any sense of mission, chance encounters or force of circumstances. Every decision he took, every action he undertook, was a reasoned, empathetic response to the stimuli around him. In this he

was alone among the white expatriates at the new University College Ibadan. He had been in other societies before coming into Yoruba society in 1950 but, in that place, he found something that drew him out more than 18

in those other places. As the Yoruba people put it idiomatically, oni Jo pade oni lu, wewe se wewe. But af Ulli was at first the dancer and the Yoruba culture the drummer, mutual interactions and transformations very soon took place: the dancer also became a drummer and the drummer a

dancer. In part, this book is an attempt to describe what he found, as well as the reciprocal transformations that resulted. Ulli came to Nigeria as a lecturer in the then two-year old University College Ibadan, and stayed at that job for sixteen years before moving on to

teach, also in a university, in Papua New Guinea. This seemingly mundane

fact is important, precisely because he half-turned his back on a secure, promising and respectable career in academics. He preferred instead to stay and work in the margins of university establishments (which were

themselves margins), both to have the freedom necessary to do what he

loved doing best, and to actually achieve concrete results. Also because of the fact that the University College at Ibadan held itself aloof from the

surrounding society and looked down on it, sometimes benignly, most times disdainfully. He thus saw that no productive engagement or interaction could take place, under such circumstances, between this alien

institution and the local environment. In this respect, his life and career as a non-academic intellectual, his achievements in the development of the literatures of the societies he has been in, and of general cultural awakening after the devastations of colonialism, remain a challenge to intellectuals.

Especially

to

multiculturalists,

sociologists,

anthropologists

and

ethnologists.

Ulli has written much about the Yoruba people and their prolific cultural productions, but he is always at pains to make clear that he did not set out to study them. He witnessed many of these practices, was fascinated by their numinosity, and only wished to be a part of the society that produced

such magnificent things, be it oral literature, sculpture, or religious rituals and ceremonies. That he wrote about them at all came as a by-product of participation rather than as a result of study and analysis. In other words, he anticipated, by more than three decades, the present thinking in the fields of anthropology and ethnology. Margaret Thompson Drewal in her paper "The State of Research on Performance in Africa" (1991;

1-64) has dealt

rather exhaustively with this nascent shift in intellectual thinking and modes, and her arguments apply across all the humanistic fields (her own 19

field is performance studies). Here I can do no better than summarize and quote, in parts, her arguments. For very long (and even up till now), Western researchers did not consider the political implications of their researches on "Others". Western epistemology is based on objectivism, which in turn has established "certain research procedures and perspectives" and therefore "a consequent disjunction between Western academic subjects and African performance practices." This Western disciplinary practice Drewal calls the "objectivist metaphysics", which turns subjects into objects "through distancing devices". Through the distanced perspective, not only cognition but mastery of the subject-turned-object is gained; indeed, the type of cognition gained is the type that allows and facilitates domination. "The politics of the objectivist paradigm," Drewal elaborates emphatically, "is that it sets up unequal, unilinear power relationships" (1991; 13-14): Cognition according to this paradigm requires distancing to remove the subject's body (subjectivity) from the object to be known ... Only the subject who has gained perspective through distancing can achieve cognition. The privilege of knowing reality is by default restricted to the "organizer of the view." The seeing/ knowing/uncontaminating subject in this way dominates the object of his gaze (unseeing, unknowing, uncontaminated). Because the objectivist paradigm operates on the condition of unequal, unidirectional power relations between knower and known, it is at once sexist and ethnocentric, an issue well-known in feminist and subaltern studies. She also quotes Johannes Fabian (on the same page), who uses visual metaphors to state the same practice: namely, that anthropology could not have gained scientific status until it underwent a double visual fixation in the process of objectifying its 'subject’: Both types of objectification depend on distance, spatial and temporal. In the fundamental, phenomenalist sense this means that the Other, as object of knowledge, must be separate, distinct, and preferably distant from the knower. . .. The hegemony of the visual as a mode of knowing may thus directly be linked to the political hegemony of an age group, a class, or one society over another. The ruler's subject and the scientist's object have, in the case of anthropology (but also in sociology and psychology), an intertwined

history. (emphasis added)

20

The objectification of the subject; the maintenance of spatial and temporal distances. I have quoted at this length to show that the opposites of these paradigms and traditions of cognition were just what Ulli adopted as early as 1950. He cancelled literally the distances, spatial and temporal, between

himself and the society he wished to know (not study) by simply moving

out of the ghetto campus of the university to live in the midst of the local people. Without arriving at it through revision of any theory or methodology, more by empathy and intuited feeling of oneness and less

than by any rationalistic process, he knew that he could only understand and appreciate the society he was living in by participation. He did not participate just in only the things that interested him, but in all the aspects of the life of the community.

In this way, he gained a better, deeper and

rounder perception of the practices that specifically interested him, and was able to make his own inputs.

The researcher as performer and participant is indeed what Margaret Thompson Drewal recommends now, for that is the only paradigm of knowing

in which

both researcher

and researched

will remain

subjects

(1991; 33): Treating fieldwork as performance means placing the emphasis on the participant side of the participant/observer paradigm; breaking down

the boundaries

between

self and other,

subject and object,

subjectivity and objectivity; and engaging in a more truly dialogical relationships with our subjects of study so that both researcher and researched are coeval participants ... This

new

paradigm,

she

hopes,

will

not

only

further

the

researcher's

understanding (of performance), "shed light on theories and methods reflecting more truly African epistemological loci, but also (enable the researcher) to be transformed"

(1991;

47). Forty years before, Ulli had

practiced and embodied this paradigm and therefore arrived at this still hoped-for new intellectual territory. Ulli was no researcher in the conventional, academic sense; to depict him

as one who merely had foresight would be wrong. If his activities and writings anticipated by decades what scholars like Margaret Thompson Drewal

different

are now recommending,

person

altogether.

His

that is because he was from the start a

attitude

to both

the

society

and

the

activities are those of an insider: a "German-born Yoruba", is what he has

21

been called. This does not mean that Ulli renounced his and cultural upbringing to take on Yoruba ones (that he even that he holds a Nigerian passport and citizenship. means that he is a multicultural person without being long before the age of multiculturalism.

European identity 'went native’), or Rather, it simply a multiculturalist,

Multiculturalism now is an academic subject-cum-political agenda. Especially in the West, it has to do with changing school and university curricula so that members of the dominant culture/population can learn about why and how the minority groups in their midst are different socially and perhaps psychologically (but not, significantly enough, economically), and also so that the minority groups will feel culturally equal. Or, as Arnold Krupat has framed it (quoted in Caws, 1995; 374): multiculturalism refers to an order of instructions concerned to present that which a dominant culture has defined as "other" and "different" — usually, of course, minor and inferior as well — in such a way that it may interrogate and challenge that which the dominant culture has defined as familiar and its own — and so, to be sure, major and superior. Multiculturalism also teaches about the integrity, equality and relativity of all cultures. But whether tampering with canons makes the students and teachers real multicultural persons is another matter. It is very possible that a person can be a multiculturalist — an expert theorizer and teacher of multiculturalism - without being multicultural. In other words, multiculturalism as an academic project or even social/political agenda does not necessarily remove the implicit assumption that one's culture 1s superior to another's, nor does it give a person a multicultural identity. The pedagogical apparatus of multiculturalism can still remain monocultural, rather than crosscultural. Here is where the paradox — if a paradox it 1s — of Ulli being a Germanborn Yoruba comes in. The choice, of course, was not made by fiat, but out of his prior experience before coming to Nigeria. First in Germany, then in Palestine, and later in England, he found that his identity was being defined for him by others — by Hitler, and by British officialdom after the second world war. It was a definition that classified rather than gave him an identity, for it limited his horizons as an individual. In Yoruba society on the other hand, and among the bearers and transmitters of Yoruba culture

22

that he interacted with, such confining group classifications were absent. "Yoruba society," he says, "is not only the most tolerant society I know of, it is also the most multicultural." More, he found in the culture things of

value which he could absorb — and has absorbed - into his own personality. It was a free choice of personal identity in which he assumed the horizons of the Yoruba culture to expand and amplify his own individual horizon. Having

thus

become

a multicultural

person

without

being

a cultural

relativist, he has always sought to expand the cultural horizons of others, especially of Nigerians in general and Yoruba people in particular. Hence the

kind

of materials

he

published

in

Black

exhibitions he mounted at MBARI Club Ibadan Osogbo, and the nature of the cooperation he Enlargement, divergence and the limitlessness of result. He found that the Yoruba society was

Orpheus,

the

kind

of

and MBARI MBAYO Club had with Duro Ladipo. cultural horizons were the always a culturally open

society and continues to be so only because it critically absorbs from other

cultures. Thus, one of the smaller paradoxes embedded within the larger paradox of Ulli being a German-born Yoruba is that he has been able to do more for the culture, more creatively and effectively, than most Nigerianborn Yoruba who are in a position to do things.

I have avoided describing Ulli as a multiculturalist — have in fact been using both that adjective plus its noun derivative rather skeptically. This is for a reason: it is difficult for any non-Western person who has experienced multiculturalism in the curriculum of Western educational institutions to escape totally the feeling of institutional patronizing. When, in fact, it translates into political correctness in the public arena, its values become doubly suspect. But there are more concrete reasons to interrogate both pedagogical and political multiculturalism. Quite often, the cultures studied

in multiculturalism courses are those of postcolonial societies (I leave

feminism

and lesbian/gay studies out of this). But at this moment

when

these cultures are being energetically praised, researched into, theorized, copiously written about and taught in Western academes, they face greater dangers of erosion and, in several cases, outright extinction, than before.

Like endangered animals, perhaps the great attention being paid to them now is an institutional testimony to the reality of those dangers. More and more, and at greater speed, they are being sucked into Western capitalism

23

and its companion cultural imperialism where they will exist only in books and video. The second point takes off from a part of Arnold Krupat's statement quoted

above: multiculturalism is to "interrogate and challenge that which the

dominant culture has defined as familiar and its own ..." In many postcolonial states one also finds cultures that feel superior and try to dominate others that they consider 'minor' and "inferior. However, in the case of the cultural relationship between the West and, say, Africa, which culture is dominant/'superior' and which subordinate/'inferior' is a clear-cut matter. The point is that, for multiculturalists especially, these minority cultures exist and are worth studying, maybe in their own rights, but primarily so that — this is the logic of Krupat's argument — the dominant

culture can use them for self-interrogation. In other words, to help the

dominant culture correct its own wrongs and generally do better at coping with the minority cultures in its midst. The purpose is laudable but it still leaves those cultures in the ever-increasing endangered and anaemic state that they have fallen into since the era of colonialism, global capitalism and cultural imperialism, especially in their homes of origin. Anthropology, as Terence Turner (1995; 408) acknowledges, is "not oriented principally toward programs of social change, political mobilization, or cultural transformation." Very much the same may be said of multiculturalism be it of the critical or difference variety, and despite its different political and pedagogical orientation. This, therefore, is why I have hesitated to describe Ulli as a multiculturalist, or as somebody engaged in multiculturalism. His cultural choice, and therefore choice of identity, was made freely, and not through some sense of political imperative or by academic research. He has been concerned also, from the beginning, about the state of health of Yoruba culture and taken concrete steps to do something about it. Recognizing that its values, like those of other non-Western cultures, were under threat, he sought ways for the revitalization of those values. This he did not do by any (futile) attempts at romantic fossilization, but by using new forms of

expression to help it nourish and transform although

a member

of the Sango

cult himself,

itself from within.

Thus,

Ulli did not hesitate in

encouraging Duro Ladipo (a good, church-going Christian at the beginning) to put that deity on the modern, secular stage. He introduced 24

that Yoruba dramatist to Sango priests for more knowledge and familiarity

with the god. The results for Yoruba theatre (and Nigerian theatre in English) generally, and for Duro Ladipo's personal/spiritual life in particular, were totally unforeseen by either of them. This book was and remained 'person-centred', from conception through the methodologies used to gather materials, right up to the writing stage. This is in keeping with the 'nature' of its subject and materials. As hinted earlier,

the idea of a book took shape later, after the materials grew and grew.

When I went to Bayreuth in 1995 as a guest of IwALEWA-Haus, Ulli and I spent about three weeks having animated discussions about Nigeria and Yoruba society. Only after that did our discussions begin to focus on him and his activities. There were topics for discussion and on which I wanted information, but there was no prepared questionnaire. Once a particular topic was started, both of us felt free to interrupt one another, debate it, roam within and around it, stray from it in long digressions, or even return

to it long after we had started on another subject. Although

taped

and

later transcribed,

these

interview-discussions

only

formed a part — albeit a very important one — of the 'raw data’ upon which I worked. I have not followed the sequence of the interviews and have quoted sparingly from them. Equally important has been my dependence on his extensive personal library for documentary evidence and other materials.

While in Nigeria late in 1995, I talked informally to some members of the Osogbo art school who also happened to have participated, at one stage or another, in the Duro Ladipo theatre company. The most important things they have to say about both the art movement and the theatre have already

been said in books. All of them merely confirmed what they had already

said in these books (see chapter V), and corroborated the facts as narrated by Ulli and Georgina. Since I did not set out to present a complete history

of either the art movement or the theatre, there was no need duplicating materials in this book.

For the same reason that the idea had begun to form that any publication which resulted would be mainly on Ulli Beier and Yoruba society, and less

on Black Orpheus and MBARI Club Ibadan, I refrained from talking to anybody else connected with both. In any case there already exists a

25

substantial literature on them and, I also felt, 'the story behind their story' would certainly be a valuable, fresh addition to the growing materials on

the history of Anglophone African literature. Moreover, I soon realized

that, as important as Black Orpheus and MBARI Club were (and remain) to

the history of that literature, and as proud as Ulli is to have been associated

with them, they were just two of the numerous activities he engaged in at the time. Those other activities were equally important to him and, with time, even more so. More interesting is the discovery that those other activities actually explain the astounding success of both journal and club. In the overall context of Ulli's relationship to Yoruba society and culture,

these preceding activities and later ones are in fact more significant than either journal or club.

And then, although their literary achievements have made both magazine and club synonymous with literature, neither was specifically devoted to it. The other arts were as dear to Ulli as literature, and the activities of both journal and club in them are also historical landmarks. Accordingly, I have tried to give them their due place in this narrative, partly to correct the imbalance already evident in much of the literature on both magazine and club, partly to reveal other aspects of Ulli that have remained in the shadows, and finally to give a rounder and more instructive picture of the club especially. Though both are given their own separate chapter, to have gone on to try to seek interviews with others actively involved in the journal or club would have amounted to bestowing on both a pre-eminent position they did not have in Ulli's mind even when he devoted so much energy and time to them. Ruling elites in whatever sphere of activity everywhere tend to think that theirs are the only activities, preoccupations and interests that are important and deserving of serious academic attention. This has certainly been the case with the 'educated', Westernized literary elite in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Encouraged and publicized by friendly criticism, courted early by Western publishers, then almost as quickly accorded pride of place in university literature programmes all over, Europhone African literature was very quickly promoted from being a new form of literary expression engaged in by a minority to being the literary expression of all

Africans. Such has been the logic of the cultural — and political — economy

26

of the postcolonial state (derived, of course, from the colonial economy) that the substitution-by-displacement was inevitable, initially. Through the establishment of both Black Orpheus and MBARI Club, Ulli no doubt contributed his own fair share to the rapid growth and development of modern African literature in English. But I soon realized that, much as he had reason to be proud of that share, he considered his works on Yoruba oral literature and his associations with Yoruba priests, with kings and chiefs, and with the travelling theatre groups, non-privileged artists of more value. This, upon reflection, is as it should be. Accordingly, the chapter on

the landmark magazine and famous club is relatively short (in proportion to what some readers may consider their historical importance). Care has also been taken to show that both derived their life and specific character from

other interests and activities. This work grew organically out of these three interactions. This is perhaps evident in the book's organization and chapter divisions. Its overall structure is cyclical: the events narrated in the second half of the concluding chapter (Ulli's life in Germany and Palestine) predate those in chapter II (his arrival at the new University College, Ibadan) and explain

how

and why they came about. Chapters III to VI are chronological:

respectively,

they

narrate

Ulli's

life,

associations

and

activities

upon

moving to Ede, Ilobu and finally Osogbo; the founding of Black Orpheus and MBARI Club; the founding of the Osogbo art movement, Duro Ladipo's theatre and MBARI MBAYO Club, plus their respective activities; his activities as director of University of Ife Institute of African Studies (19711974) and IWALEWA-Haus, University of Bayreuth (1981-1984, 19891996). But the reader will find that much of the activities described in chapter V happened before those narrated in chapters III to VI and that,

chronologically, events in all these middle chapters overlap. This rather convoluted organization is perhaps as it should be, for the seeds of Ulli's activities in Nigeria were sown and had begun to germinate long before he arrived in that country in 1950; the tree continued to blossom and flower

long after he had departed physically. In other words, the plot of his life has an inherent unity of its own: there is a teleological unity within its seemingly fragmented existence (Nadel, 1984; 202). Its parts carry aspects of the whole and the whole is reflected in

the parts. Although adventurous and full of sudden turns, that life has no 27

social reversals or grand heroic gestures. In this kind of plot, the sequential

unfolding of events is merely a matter of growth and maturation in time and space. In the structure and organization of this book, therefore, I have merely essayed to maintain what I perceive as the synchronic continuum of

that life: its dual process of sequentiality contained within — and also expressing — simultaneity.

It remains to say something still about the purpose of this book. It will have been noticed that the overall tone of this introduction is laudatory. Eulogy, as Michael Gilmore (1978; 131) says, is the oldest form of biography. The

Yoruba oriki (praise poetry) is biographical poetry in which the subject is both "a didactic symbol and cultural ideal". But I hope, contrary to Gilmore's further assertions, essential concrete details have not disappeared in this one. Mine has not been the objectivist approach which requires maintaining an adversarial distance from the subject — the approach in which the biographer, rather than his subject, emerges as the (intellectual) hero. Rather, I have sought to be as fully involved in the life and activities

of the subject as he himself could possibly remember them, and as I could imaginatively envision and recreate them here.

Furthermore, I am only following the example of Ulli himself. Although he has observed closely and written much, his approach has never been that of the distanced, disinterested observer. He has always been more interested in and committed to the people who do things, be it a ritual performance or a painting, than to whatever scholarly knowledge he can gain from what they are doing. Thus, he is at once a preserver and transformer, a participant, witness and recorder, the engaged Yoruba man who has faith in what he has seen, believes in its enduring values and qualities, in its integrity and dignity. Therefore, this book is a product of empathy, of human contacts and the inevitable changes and growing understanding that result from those prolonged contacts. It has been inspired, in short, by that interaction — another example of his ability to make people do things that they thought

they could not. This work is, in short, just a setting of the records straight, a filling in of the details, and a reminder. Wherever anything new and of enduring value happened

from the early

1950s right up to 1966 ın Nigeria, Ulli was at the centre of it, either starting

28

it and/or ensuring that it was sustained, bringing to public attention what was neglected, giving serious intellectual attention to what was passed over (because considered to be beneath notice) by the emergent intellectual elite, or just quietly supporting others. The rıght moment might have conjoined with the right quality and calibre of friends, but it needed something or somebody to bring all together and make them gather momentum. That is Ulli's ori inu: the ability to make things happen, to discover fertile soil where others have seen only stony ground. If a fraction of any of these qualities in both the man and the society he met and so enthusiastically embraced as his own have been conveyed in this book, it will have gone some way to serve its purpose.

29

CHAPTER

II

"ONA L'EGBON'' - THE ROAD

IS THE SENIOR BROTHER

Improvement makes straight roads But the crooked roads without improvement Are roads of genius William Blake

Ulli

came

to

Nigeria

in

October

1950

and,

uninterrupted stay, left with his family in December

after

a

sixteen-year

1966. Sometime in

1970 and not long after the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970) ended, he came back for a conference, during which he found time to go to the eastern parts of the country, to meet old friends who had survived that war. On his way

back, he drove through Ede, the town where he had spent several happy

years and whose oba was one of his closest friends. In his absence Ede had become a garrison town: soldiers everywhere, driving their huge lumbering

vehicles with all the carelessness they were capable of. One such juggernaut overtook him on the wrong side, crowded in on him on the narrow lane, ripped the fender and door off his tiny old car, and almost ran him into the gutter. He extricated himself from the car and came out on to the road. The soldiers too jumped down from their vehicle and surrounded him, shouting: "Congratulations! Congratulations! God is with you! God is on your side!" Thus did they neatly transfer the blame to him: he should have known better than to contest the right of way with them; he should

count himself lucky not to have paid more dearly for his presumption! Ulli could have died during that brief return to Nigeria from half way round the world but did not. He drove the badly dented car to Ibadan and still all

the way to Lagos. In Ibadan he stopped at the Soyinkas' who, upon seeing the wrecked car, were aghast. When Ulli told them what had happened, Soyinka was even more horrified: "What would people have said," he exclaimed, "if you came back all the way from Papua New Guinea only to be slaughtered so mindlessly here?" Laide's (Soyinka's wife) response to that not-so rhetorical question gave a very Yoruba meaning to the barely averted tragedy which, if it had happened, would have been truly absurd:

"Well, if you had died," she philosophized, "people would have said that

you knew that your time was up and so came back home to die." She was only expressing the sentiments of the majority of Yoruba people who knew Ulli: for them, his home was nowhere else but Yorubaland.

Ulli's coming to the then two-year old University College Ibadan in 1950

was absolutely fortuitous. Back in London, where he was then living, he knew very little about Africa, and even less about Nigeria and its diverse peoples and cultures. He saw an advertisement for the post of Lecturer in Phonetics in a college of the London University situated somewhere in far away West Africa, and a whole lot of things started spinning in his mind. It was like passing by a door slightly ajar, through which he saw a dimly lit

interior. The half-open door tempted and beckoned to be pushed back so it

would reveal more of what lay behind.

Ulli applied for the position and when it looked like he would get it, started digging around for information about Nigeria. He went to the British Museum to renew his acquaintance with the Benin bronzes, Yoruba carvings and Igbo masks. But these were already in glass cages, suggesting that they belong to the past. Leon Underwood's three little books — African Bronzes, African Masks, and African Sculpture — which he already had, were not very useful either, as they contained scanty information about the people who made those objects in the photographs. His landlady also gave him some old copies of Nigeria Magazine that were not very helpful either (the magazine's good years under D.W. McCrow, Michael Crowder and succeeding editors were yet to come). Indeed, the story behind those old copies was more stimulating to Ulli than the magazines themselves. The lady who owned them, his landlady said when handing them over, had been in Nigeria and loved the place so much that when she left, she did not scrape its laterite soil off the soles of her shoes! Another secondhand introduction, this time less auspicious, came through a judge whom his parents knew. This judge had served some years in the colonial service in Nigeria. When he heard that the new University College was going to be sited in Ibadan, he grumbled that it should have been built in Kano because, in his opinion, Kano was a more orderly and beautiful city. The judge was only expressing the general opinion of the British

about the different groups that make up Nigeria: Northerners were conservative, cooperative and respectful of authority and, on the whole, so 32

much easier to deal with; Southerners were presumptuous, pushy, and not so amenable to (colonial) authority. Ulli's

direct

introduction

to

Nigeria,

however,

finally

came

through

her

Nigerian

Nigerians themselves in London. He went to a little theatre called Watergate Theatre to watch Ram Gopal, an Indian dancer. There he met a young French boy and his Ghanaian girlfriend who, upon hearing that he was preparing to go to Nigeria, immediately invited him to a party in Hampstead,

in

the

house

of a German

immigrant

and

boyfriend. At the party, he asked the Nigerian host, Tommy Ogbe, to tell him

something

about Nigeria.

The Nigerian reflected for a second and,

rather than start a lecture, stood up, went into the kitchen, returned with a huge tuber of yam that he plonked down on the table, and declared: "That

is what you will eat when you get to Nigeria!" Ulli was impressed: here

was something real, to be seen and touched, rather than imagined.

Tommy

Ogbe

then gave him letters of introduction to two people in

Ibadan, one of who was S.O. Awokoya, then Principal of Molusi College,

Ijebu-Igbo.

The

other was Dr Oritshejolomi

Thomas,

one of the few

African medical doctors at the University College Hospital. S.O. Awokoya would later become Minister of Education under Obafemi Awolowo, when

the Western Region attained self-government; Dr Thomas too would become the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, about two decades later.

Ulli

could

beginnings.

still have Dr

Fry,

changed Head

of

his mind

in spite

Department

of

of such

Phonetics

favourable at

London

University, whom he had asked to support his application, advised him to wait for a year when a similar or even better position would open up at Legon, that the Legon position was worth waiting for "because the University of the Gold Coast was a much better shop." That unsavoury

comparison decided Ulli, for he had no intention of going to a 'good shop’.

This was in the summer of 1950 and Ulli was a young man with a whole

life in front of him. Yet such little, contradictory and chance encounters determined that it was to Nigeria he would go, and gave a foretaste of the kind of life he would lead there. They also foreshadowed that his life from then on would be linked with that country and its peoples and cultures,

33

including the long stretches of it lived either in far away Guinea and Australia, or in Europe.

Papua

New

Considering that life now and the turns it took, it sounds strange to hear

that Ulli came to the University College, Ibadan, to teach English Phonetics — to teach young Nigerians how to be English in manners and speech. The

circumstances that led to this were as casual as those that led to his coming

to Ibadan; but then, his life up to his arrival in London in 1948 had taught him to be alert, to always keep his wits about him and be ready to leap at opportunities as they presented themselves. During the war, he had been a refugee interned by the British ın Palestine. When the war ended, Britain was shipping these internees to Australia and, though he knew nothing about that country, he knew he did not want to go there. The only way to avoid deportation to Australia was to be a student. But all university admissions were reserved for war veterans. The British Council kindly told him that his only chance of securing admission into a British university then was to do a diploma course in Phonetics, a course that was designed for foreigners wishing to acquire an English accent. Ulli duly applied and did the course. After it, he had an opportunity to teach German in a posh school but chose, instead, to go to a school for disabled and problem children, where the task was harder and the pay poorer. The children spoke in all kinds of regional dialects, but his Phonetics course came in quite useful. This was not because he wanted to teach the kids how to speak correctly though, but in his own efforts to make out what they said and to understand them. More useful, even if totally unforeseen, was that the course made him prima facie qualified to apply for the vacant position at Ibadan; just as, not long after arriving in

Ibadan, his experience at this school for problem children back in London

would get fascinating Nigeria.

him invited to speak to trainee nurses and hear his first stories about the abiku phenomenon among the Yoruba in

The crucial step that fully qualified him for the Phonetics position, however, was through the teaching stint he reluctantly did at London University. Daniel Jones, the man who invented the university course in Phonetics and used to give six lectures a year in German Phonetics at

London University, retired. Dr Fry then invited Ulli to take over the course

and develop it into a full-blown, sessional one. Ulli was not keen, for he 34

was happy and fully involved with his kids. Dr Fry and others mounted

great pressure on him and in the end he had to agree: his old teacher and others in the Department of Phonetics had been so good to him anyway; and it was only right to reciprocate in some way. So he agreed on the condition that he would train someone else to take over from him within the shortest possible time. Thus this position, reluctantly taken up, placed

him in an advantageous situation to apply for the job at Ibadan.

Before leaving London to take up the position of Assistant Lecturer in Phonetics at Ibadan, Ulli performed one last act that was to have totally unforeseen consequences for Yoruba religion, and the effects of which would be so radical that they would last a lifetime for the other major dramatis persona involved. He sent a one-line telegram to Susanne Wenger in Paris: "Come to London to marry."

A year before, during the Easter period of 1949, he had gone to Paris on the invitation of the French boy he had met earlier. The invitation was also accompanied by a promise of free accommodation. He had never been in Paris before so he seized the opportunity. In Paris, he naturally visited all the famous sites and took long walks. It was during one of such walks that he met Susanne, literally on the street. A young lady was coming from the opposite direction carrying a little flower pot in her hands. When they passed each other he looked at her closely but furtively, and could hardly believe what he saw: "Wait a minute," he said to himself, "did I see correctly? This lady appears to have one green eye and one blue eye!" So

he doubled back to check again and, yes, he had seen correctly. He talked to her, she responded pleasantly,

and a certain mutual

attraction started

developing. He visited her, saw her paintings, was puzzled and not quite comfortable with them — they were in the abstract style then in vogue in Paris. She herself was less puzzling and much more fascinating to talk to. Like Ulli himself, she had had a very traumatic experience of the war. She had now put all that behind her and was now deeply into Tibetan, Inuit (Eskimo) and other mythologies, in whose fantastical worlds she lived. Ulli knew nothing about them, but Susanne's manner of narrating them drew him in. He went back to Paris in the summer of 1950, by which time her earlier paintings had arrived from Vienna. In these he could recognize her

personality and connect the paintings with her, so he became much more interested in her as an artist. Together they visited many museums in Paris, 35

but especially the African section of the Musée de l'homme. Here they spent several hours looking at the displayed objects and talking about them. There was a sharing of love of the arts and fascination with African arts especially. So when Ulli got the job at the University College, it occurred to him that this was perhaps a unique opportunity for her to go to Africa. But there was a hurdle: the colonial authorities then positively discouraged single ladies from prolonged stays in the colonies (especially in Africa); the only way they could was if they were married. So Ulli invited Susanne over to London to marry. The ceremony itself was ridiculous. The bride did not understand a word of English so had to merely repeat phonetically the vows. When it came to putting on the ring, the groom suddenly realized that he had not bought any, so he rushed out into the streets to buy a curtain ring! Colonial bureaucracy satisfied, Susanne was able to join Ulli a few weeks later, to experience Nigeria and Yoruba culture as intensely as Ulli, but to respond to it in an altogether different manner. Ulli left London for Nigeria on October 1, 1950 — exactly ten years before Nigeria's (as yet unnamed) independence day. The journey, even though by air, took four days, for the plane was grounded in Kano for three days. Ulli spent those three days roaming the streets of Kano — especially the ancient city — and found the old judge was right: Kano was indeed a beautiful, clean, serene and orderly city. Its wonderful markets were full of goods from all over the sahel and savannah regions of West Africa, and even from North Africa. When finally he arrived in Ibadan, he found that the judge was right too. His first impressions of Ibadan were of a huge, sprawling city, vibrant but chaotic. The city of Ibadan committed the sin of being disorderly and dirty, but the new University College, situated then in Eleyele, was already embarked on an opposite but equal one of being completely cut off from its immediate community. Physically, it was located in Ibadan, but it did not belong to it. To him, the entire tone and atmosphere of the self-enclosed and self-

absorbed institution looked false and ghettoish, so he kept asking: "What has happened

to the original place?"

This was his first — and lasting —

impression of the College, borne out and confirmed by subsequent events

and

interactions.

temporary 36

campus

Cooped

was

up

in the

a converted

temporary

army

wooden

barracks),

buildings

he

got

(the

bored

immediately. He contacted S.O. Awokoya as soon as he could and, within a few days, the latter came and invited him to spend the next weekend with him in Ijebu-Igbo. So within his first two weeks in Nigeria, Ulli was bumping his way through potholes and dust to other places in Yorubaland.

Mr Awokoya kept apologizing for the state of the road, but Ulli's excitement at already getting to know more of the people and place more than compensated for the rough ride. He started learning about the Nigerian political and social situations from his new friend. He ate his first Nigerian meal in Ijebu-Igbo and, more importantly, met a babalawo for the first time. Mr Awokoya initially dismissed the idea of visiting a babalawo completely as unnecessary, but when Ulli persisted, he reluctantly took him to one. It was a disappointing experience. Not really caring about such things and not knowing the man very much either, his host literally commanded the priest

to demonstrate for the oyinbo. It was all so very awkward. A UK-trained educationist

and principal

of a secondary

school,

who

was

also in the

forefront of the rapid 'modernization' drive, Mr Awokoya clearly did not

see any value in such people as babalawos. He considered them relics of a vanishing traditional world and was embarrassed to be reminded of their existence. He was even more embarrassed at having to be seen at a

babalawo's: what would his people think of him? He did everything with

despatch so as to be done with it and gone as soon as possible. Ulli also

learnt his first lesson in the attitude of the new, educated Nigerians to their own cultures, traditional institutions and practices. Ulli would very soon

have his own opinion about these institutions, different from that of most of his educated friends, but hardly ever did such differences stand between

them. Awokoya and he remained good friends, and for many years saw each other regularly. When Chief S.O. Awokoya later became Minister of Education under Chief Obafemi Awolowo and was in charge of the huge Free Primary Education scheme, they argued endlessly over the certain losses and hoped-for gains of that gigantic programme. Ibadan was already a vast but still fascinating city then, with a lot of the

quarters and whole areas still untouched by the helter-skelter pace of 'development'. Still in the (not too distant) future were all the drab and monotonous cement structures haphazardly erected, but never finished, that would constitute the modern slums that have since characterized many 37

Nigerian urban sprawls. Ulli could wander around endlessly in the narrow mazes and winding streets to see shrines, markets, and other old places without attracting too much attention. Except that of young boys wanting to

practice their newly acquired skill in English on him. The brave ones among them would walk up to him and demand: here?"

"What is your mission

Meanwhile, life in the University College confirmed his initial impressions. He no sooner settled into teaching the Phonetics course than he found everything wrong with it. First there were two hours of theory and two of

practical. If the aim was to get the students to change their pronunciation,

then two hours of practicals a week was too small. As the aim was not to make linguists of them, two hours of theory was too much. What was the point of the course anyway? Ulli kept asking himself and anybody who would listen. He could understand a foreigner in Britain wishing to improve or change his accent, in order to be better understood, or for the real and practical reasons of survival. But surely, the situation in Nigeria was different: English was the official language; there was no more reason for any Nigerian to want to change his accent than for a Scot to wish to change his. In less than a month, he saw the absurdity of it; but as he was the only one who did, there was nothing he could do about it. The thought of crossing over to the Literature section did not appeal to him, as much of the same pointlessness was going on there: English literature from the Anglo-Saxons to the Moderns. Very soon, and within six months of arriving in Ibadan, he took the decision that as soon as he had served out his present contract, he would leave. Ulli of course did not leave, but he stayed only one year in the English department. The academic situation was merely an extension of the social one. A steward who had been trained to wake up his white masters in bed in the morning with a cup of tea and fruit salad, was imposed on him. When Ulli insisted on skipping that luxury, the steward protested and could not understand. A bargain was struck on this matter, but other 'unwhitemanlike' habits of Ulli's got in the way of any happy relationship between them and the steward had to go. In its social programmes and activities no less than in the intellectual ones, the university simply did not seek to make itself

directly relevant to the society it was built to serve; neither did it engage in any

38

useful

town-and-gown

contact.

The

professors

completely

shut

themselves off behind the walls and lived — mentally and socially — in the ghetto they had deliberately created.

For Ulli then, the really baffling thing was that many of the professors had a vast

knowledge

of Africa

in their

own

fields.

There

was

Geoffrey

Parrinder for instance, a lecturer in Religious Studies (and author of one of the early books on traditional African religion), who knew every corner of Ibadan and took him to the Sango shrine in Agbeni quarters. Leo Frobenius, the German ethnographer, had made the shrine famous when he

visited it in 1910 and given a vivid, detailed description of it in his book (1). Ulli found the shrine to be still in exactly the same state as Frobenius

had described it. There was Professor Welch, also of Religious Studies, whose knowledge of Nigerian cultures was very vast. Aloof and with a Goethe-like chiselled head, Welch towered above everybody else both physically (he had a back problem so he always sat on a special chair

which

raised him

higher than

other people

in the room)

as well

as

intellectually. Professor Welch had done his doctorate (Anthropology) on

the Isoko people of Nigeria, yet neither his familiarity with Nigerian cultures nor his obviously

impressive

intellect could prevent him

being snobbish and generally condescending toward Africans. He colonial-type who extolled endlessly the faithfulness and mindedness of his African servants, and even swore by them. When appointed Professor of Religious Studies at the University College

from

was the simplehe was Ibadan,

he went straight to the Delta to get his old steward back.

Professor Welch, however, went a step further than the rest. He organized a 'Town and Gown Group' that met once a week in his house, and which included many Nigerian teachers, churchmen, professionals and other dignitaries. The group read and discussed papers on topics relevant to Nigeria, but Ulli found the atmosphere too formal, the people too polite, stiff and self-consciously intellectual for any real goal to be achieved. But it was a forum through which he met many Nigerians. There was also Mr Abraham, the famous lexicographer of African languages. He had done a dictionary of Hausa language and another of Amharic, and was then in Ibadan doing a Yoruba one. So he already had the reputation of being an expert on dictionaries. As Ulli crossed over to the mess in the afternoon for lunch, Mr Abraham would hail him and chant:

"Still on adverbs today." Clearly though, his evident passion for words did 39

not extend to the different peoples whose languages codifying, for he showed the least interest in them.

he spent his life

The University College Ibadan then was staffed mostly by such Europeans. They did their work very conscientiously in the classrooms or laboratories, but kept strictly away from either the students or the indigenous population. With his strange habit of walking the streets of Ibadan, Ulli very quickly became something of an outsider. Other Europeans would come across him in his long perambulations and, flustered, offer him a lift. When he refused, as he invariably did, they felt offended and doubly embarrassed: he was letting the side down. The colonial authorities had established an image of the white man which the academics, who perhaps should know better, simply accepted and maintained. Perhaps they too had become prisoners of that image, for even though they professed lack of curiosity and contempt for the culture around them, they regularly purchased Nigerian icons and art objects — the Yoruba ere ibeji were especially favoured. There was one fellow, Lasisi, a disreputable son of the then Alaafin of Oyo, who found a ready market among the university community for objects he had stolen from the palace in Oyo. His university customers knew the prince was a thief, but did not care. There was one particularly painful episode which for Ulli illustrated very well the contradictory attitude of the college's European community to Yoruba (or generally, African) art. Professor Christophersen had bought a pair of edan ogboni from this same Lasisi, and apparently was impressed by it. But he passed it round at one of the dinners he regularly gave in his house as an example of primitive art for further entertainment of his guests. Ulli was not amused but fascinated by the object. Like everybody else he did not understand it or what it stood for, but he responded to its power and mystery, wondered where it came from and what it was used for. Most of all he wondered about the people who made it. The same indifference obtained at the political level. Dr Mellanby, the first Principal of the College, was a wonderful man who had achieved excellent results in record time. He, however, knew little of the place and its people,

and did not want to know. Ulli found this combination especially strange

and hard to understand. Here was a man putting a lot of energy into a project whose ostensible aim was to serve a particular society. He evidently

believed that what he was doing was worthwhile, but he did not care for the 40

society for which such a gigantic and ambitious project — and on which it would have such far-reaching effects — was being established! Dr Mellanby established a pattern at the then very young university college, a pattern which, sadly enough, other universities that came later in Nigeria as well as other parts of Africa were to follow: a feeling of superiority to the environment in which they are located; that the environment was not worth bothering much about; leading, in consequence, to only minimal and unavoidable contacts between the two. In this regard, the university's role

became

reduced

to

merely

training

young

people

in

the

modern

professions. Although a lot of research activities went on, nothing new or

original that was a product of the interaction between the institution and its environment resulted. As their mere establishment more or less became its own end, they were from the start in no position to intervene in the dismal

politics and economies that have been the fate of the continent since independence. The universities themselves became victims of the ills that have bedevilled post-independence Africa. By the mid 1950s, Nigeria was already looking forward to independence and the politicians were busy in their anti-colonial struggles, quarrelling

among themselves, or, when not so occupied, drafting one unsatisfactory constitution after another. The University College Ibadan, the only one in the country then, was also busy training people who would take over the

running of the country at independence. Little was being done to give the students the minimum level of political education required to sustain the political system the country would inherit. The dictum "Politics should be left to politicians" excused everybody. It was all a very exciting and heady time in the country, and Ulli felt that the university should do more than merely design short-term courses in Local Government Administration. His

decision to do something about it led to what could have been his first major crisis with Dr Mellanby.

The

Extramural

Studies

Department

had

a

programme

in

Local

Government Administration; right there in Ibadan, there was a Ministry of Local Government Affairs headed by Mr Obafemi Awolowo, who was

quite capable and credible. It department to involve either the Ulli thought this was plain bad opportunity to invite him. The

had never minister or manners and opportunity

occurred to his ministry was on the came during

anyone in the in its activities. lookout for any the summer of 41

1953 (Ulli had transferred to the Extramural Studies department by the end of 1951), where he worked with Robert Gardiner, a like-minded friend. Gardiner had arranged two summer courses for that year, one in Local Government and the other in Journalism. But as he had to go away for his summer holidays, Ulli was left free to run the courses. The campus being always empty during the summer holidays — everybody away in Europe — he revised the programmes and invited Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief S.

Ladoke Akintola to give talks on journalism, and Chief Obafemi Awolowo

to talk on Local Government Affairs. Dr Azikiwe and Chief Akintola came. The latter was quite enthusiastic and actually delivered a prepared lecture, at which many journalists were present, and which was followed by a lengthy discussion. Then, the evening before Chief Awolowo was to come for his own programme, Dr Mellanby suddenly returned! Well, an important person like Chief Awolowo could not come to the campus without the Principal knowing and possibly receiving him, so Ulli had no choice but to go up to the head of the institution and tell him what he had been up to, literally behind his back. The following short conversation took place: Ulli:

"I have invited the Minister to our programme tomorrow, will you please come and introduce him?"

starting

Dr Mellanby: "Which Minister?" Ulli: "Awolowo" Dr Mellanby: "Oh, I hope I won't hit him." Dr Mellanby of course was a very urbane man who hit people with his razor-sharp intellect rather than fists. He was in fact quite civil and polite. He expressed the possibility of such a hostile reception because Chief Awolowo had just written three newspaper articles that were very critical of the University College. Everybody had called Chief Awolowo a political upstart and other such names, but none had responded to his allegations. Dr Mellanby for his part thought it was beneath his own personal dignity, or that of the university, to respond officially. Ulli agreed with the views the chief had expressed in the articles, but was the only one. So by inviting him

(and the other two major politicians) to the campus, he made his point. He

was not a politician — in fact could not be — but felt he had to make a general political statement about the institution's deliberate self-isolation from the rest of society. 42

If the mainly European staff of the university responded with a mixture of contempt

and

embarrassed

fascination

to African

culture,

the

students

responded with even more shamefaced rejection that baffled and saddened

Ulli. The European attitude, though wrong and tinged with a touch of racial arrogance and prejudice, was largely based on ignorance coupled with an unwillingness to learn. But what about the Nigerian students themselves?

Their attitude he found painful and unfortunate because after all they lived

the culture, had an intuitive understanding of it, and it was their rightful heritage. And had nationalism, one of whose major platforms was, after all, pride in race and the pre-colonial past, not meant anything to them? So he engaged the students in debates during and after lectures, seeking to persuade them that there was more to the culture than what they had been fed by missionary and colonial education. What the students saw in their culture mostly were only the imagined evils that the missionaries had

taught them to see; or what was absent in it and seen to be abundantly

present in the European: technology and its shining, efficient mechanical gadgets. They thus negatively defined their culture by what they perceived

it to be lacking and conversely, positively but mistakenly defined European

culture by what it had in overabundance. In the debates that Ulli often deliberately provoked, the students had one favourite, pathetic statement that summed it all up: "We cannot produce

even a simple pin!" He tried to counter this corrosive, self-deprecating

image, and the implicit self-inferiorisation it carried, with arguments about how their societies had lived autonomously for thousands of years before

the white man came, and that if 'pins' were what they felt they needed now, they could always

buy them

without

losing their own

cultural identity.

They returned with the popular accusation that he was trying to turn back the hand of the clock. No, he would say, that was an impossible thing to do. Only that they should reflect on the changes taking place around them, direct and turn them to advantage, according to the needs of the entire society and not just their own — not according to what the Europeans thought were their needs. Ulli would then go on to tell them that even Europe, the origin and source of all the changes, was no longer too happy with them; that it would be a terrible mistake if they should lead the rest of their society blindly into the same irreversible mistakes that Europe had made.

43

The damage was too extensive, pervasive, and already too internalized for mere debates. Most of them understood and defined education only as the ability to manufacture things in the technological manner of the West. But more tragically, the university was, for the generality of the students, the perfect means of escaping what they considered the "African dark ages" and leaving it behind for ever. It was a matter of personal escape and all arguments against it were already foreclosed. Nothing could make them see much of value in African ways. At the university, the students were waited upon hand and foot in their cafeterias and pampered from morning till night in their halls of residence. Made to feel by both the university and the outside world that they were a special breed, the students only saw and used the college as the last major stage in their incorporation into the new elite class. They were fully aware of their present and future privileges and almost totally unaware of their responsibilities. Those still outside struggled to get in and participate in this new good life. It was too late: barely seventy years of colonial brainwashing had done so much damage. Perhaps nothing signifies the depth and extent of the rejection of the (African) self, of the eager embrace of so-called European ways more concretely, comprehensively and yet more simply than the huge expansion ofthe GRAs (Government Reservation Areas). These were special areas on the outskirts of regional capitals and provincial headquarters, which the colonial officers created for themselves, so that they would be safe from any kind of 'contamination' that might result from daily contact with the natives. A significant element in the colonial ideology of course was the mystery and mystique about the white man, which in turn reinforced that ideology and its manifest power; so the GRAs were in part ideologically necessary for this. But did the Africans need them? As the students neatly evaded the questions that Ulli raised with them while they were still in the college, so did they, when upon graduating and taking up civil service jobs,

ignore the ideology of the GRA and moved into them. Their ubiquitous

presence all over the country was one of the most potent symbols of the privilege and power of the new elite class. Rather than shrink to the point

of disappearance, they have multiplied and expanded. The aim of colonial education in Africa generally was not to transform Afrıca from within, but to radically change the continent by separating the new which came from without from the old and indigenous, with the hope

44

that the latter would in time wither and die away. Spatially, the colonial university in Nigeria was built far away from town, like the colonial GRA. The products of the former maintained the latter even in postcolonial Africa, thus continuing that original sin of colonial separation. Yet Ulli could see that these students were still proper Yoruba or Igbo or Bini, in spite of their stiff opposition, and beneath their cultivation or imitation of Western ways. To him, they displayed their cultural upbringing without realizing it and in spite of themselves. That they were trying their conscious best to lose such identities was particularly heartwrenching to

Ulli for, being a lecturer, he was aware that their efforts only invited a feeling of amused contempt from the Europeans. Indeed, the favourite campus joke among the predominantly European staff went as follows:

Statement: "The University of Ibadan is a wonderful place, except for one thing!"

Question: "What's that?" Answer: "The students." (A perennial joke common

on university campuses

around the world no

doubt, but made by a predominantly white faculty about their predominantly African student population, it had an unsavoury aftertaste that remained in the mouth long after the joke had been enjoyed.)

Ulli felt he had to go beyond arguments in order to make his point, so the first thing he did when he crossed over to the Extramural Studies Department was to introduce those European texts that were very critical of modern Western civilization. To complement this, he also introduced the few African poets (mainly Negritude) that portrayed Africa positively. In his effort to change the content of the curriculum, if not its form, he also introduced texts from North Africa! This was for two reasons. First, the

same questions of modernity versus tradition, of whether it was possible to modernize without Westernizing were already being raised and debated in North Africa, so Ulli thought that texts from that region might persuade his students that there was indeed a problem to be faced and examined. Second, in the absence of texts from the predominantly Muslim Northern Nigeria, North African texts offered the best substitutes for showing what another and very important region of the country was like. For the vast majority of young Southerners, students at the University College

45

inclusive, knew next to nothing about the north. Furthermore, since these students had mistaken notions about Islam, he also wanted to show its intellectual side. In several ways, Ulli was fighting a battle that was already over before he showed up on the battlefield. What he met was the putting up of lasting edifices on territories already conquered and appropriated. While he engaged in these activities at the university, the government in Western Nigeria, led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his very able, very energetic lieutenants in the Action Group, started the Free Primary Education scheme. The staggering aim was to get every child in the region in school within the shortest possible time. Ulli's old friend, S.O. Awokoya, was in charge as Minister of Education. The two engaged in lengthy arguments over the gigantic scheme. Ulli's objection to the scheme was more about its philosophy than about its practicality and logistics. It was noble of the Minister and his ruling party to send every child to school, he argued, but what kind of education would they be getting? What would be the content? Would its recipients still have an ethical centre and reference point by which to guide themselves? Clearly, the Action Group and its brilliant thinkers had not thought much about the philosophical aspects of the gigantic programme. Ulli also asked more concrete questions: What would the thousands of the young people who went through this form of mass education do afterwards? What jobs were waiting for them, or did the honorable Minister expect them to return to the farm? The religious faith in the doctrine of rapid modernization blinded the Minister of Education to the first set of questions. He had received the best of Western education in England — this was why, afterall, he was put in charge of Education in a very progressive, so-called scientifically-minded government. Yet his answer to the second remains a study in executive and political cynicism and frightening in its implications. When everybody became literate, the Minister prophesied, many would have no choice but to return to the farm! Of course, the prediction never came to pass (it could

never have); meanwhile something invaluable had been taken away from

the people, replaced by an unthinking type of education. Worse, perhaps because of the political motives that fuelled it, the contradictions inherent in the policy were never seen, or if seen, were simply brushed aside. For example, the policy was supposed to raise the value of education by

46

making it available to more and more people, but the very process of expansion weakened its value. First, the number of educated people who needed salaried jobs increased at a rate faster than government could create

Job opportunities. Massive unemployment and underemployment were the

immediate results. Second, the expansion diluted the quality of education provided. In combination, these two consequences produced two contradictory attitudes to Western education in the Yoruba society of the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the one hand its failure to fulfill all the

touted

promises

produced

disappointment

and

mockery,

sentiments

expressed in an immensely popular song by the most successful juju musician of the day (2). On the other hand, because acquisition of Western education had so rapidly become the only means of access to state power (plus the wealth and/or physical amenities easily gained therefrom), it became a felt necessity that parents must give their siblings if they were to have a fighting chance in the new socio-political order.

Thus,

understood

purely

as the agency

that brought

olaju,

education

became recognized, and valued more, as a survival strategy. In this form, it

turned into a tool for understanding, grappling with, and controlling the conditions of personal success in an environment where more and more similarly educated people struggled for less and less of the state's resources. Education rapidly lost its power and potency either as a morally stabilizing

force or as an agency of socio-political transformation that it was hoped it would be. All in all, an almost irreparable damage was being deliberately done and Ulli felt appalled. His thoughts about the ravages on the ethical fabric of

the Yoruba society he was daily witnessing then were recently restated as follows (Femi Abodunrin, 1996; 22):

The late K.C. Murray used to point out that the Colonial Education Ordinance started with the sentence: "Education is an instrument of change". The implication is clear. Education was not a means of widening people's horizon. It was not attempting to build on what was there already. It was a matter of discarding everything you had, suspending any belief you ever held, disowning every kind of

wisdom

you

ever

held

and

embracing

adaptation — somebody else's lifestyle.

— wholesale

and

without

"Education as an instrument of change" was an article of faith bought lock, stock and barrel and drummed into every Yoruba parent and child. It was 47

pursued with a kind of fanaticism that even the worst of the colonialsupremacists, or the most intemperate iconoclastic missionaries, would have baulked at. And like all extremist goals, its long-term effects have been at best mixed, at worst more destructive than constructive. At the heart of Ulli's concerns and his arguments was the relationship of Western education to African culture(s). S.O. Awokoya and the Action Group party, as well as the students in the university and those still aspiring to go in, had all virtually accepted the implicit universalizing process of colonialism. Narrowly understood only in its Western manifestations and results, 'education' was what Africa did not have, which it must now have, and which therefore must replace everything African with everything European. This could only happen at the superficial levels, so the Yoruba people were fast, happily and thoughtlessly exchanging their deeply-rooted centre for superficial gains. The tragic results of this lopsided bargain would not begin to manifest themselves until much later but, in the meantime, the heedless rush to "modernize" through Western education was on at every level and unstoppable. It never occurred to anybody that Western education could be indigenized, or that African and European cultures could be made to interact rather than clash. These were Ulli's complaints and arguments, but they fell on deaf ears or met with hostile incomprehension. It was not all negative people, however, at the University College Ibadan. Many of those in the Geography department went regularly on climbing expeditions and had friends in the villages around Ibadan. With one of them, John Pugh, Ulli climbed Ado Rock a number of times. There were other excellent people like Professors Samson (a botanist) and Alexander Brown of the Medicine Faculty. Both were deeply committed to the university and found it extremely difficult to retire after years of service. In 1967, Professor Alexander Brown travelled to London on leave; as he

disembarked from the plane, news broke that the much-feared civil war had

started in Nigeria. Right there at Heathrow Airport, he booked himself on the next available plane back to Nigeria. But above all, Ulli considered

himself lucky to have met two people, both of who in their different ways

combined to influence his life and change its direction permanently. The first was Robert Gardiner, Lorenzo Turner was the other.

48

Robert Gardiner was in charge of the Extramural Department of the university and initially its only teaching-and-administrative staff. A man from the then Gold Coast, he had been on the panel that interviewed Ulli in London. Ulli has captured (1993; 3) his first impression of him memorably: Robert Gardiner "was one of the blackest Africans I had ever seen. His skin glowed with a rich, velvety warmth. His expression was wistful, yet

purposeful, like that of a man who is left with few illusions but determined not to be got down by (them)." Now in Ibadan and under less formal circumstances, Ulli found that he could talk to him at a different level; that their worries, concerns and ideas coincided. Both worried about how

poorly the students in the university were being prepared for the imminent self-rule; both thought all students should be given some knowledge of how parliamentary democracy works; and both sought different ways of putting the university's resources at the service of the now imminent political change. It was almost inevitable that Gardiner would sooner, rather than later bring Ulli over to the Extramural Studies department. On Gardiner's influence on him through the programme, Ulli has written (1993; p.14) as follows: "I might have remembered Ibadan as a slightly weird and perhaps even

entertaining interlude in my life but I would probably have ended up returning to London and my handicapped children if it hadn't been for Robert Gardiner." Robert

Gardiner

not

only

had

a sympathetic

ear

for his

increasing

dissatisfaction with the massive, systematic and apparently successful brainwashing that he considered to be going on all around him in the

college, he also shared Ulli's ideas about what could and should be done. So very soon, he started inviting Ulli to teach and help show films in the

Extramural

classes.

The

Extramural

Studies

was

to

a sort

programme

then

at

the

University College was modelled on the British Workers Educational Movement that had started in Britain after the war and succeeded very well. The

idea

at

Ibadan

set

up

of general

education

and

enlightenment classes which workers could attend to learn about democracy, its various necessary institutions and how they work; about the rest of the world and their place in it; etc. It was, in short, a programme set up to broaden horizons generally and prepare ordinary Nigerians for the big

change from dependency to autonomy. Hence the various summer school

49

programmes on Local Government, Journalism, Parliamentary Democracy, etc. The summer school was not an extra-curricular activity but one of the essential functions of the department. Its normal classes were initially restricted to Ibadan, then extended to Abeokuta, then to farther-off places like Osogbo, and eventually to still farther places like Benin and Agbor.

The programme, in short, offered an opportunity to travel around, meet a wider variety of people, see places both formally and informally. So, characteristically, Ulli jumped at Robert Gardiner's invitation, without knowing how far it would lead him, what other doors it would open, or even what he might meet. In any case it was an alternative to the narrow life on the campus, which afforded him a regular breath of fresh air away from its stifling atmosphere. Ulli's first teaching assignment was in Abeokuta. Although the town was less than two hours drive from Ibadan in those days, and although he held his classes in the evening, Ulli would go in the morning and spend the whole day wandering around, climbing the famous rocks that gave that city its name. He roamed the city endlessly, visited Ake (the palace of the Alake) to look at all the palace carvings, sat for hours just watching carvers (some of who had done most of the carvings in the palace) at work, without asking questions. He also became quite friendly with the very Reverend Ransome-Kuti and visited him regularly. A man also in the forefront of rapid education in the Western Region, Reverend Ransome-Kuti was then Principal of Abeokuta Grammar School and a very important public figure with a lot of political weight in Abeokuta politics. Ulli found him to be a very flamboyant man and very interesting to talk to. He found, too, that beneath his very sincere Christianity and Western ways, there still resided a dignity that was recognizably Yoruba but which, sadly enough, he would not have admitted to if reminded of. One day a nurse from the University Teaching Hospital asked if Ulli could please stop by at the Lantoro Mental Home (in Abeokuta) to deliver cigarettes to an inmate there by the name Godwin. He did, and found the place most depressing. The premises was originally an army barracks, all

grey cement buildings completely surrounded by a barbed-wire relieving feature inside except a lone tree right in the middle. He the inmates' life to be as dull and dismal as their surrounding. occupational therapy was weaving coconut fibre mats. Godwin 50

fence; no also found Their only himself —

who Ulli found to be a charming and attractive man — took him round, showing little or no signs of grave mental illness about him. The asylum contained mentally ill patients as well as those who had simply committed serious or inexplicable crimes.

In the course of his weekly visits to the Home, Ulli reflected very much on its situation and came to the conclusion that it was the most concrete and tragic symptom of colonialism in Africa. Britain had its own concepts and definitions of sanity/insanity, normality/abnormality, and African societies

had their own, which could not have coincided on every point with those of the British. Likewise, the techniques of reintegrating people who had committed serious crimes, or were judged to be insane, also differed.

However, the logic of imperialism dictated that Britain impose its own

definitions, concepts, and operations of madness, crime and punishment, law and order on alien peoples. In the process, very many individuals were

left floundering for ever in the void created by such superimpositions.

There was an Igbo man in the asylum, sent there by a British magistrate for committing murder. The details of what really happened did not make the case one of straightforward homicide or even insanity. He had been assaulted while masked during a masquerade ceremony in his village. The

man who assaulted him had even committed further sacrilege by attempting to unmask him. In the circumstances, the masked man had no choice but to kill his assailant. His community no doubt understood this and, left alone to

deal with it, would have found ways to expiate it — the man would certainly not have been declared insane. But, not understanding the religious

circumstances of the crime, the British magistrate could not understand the crime either, so he declared him insane and sent him to Lantoro. There the

poor man existed in a cruel state of nothingness for several years before he died. Ulli met several people with a similar fate at Lantoro.

By the end of his trip on the first day, Ulli was almost as depressed as the environment and its inmates. As the British doctor in charge of the place was seeing him off, he asked if he could come back. He himself was as surprised by his own request as Dr Cameron, who asked what for. So, on the spur of the moment, he replied that he would like to bring back paints and brushes to see if any of the inmates might like to paint. The genial doctor saw no harm in that so Ulli became a regular visitor to the home.

51

Gradually, many of the inmates began to respond enthusiastically to the experiment. Something different was happening to their ill-fated life and to their monotonous and dreary existence in the mental home-turned-prison. As they began to express their innermost feelings through simple, very

unsophisticated art, they cheered up. Ulli kept up the visit for eighteen

months and through him, the quality of the inmates’ life changed. They renewed their contact with the outside world in other ways, for he carried messages back and forth between them and their relatives outside. He went further: he had an exhibition of their paintings in the corridor of the university library in 1952, which he titled "Luckless Heads". This is also the title of the bilingual (German and English) book on the artists and their paintings which he published eventually in 1982 (3). And so began his involvement with the arts in Nigeria, by accident and in circumstances that most ordinary people, if asked to try, would have rejected as totally hopeless or inauspicious. But although it happened by accident, the ‘accident’ itself fell into the pattern of all the others that had characterized his life; more, the whole endeavour in all its aspects also falls into a pattern typical of Ulli. The belief — put into practice again and again — that no matter how down and out an individual or group 1s, some innately human spark of creativity is still smouldering somewhere, and that all you have to do is to help the person or group rediscover it and make it flame. He believed that "even the most difficult child can be relaxed from time to time and even the most hopeless situation can be solved through the magic notion of 'culture'. Get the person interested in anything — music, books, flowers, animals, theatre, and its life will take a positive turn." This was his attitude to the disabled children he so successfully taught in London. It was also the implicit basis of his quarrel with the education being given then at the University College, throughout the primary and secondary levels of education in Nigeria, and massively by the ruling party in Western Nigeria. It was an education without any cultural, humanizing and harmonizing centre. The young boys who would become known as the Osogbo artists were neither problem kids nor "luckless" adults, but they fall into the group, for the prevalent educational system in Nigeria then effectively 'disabled' them.

Secondly, that he should have spontaneously thought of introducing art to the inmates also falls into pattern. From the beginning of his life Ulli lived 52

a life surrounded by art and music — he experienced them not in galleries and halls, but at home. Music was performed at home weekly; he has never slept, and can never sleep, in a room without pictures hanging on the walls. And so wherever he went, he has not only surrounded himself with both, but sought to make others create them for themselves and their society

when he saw the possibilities. His life has been one long uninterrupted marriage to the arts, metaphorically and literally; literally in more ways and times than one. Third is his instinctive seeking out of those whom Western

education would have passed over and buried in unrealized potentials and insignificance — those whom the colonial system everywhere marginalised or completely turned into outsiders. The greatest victims of this were (and

still are) the traditional artists, practitioners, and carriers of various aspects of African cultures.

It was also through his teaching of Extramural classes that Ulli got his first, teasing introduction to the complexity of Yoruba religion and cosmology. In the process

of teaching

classes

in various

locations,

he must

have

mentioned that he had taught problem children before in London. The Head

of the Nursing School at the College Hospital heard about it and invited

him to give a talk to her students on the subject. He had his doubts about the usefulness of his London experience in Nigeria, especially as the kinds

of social upheavals which created those children in London were as of that time still absent in Nigeria. He went anyway, and in the process of exchanging ideas with the nurses, one of them mentioned the abiku

phenomenon (an abiku child is of course the archetypal Yoruba 'problem child’). He heard stories about abiku from the nurses (one of them actually claimed to be one); but the more he heard, the more fascinated he became

with the phenomenon as well as with the world view that lay behind it. Soon he started asking other and older people about it.

Robert Gardiner had a free hand in employing his part-time teachers for the Extramural classes and Ulli made sure he got as many classes as he could, in different places. Ulli had earlier hinted that he would love to cross over to the Extramural Studies department fully if there was a vacancy. Then

one day in June 1951, Gardiner told him that a full-time position was now

open. Ulli resigned the next day from the English department. Upon receiving his resignation, Dr Mellanby actually came to his house to advise

him against the move:

as far as he knew, no new position had been 53

established for Extramural Studies and Ulli might soon find himself jobless. Dr Mellanby did like Ulli (the feeling was mutual, but he thought that Dr Mellanby liked him because he really was too insignificant in the place to merit any strong reaction one way or the other) and gave him that advice because he really did not want to see the young man jobless, ending his university career barely before it started. But the possibility of a loss of job could not dissuade Ulli from discontinuing to teach what he did not believe in. It was indeed true that the University had not established a new position in the Extramural Studies department, but he believed that if Gardiner had promised him a job, then a job did exist. Robert Gardiner himself was meanwhile out of town, so the mystery did not clear up for some weeks. When he returned, it turned out that what he had done actually was to persuade the three regional governments in the federation to establish the position of Regional Tutor in their respective regions. So Ulli became the Regional Tutor for Western Nigeria. Along with it came other very welcomed prerequisites: he could locate his headquarters anywhere in the region; he had an official vehicle to travel around in and organize the classes and their tutors; he got promoted to Lecturer II. Hating the campus more intensely everyday, he wanted to move out immediately. Then Susanne came down with tuberculosis. As the cure in those days necessitated staying permanently in bed for almost six months, they could not move. At the earliest moment after her recovery, they moved out. Lorenzo Turner (4) was the other man in the University College who exercised perhaps the most positive and crucial influence on Ulli then. Through the Extramural classes, he sustained and enlarged his social contacts with many Yoruba people at virtually all levels. Lorenzo Turner gave spiritual depth to this by introducing him to the culture. Almost fifty years later, Ulli could still write (1993; 20) of him as follows: It was Lorenzo Turner who first opened my eyes to the marvels of Yoruba culture, to its complexities and compelling beauty. Lorenzo Turner surviving African where lived small large vocabulary

was an elderly African-American who had studied languages in the Gulla islands off the coast of Florida, communities of slave descendants who still retain(ed) a — mainly Yoruba — of African languages. Turner had

collected these linguistic evidences and many

54

stories from several old

women.

He had then gone to Cuba

folklore

too.

Now,

he

was

to collect more

in Nigeria

on

Yoruba

sabbatical

stories and

from

Chicago

University for the academic year of 1951-1952, to collect still more. He

also wanted to compare materials from both worlds, as well as to play back the materials from the African Diaspora to Yoruba students in Nigeria to see what the two societies still had in common and/or how far they had grown apart. He attached himself to Ulli and played the recordings in his

classes. It was a delight to both each time they found that, in spite of the

intervening great distances in time and space, the young students, whose knowledge of Yoruba folklore and even language had begun to decline,

understood the materials fairly well. Lorenzo Turner was an impassioned ethnologist fully committed to what he studied; to him, studying the survival of Yoruba culture in the new world was more than a matter of academic interest. The only person in the

university then who believed in the existence of something called African culture, he spoke with absolute passion about it, believed and lived it even more passionately. Whenever he spoke about it, he would start shedding tears. He saw the poverty of the Gulla islands women and felt it keenly; but he also saw their spiritual power and the richness of their inner lives. Most of all, he was painfully aware that all were vanishing. And yet that spiritual power and inner life was, he felt, the essence of Africa and source of her dignity. As he felt that such essence and dignity were still recoverable, he

was not just a collector who sought to preserve, but one who also preached and inspired others. Ulli was immensely inspired, to the point where he felt

that Lorenzo Turner's mission, and not the university, was what life was about.

In December 1951, Lorenzo Turner and Ulli went on a trip to Dahomey (now Republic of Benin). Together they did more recordings in the market at Ilu Ajase (Porto Novo), from where they proceeded on to Abomey to see

the palace and its marvellous reliefs. From there Turner went on to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to meet Kwame

Nkrumah while Ulli cycled to

Ketu, then walked to Meko. The trip afforded him a glimpse of another kind of European colonialism in Africa. The French had reduced the oba of Ketu,

the Alaketu,

to something

called chef de la famille royale.

They

governed the town directly through an appointed commandant, who in turn had the power to appoint a chef de village. The sole business of this 55

African. functionary of the empire lay in conveying orders from le Commandant to the people. It was all so different from the British system in Nigeria where some respect was still accorded to Yoruba obas. Ulli had never seen anywhere in Nigeria the level and kind of poverty he saw in Ketu. The place was visibly crumbling. The famous pillars of the palace of Alaketu had been uprooted and, if you wanted to see them, you would have to go to Paris. Mercifully, the marvellous city gates still stood — a rarity then, for all other Yoruba towns had somehow lost theirs. While slowly making his way back to Nigeria, Ulli arrived in a tiny village called Ilara at night and was taken to the village school teacher. He slept in a beautifully polished mudhouse — the type quite common in those days in Benin City — that was cool and comfortable. The next morning, while it was still fairly dark, he was woken up by a persistent 'swish, swish, swish' sound. Wondering what it was, he peeped out of the window and was met by the sight of women sweeping the streets. When daylight came and he went out, the streets were immaculately clean and full of beautiful patterns made by the brooms. But then, Ilara was still in the bush. By-passed by the helter-skelter race to ‘modernize’ that was going on in much of the rest of Yoruba society (in Nigeria), it had also, up till that moment, escaped all the ugly side-effects of that rush. Accessible only by foot or bicycle, [lara gave Ulli an idea of life in Yoruba towns and villages perhaps even just fifty years before: communal cooperation and work to produce a clean environment; calm and

dignity; integrity of culture and daily life. By the 1950s, even with the

presence of the British and their busy local sanitary inspectors, Yoruba towns were already becoming very dirty; crudity and roughness were already creeping in slowly but inexorably into social life; modern vulgarities already vying with the traditional ethics. Like any other European who cared to look, Ulli still found a lot that was wonderful and

wholesome in the environment. Any other foreigner paying a casual visit, and who cared, would still have found much that was original and exhilarating, but he might also be troubled by the ugliness seeping in already. Now Ilara afforded Ulli a glimpse of where the wonder and the beauty all came from and how it all was. He felt lucky and grateful to that little Yoruba village in the middle of nowhere that he stumbled upon in the middle of the night. 56

Walking back from Ketu across the Nigerian border towards Meko, Ulli realized at last that he "had found a spiritual home." He could not as yet know what depth and richness he would find, but he knew intuitively — that it was a matter of time (1993; 20):

I knew that I was merely standing on the threshold, that I was ignorant of the real essence of the culture and would probably never fathom its deeper meaning. But in an inexplicable way I felt at home in this context. In this society I felt an ease and contentment never experienced in Europe. I had not so much the desire to study it or analyse it asto be a part of it. Now

he knew

what

to look

for, where

and how

to search

for it. His

initiation was complete. That Ulli made that journey almost alone, with little preparation and minimum aid, as well as in the teeth of hostility from the new elite class, and benign indifference from the University community, is remarkable; that he has tirelessly and successfully sought to make others enter that home too is even more so.

NOTES 1. For the description of the shrine, see Leo Frobenius, Berlin 1912, pp.44-45.

Und Afrika Sprach,

2. The actual words of this musician (I.K. Dairo), first beaten on the talking drum and then spoken rather than sung, were: o l’emi o mo'we o oni'we mewa n 'se lebira n Ikeja o l'emi omo 'we o ise owoo mi mo nje

oro 'we ko la wi ebi ni o soro fun alakowe di tie m’orun (she says I am not educated/but there are now secondary school graduates doing menial jobs in Ikeja (the first industrial area of Lagos)/l eat out of the sweat of my brow/who is talking of education here?/when hunger stares him in the face/our educated friend will remove his tie) (and engage in manual labour). Implied in the last four lines of the song are that education makes for laziness and some form of dishonesty.

57

3. Ulli Beier, Zuckless Heads: Paintings by de-ranged Nigerians, Bremen: CON, 1982 4. Lorenzo Turner came from the University of Chicago and returned there after his sabbatical. Most unusually, Ulli lost contact with him thereafter.

58

CHAPTER II OSOGBO N'ILE ARO - PRIESTS, KINGS AND FRIENDS It was that young man's singular fortune (thanks to age, education, character, and an inability to accept a negative world) to be so free of his era as to be almost exiled from time — and be able, therefore, to be truly contemporary. That is, a contemporary not only of limitless contemporaneity but, in actual deeds, of the new men, the

little men, the obscure men with whom he had the good luck to live, mature, and achieve self-knowledge. Carlo Levi

Ulli and Susanne wasted no time in moving out of Ibadan as soon as she had recovered from her illness by October 1951. As the Regional Tutor for the Extramural Studies programme of the University College Ulli could

live anywhere he chose to in the entire region. He did not consider moving

into Ibadan comprehend town east of them the top

town at all because he felt the place was simply too big to and grasp. Rather, he chose Ede, a medium-sized Yoruba Ibadan and quite close to Osogbo. There the Timi of Ede gave floor of a house on the main road, very close to oja oba (the

king's market) and the palace. Thus, even if Ulli did not know it, his quest started in the right place. The location of the house made him a part of the Ede community. It also situated him, practically and symbolically, at the heart of two institutions culture: the market and from 1951 to 1954, and intellectually rewarding

that are central to the oba institution. struck up a warm, as it was spiritually

Yoruba socio-political life and Ulli saw Timi Laoye everyday lifelong friendship that was as stimulating.

The closeness to the two institutions right from the start would characterize

and guide all his subsequent relationships and activities. It would direct him to the other institutions, and give his understanding of the life around him an intimacy that no amount of painstaking academic research could ever give. From this geographical as well as symbolic centre of Ede, he

could see and get to know, literally, everybody as they passed through the

market in their daily rounds. The daily night-market was also an occasion

to see the community more in its social than commercial aspects, and be a part of it. He was also physically close to the oba and the palace - the centre of communal political power — and was therefore in a vantage position to behold how the old traditional power games were played out, as well as how the new was already reshaping (more accurately, distorting) that institution. From Ede he moved to Ilobu in 1954, a move that would complete his close association with all the Yoruba cultural institutions that mattered. While his friendship with Timi Laoye grew, he was also developing another kind of friendship with the olorisa at Ilobu. This was friendship at the psychic level, permanent, very intense, and therefore more profound in its effects on Ulli. He moved to Ilobu so as to be closer to the priests and priestesses of the various orisa. The house he moved into was quite charming, as was the general situation in Ilobu; but by 1958 he had to move again. Not long after his arrival in the town, Ilobu people thought to give their town a befitting mosque, so they taxed themselves heavily to raise the money. It went down into the deep pockets of the oba's voluminous gowns, but no mosque rose up. The gentleman simply used the levies to buy himself a big American car. More incomprehensible still to Ulli was the reaction of the people to such unconscionable theft. At first they were angry, but when they saw that their oba was now riding around in a car larger than that of the oba of the rival (but bigger and more prosperous) town Osogbo, they became proud of his 'achievement.' An oba should be the guardian of communal values and repository of tradition, Ulli was convinced, but that particular Muslim Olobu could just barely tolerate traditional religion. Ulli could not be friends with such a crooked and cynical man who, as far as he could see, was too much of a businessman and too little of an oba. The Olobu's behaviour was only one of the reasons why Ulli moved to Osogbo in 1958, however. Another was that he had started working closely with Bakare Gbadamosi, the young man in Osogbo whom he had employed as translator and interpreter. He was also becoming quite friendly with Ataoja Adenle and already visiting Duro Ladipo at his bar. Then one day

he saw the house at 41 Ibokun Road! It was in the Brazilian style then

popular in Lagos as a status symbol, though still just a shell — no windows, 60

no

water,

no

electricity

supply,

no

ceiling

on

the

top

floor.

Ulli

immediately saw all the possibilities of its big size, all the uses to which he could put so much space. He liked it instantly and, upon inquiry, found that by some

happy

coincidence

it was

being built by his friend's (Bakare)

father. The gentleman had been the baba kekere to the previous Ataoja. When that one died, the baba kekere lost his position, money soon ran out, and the ambitious project stood in danger of never being finished. Ulli asked Dr Parry (the Vice Chancellor of the University) to come and look at it. Dr Parry agreed to rent the house for Ulli on behalf of the university, as the official quarters of the Extramural Studies department, for twenty-four pounds

a month,

half of which

Ulli was

to pay.

Because

the cost of

renovations amounted to 2500 pounds (a lot of money in those days), the landlord agreed to let the house rent-free for ten years. Then, when the house was completed and Ulli moved in, baba kekere came

one day to complain. He was old, he said, and might not outlive the agreement as it stood, which meant he would personally never see any

returns. Ulli sympathized with the old man and went back to Dr Parry to see if the agreement could be renegotiated. Surprisingly again, Dr Parry understood. The lease agreement was rewritten and the old man was to collect twelve pounds monthly for the first twenty years. It was a truly generous agreement. More so as nobody in 1958 could have known that

Ulli would leave Nigeria at the end of 1966, or that should he do so before the end of the lease, nobody would replace him at Osogbo. Anyhow, with Ulli's departure in 1966, Susanne (who was not an employee of the

university) became the beneficiary of the agreement, for she was allowed to live rent-free in the big house for twelve more years.

Osogbo in those days was a provincial headquarters. It had a railway station which had very early turned it into the commercial nerve centre of a densely populated area of mid-north eastern Yoruba country. But although

a commercial centre that could also boast of some trappings of a modern

urban centre, the town was essentially still a semi-rural, agrarian community with a leisurely pace of life. As in most Yoruba towns, the

majority of the inhabitants were still engaged in farming and the traditional crafts. Indeed, Osogbo had more to be proud of in terms of tradition and history then: the home of the famous Osun deity whose grand annual

61

festival was celebrated with gusto, colourful processions and improvised songs; an equally famous indigo-dyeing industry. A place where the rain forest and the savannah meet, Osogbo and its environs was also the war zone in which was fought, towards the end of the

19th century, one of the major battles of the Yoruba civil war that raged

throughout the century. The war swelled the population of the town with migrants from neighbouring Ekiti, Igbomina and Ijesa subethnic groups. Any person looking to immerse himself in Yoruba culture could not have chosen a more central location, for the calendar of festivals in the neighbouring towns and villages was as full and varied as it was interesting: the highly charged and mysterious Sango festivals in Osogbo and Ede; the Sango and Egungun elewe festivals in Ila-Orangun; the Obatala and Otin festivals in Otan-Ayegbaju; the Obatala festival in Ede, the edi ritual and olojo festival in Ile-Ife, and many more in the smaller towns, all within a day's journey from Osogbo. For a peripatetic man and teacher like Ulli, there was always somewhere to go, a festival to see for the first or umpteenth time. No wonder Osogbo in the early 1950s was also already the centre of the still eembryonic Yoruba cultural reawakening: it was home to Kola Ogunmola, one of the three great figures of the Yoruba travelling theatre, and to Oyin Adejobi, one of its earliest and longest-surviving practitioners. Both were already creating big impressions, and soon to be joined by Duro Ladipo, a native son like Adejobi. About six bars which also doubled as restaurants and nightclubs provided a semblance of modern social life and catered for the sizable population of clerical workers, primary and secondary school teachers, and members of the business class who loved night life. One of the popular bars in Osogbo then was the Cafe de Paris, owned by an Osogbo man from Iyadudu compound. Somehow, the young man had found his way into the French Army and while in Ivory Coast had met a French lady, Madame Suzanne, who ran a bar in Abidjan. They married

and he demobilized from the French Army. Both came to Osogbo to settle

down and start another bar. A white woman running a bar in the mid 1950s and who called everybody oko mi (my husband) was a sensation. Ulli was a

62

regular at Café de Paris and became a sort of ‘agony uncle' to the French lady, as he was the only one with whom she could converse in French. By far the most popular night spot in Osogbo

in those days was Gemini

Bar. It belonged to an old Lebanese popularly called baba ibeji (he had twin

daughters),

who

made

sure

that

a good

band

was

around

every

weekend to play music. One of the bands that played regularly was E.K. Ogunmola's. Ogunmola had started out as a primary school teacher in AdoEkiti, but was also doing theatre on the side. Then he transferred to Osogbo to continue both occupations and when he had no theatre engagement at the weekend, converted his actors into musicians.

Gemini Bar was located opposite the CMS bookshop and an adire (tie-dye) textile market. In the centre of the bar was a large round table around which everybody sat, with baba ibeji himself presiding. The regular patrons were mostly

government

clerks,

teachers,

businessmen

and

the

occasional

policeman. Men brought their ladies occasionally, but there were no tarts — Osogbo was too sedate for that in those days. Two other regulars were one

Mr Akinnola who ran a petrol station, and a school teacher and son of a reverend of the Anglican Church. The reverend held the important traditional office and chieftaincy title of Bobagunwa of Osogbo. When he died in 1963, Ulli became the new Bobagunwa. Mama ibeji was old, thin and bent, but she made wonderful roasted chicken that all the patrons of Gemini Bar relished very much and consumed in great quantities. The ibeji (twins) themselves had perfectly white skin, combed their hair tightly back, and dressed with the severity of nuns. They sat in a corner, absolutely silent, immobile and expressionless throughout

all the nightly revels that went on around them. They were totally unapproachable and baba ibeji forbade anybody to go near them. This only accentuated the keen interest everybody

had in them though,

and many

came to Gemini Bar night after night in the hope of breaching the formidable walls of protection one day. Baba ibeji himself was an eccentric man who drank a lot and became drunk after a while. In this state he became jolly, inviting people to dance with his daughters: "C'mmon, c'mmon,

dance

with

my

daughters,"

he

would

command,

and

people

eagerly obeyed. But by the time that particular dance was over, he would have had a couple of beers more. Then he became nasty and shouted at those dancing with the girls: "You bastards, you want to fuck my 63

daughters!" Often, the night ended at the police station, for he would have thrown an empty bottle or two. He would sleep it all off the whole of the following day and not show up at all at the bar. Then he bounced back the

night after and the whole thing would start all over again. All these were

part of the appeal and excitement of Gemini Bar. Its faithful patrons loved it alland came back night after night. When Ulli was in Nigeria was ill in the hospital in had had cancer of the leg pain. When Ulli saw him

for a conference in 1970, he heard that baba ibeji Ibadan and went to see him. It turned out that he all these years and was drinking so hard to kill the in the hospital, the leg had been amputated. Still

his old ebullient self, baba ibeji joked about his illness, warning Ulli: "Don't tell anybody because by the time I return I will have been fixed with an artificial leg and nobody will know." Baba ibeji never returned, for soon after he died there in the hospital. His twin daughters married Nigerians.

Then Duro Ladipo opened his own Popular Bar and what a sensation it caused, for his very beautiful, grown-up twin sisters served in it! Ulli's Extramural classes in those days covered all the towns from Iwo at one end to Igbajo and Ila-Orangun at the other. He would come back late at night, stop by at Duro's bar to unwind and talk with him, before going home to sleep. Gradually he got so used to the place that he could not think of relaxing anywhere else. Duro himself was a curious person who wanted to know all that Ulli knew, and opened all subjects for discussion. Gradually, he became one of Ulli's two main friends (the Ataoja being the other) and both saw each other everyday. For three years, all that Ulli knew about Duro was that he ran his own bar in the afternoon and was manager of Ajax Cinema at night; he had no idea his friend was into music at all. The idea of a theatre did not come until much later. For Ulli, Osogbo was home. He was involved in the everyday social life of the community as anybody could possibly be. He was a full citizen with all the responsibilities of an acknowledged influential person in the town. He settled quarrels between friends, bailed people out of police cells any time of day or night, and generally helped in any way he could. He became part of the community because, right from the beginning, he had been

responding to something in the society generally: a social ethos and organization so different in many ways from European ones. Rather than cocoon himself in a European style of living ‘among the natives' he became

64

a part of his environment, all without 'going native,' or exoticizing the 'native.' This was done with conviction because he assessed life around him in its own terms — as well as on its own merits — and found much that was good and reasonable in it.

Ulli was not quite a year old in Nigeria when he moved out of the isolated 'ivory tower' of the university campus to Ede. From there he went out to

other towns to hold or organize his classes, often having any of the towns. After his first class at Igbajo one night, took him to 'oke D.O.' where he would spend the night. restful place, and cheap too. As the class secretary was casually observed: night, don't worry. for granted that the the contrast struck

to pass the night in the class secretary It was a beautiful, leaving, he rather

"By the way, if you hear anybody on the verandah at It's not a thief, just the local lunatic." The teacher took it idea of a lunatic so close by would not disturb him and Ulli: in Europe, most people would be more worried

about a lunatic hanging around than a thief! He was even more impressed

when

he thought further about the matter: here is a society in which a

lunatic is not only tolerated but even allowed his own large measure of freedom! His mind also went back to the contrasting treatment of those wretched souls at Lantoro Mental Home. He was to come across more and

more of such little humane attitudes which cumulatively general picture of the kind of society he lived in.

gave him

a

Ulli learnt much about Yoruba society not by reading or researching, but simply by watching and experiencing. "Everything just happened in front of my verandah," was his way of putting it. In the West there was a widely held opinion that African women were forced into arranged marriages, that

they had no personalities of their own. Looking out of his verandah at Ilobu

and Ede, or down from the balcony of his house at Osogbo and watching so many women just engaged in normal daily activities, he realised that this was another of those European prejudices. What Ulli saw, and marvelled

at, was the poise and confidence with which the women went about their business. Instead of depressed 'beasts of burden,’ he saw women

with an

extraordinary sense of business acumen, whose control of the markets gave them tremendous political influence. From his verandah or balcony, he noticed that women's

faces expressed strong individuality and calm self-

assurance. There was also the fact that they rose to the highest ranks in the

65

religious cults, which meant that the personality came from something inside.

specific

strength,

character

and

Ulli observed these qualities even in little girls, especially those who assisted their mothers in the markets or hawked things around in trays. One night he happened to be passing through Iwo and stopped to have a drink at a little general goods stall. A little girl of about twelve came in, untied her opoo and poured out from it money in pounds, shillings and pence, all totalling one hundred pounds. Then she said: "I want so many cartons of Bicycle, so many of Players, and I have ... so much left. Alright, you can give me so many boxes of matches for that." She had totalled up every thing in her head, down to the last penny, and without any mistake! She collected the various items, arranged them in her tray, and went about her brisk trade. And she was just one of so many like her, all moving around in the market, all knowing their trade. None of these many young girls could read or write, but their self-confidence and sense of responsibility were evident. And they carried on trade in whatever they specialized in, in their own right! All the way home that night, Ulli thought to himself: "Now here we are creating a dependent society with our so-called education. All we are doing to these people, really, is to help them lose the qualities I have seen in this little girl tonight, and so many like her, to lose the qualities of iwa and ifarabale that are a part of their own education and that I see all around me." That night, he kept asking himself: "What gives this little girl so much self-confidence? How did she acquire it? Where has it come from?" Even though he had been in the country for a couple of years and interacted with many people, he had no answer yet, but was determined to find out. While still living in Ilobu, a town with dozens of shrines and hundreds of

carvings in them, Ulli had already formed a close friendship with the

magba Sango and the priests of Soponna and their drummer (1). As the three towns of Erin-Osun, Ilobu and Ifon were quite close to each other, he

had many places and people to visit with minimum travelling. So for many hours everyday, he different shrines.

sat down

with

the priests

and

priestesses

in their

In each town where he started Extramural classes in those days, the first thing he did was to visit the oba, inform him of the programme about to

66

start in his domain, and seek his support. This was what first took him to Ede in 1951, and the occasion of his first meeting with Timi Laoye. On that preliminary visit, the Timi was very enthusiastic and asked Ulli to come

back in a week for the first meeting. That meeting took place in the town library and the oba himself attended, sat down among his subjects like any other student, and came unfailingly to every class for a whole year thereafter. When that meeting ended and Ulli was already driving off in his car, somebody waved him to a stop, ran up to him and handed over a basket of yams and eggs: a present from the oba. Ulli was to discover later

that this diplomatic way of making presents was typical of that generation, for he experienced it again with Shetima Kashim, on another occasion and in another part of the country. They did not want you to have to thank them, so the present would be made after you had bidden goodbye and were on your way. Upon settling down to his classes at Ede, the first thing

Ulli did was to help the local council spend its annual library vote of fıfty pounds, money that had never been used before.

It was the Timi of Ede who gave Ulli the big support he needed at the initial stage. He chose to settle in Ede because of Timi Laoye, ate his first typical Yoruba pepperish meal with him (which revitalized him), and saw him everyday for the next two years. Ulli merely sat like everybody else with the oba in his throne room and watched all the goings-on: how he settled quarrels brought before him; how he related to ordinary people and distinguished or titled citizens; how decisions relating to general communal welfare were arrived at by concensus. One of the personalities in the palace

was the iya Sango, Timi Laoye's aunt. Although a custodian of the palace

Sango shrine, she was a completely unpretentious woman who sat in ragged clothing in her dark little shrine. Even then, her humble appearance could not hide the power she radiated, and which everybody felt at first

sight. Iya Sango's knowledge of spiritual matters, traditions and customs was even vaster than that of Timi Laoye himself. When a knotty problem arose in the endless discussions that went on between Ulli and the Timi, she

would be called upon to educate both. Then she would come in and kneel,

or even crouch on the floor. Ulli soon found that taking either of these

positions was a formality that did not reflect the true relationship between

the two. /ya Sango's fiery temper was impressive, but even more so to Ulli

was that so much authority could reside in a person who carried no visible

67

insignia of power. But for a thin string of kele around her neck and wrists,

she displayed no wealth or glamour to indicate her closeness to the throne or high office in the cult. Watching her and appreciating more and more her

spiritual power and great knowledge, Ulli realised the appropriateness of

the Yoruba proverb that aso n'la ko ni eniyan n'la. He was to encounter these attributes of modesty and absence of pretentions again and again in his associations with babalawo and other olorisa later. Ulli also learnt that the palace protocol of kneeling or crouching to speak before an oba did not translate into abject weakness on the part of his subjects at all. From that position many spoke to the exalted man with respect but without fear, traded jokes and laughed without inhibitions. Visiting Timi Laoye and sitting with him at the palace daily, Ulli heard all the daily vexing issues and problems and witnessed how they were patiently tackled. People came freely to voice their grievances or problems; parties to disputes did not need the services of lawyers, for the end of justice was not legalistic rights and wrongs followed by penalties, but reconciliation, peace, harmony. In all the two years of such closeness, Ulli never saw the oba lose his temper once, no matter how aggravating the situation. Infinitely patient, the Timi reduced everything to a smile, seeking only to pacify all parties. Colonial rule had introduced new dimensions of rivalry into the Yoruba oba institution, which meant that rival claims to thrones could no longer be resolved in the old ways but had to be taken to the judicial courts. Such cases usually lasted years before being determined, enough time for the rivalry to have hardened into bitter enemity. Such conflicting claims to the throne had become quite common in Yorubaland and Ede was experiencing one of them while Ulli was there. When this eight-year dispute was finally settled in Timi Laoye's favour, Ulli went to the palace to congratulate his friend. Whatever else he might have expected, it certainly was not that which confronted him when he got there: the two men, until that morning bitter rivals, were sharing a drink! Yet the other man had twice carried his suit to the Privy Council in London; he had even once succeeded in driving Timi Laoye into exile for over a year! Seeing Ulli's disbelief and confusion, Timi Laoye smiled and said: "I have forgiven him, I bear him no grudge. I have given him a chieftaincy title." Ulli learnt there and then that the

68

Yoruba people thought it more important to secure harmony by settling a quarrel than to enjoy personal triumph over an enemy. The Timi in this instance had acted in private life exactly as he always acted in public. It was one more lesson for Ulli in the Yoruba social and

political ethic of reconciliation that got him more interested in the oba institution. He discovered that it was also a fundamental religious principle:

in the Obatala ritual the Timi pays ransom for the ajagemo. If the deities can co-exist, why should not human beings? Although Ulli learnt much by just being in the palace with the Timi, he learnt more from Jimi Laoye himself personally. In his quest, Timi Laoye

in fact became a mentor. He was ever so willing to talk and intimate Ulli with the town's activities, especially the festivals, their calendar, and their purposes. He told Ulli all he knew and introduced him to all the olorisa. The official deity of the Timi used to be Ogun, but at some stage in the

past, Sango supplanted him. According to the legend, one future Timi was born

with

both

palms

closed

into

fists.

When

prised

open,

one

palm

revealed a cowrie shell and the other a thunderbolt celt. These signs were interpreted to mean that the fiery deity of lightning and thunder had claimed that particular future oba. So Sango became the personal deity of that and all future Timi, and gradually the most prominent deity for the whole town. Timi Laoye took the worship of Sango seriously even though

he was a Christian of the Baptist denomination. Indeed, Sango's annual festival brought to a climax all the year's religious festivals in Ede.

Timi Laoye insisted that for Ulli to have access to certain categories of knowledge of Yoruba society, he must be initiated into the ogboni. Ulli was reluctant because he saw things differently, and also because he felt he was not quite ready yet. The oba for his part thought otherwise: for him, ogboni was no more than a council of elders that in former days acted like a

supreme court. Ulli was initiated and discovered, as he had guessed, that ogboni was more than a talking shop for old people. The ogboni was a cult in which every segment of society was represented,

except being a a kind Yoruba

the war chiefs. All senior olorisa were members — membership precondition for receiving certain titles in the orisa cults. It acted as of supreme court in the old days because it was one of the few political institutions where concensus could be reached. Yoruba

69

city-states were somewhat like the ancient Greek polis, ın that each city was by and large autonomous, with hegemony shifting according to the vagaries of military strength and ascendancy. People lived in walled cities, but were mostly farmers whose fields could be ten kilometres away, or even further. The Greeks evolved from monarchy to oligarchy and then to democracy, but the Yoruba took a different path: they evolved a system of checks and balances that wove elements of all three into one. The oba's power, ın the Yoruba cosmic order, was next to the orisa's — he was the orisa's companion, deputy and representative. This is the religio-political myth; in reality his powers were drastically curtailed. He was held in check by the elaborate chieftaincy institution, and by the ogboni society. Hunters’ guilds, egungun and oro cults also had their own separate, clearly defined spheres

of political influence which a wise oba would hesitate to encroach upon.

Popular disaffection with an oba was expressed through songs sung at night outside the palace, or even through his own drummers. In extreme cases, the oldest woman in the palace had a veto power. The co-existence and interplay of different social and political forces were also reflected in the religious sphere. Numerous orisa co-existed within the walls of every town. The oba's own orisa enjoyed a certain prominence, but there was no such thing as a 'state religion.' Each cult group was known to understand and be able to relate to a specific aspect of the supernatural forces that encompassed and influenced the lives of men. Only cooperation among all the cult groups could ensure a prosperous and harmonious existence of the town. A society that up of so many each city-state borders of the identify three

allowed so much freedom heterogenous parts, needed together and at the same different political units and such institutions: the oba,

and individuality, that was made more institutions that would hold time provide a link across the city states. Ulli was soon able to the Ifa oracle, and Ogboni. For

example, a member of the ogboni cult in one town who found himself needing help in another could go to that town's cult house and present himself. He was straightaway accepted and given all the assistance he needed. This solidarity existed even in times of hostilities between any two

city states. Ulli was more interested in how the institution worked than in

70

the advantages that membership conferred, so he used this privilege very sparingly.

His intimacy with Timi Laoye, coupled with his frequency at the palace and watching how the oba exercised his power, got Ulli deeply interested in that very vital and quintessentially Yoruba (oba) institution. In his lifelong

friendships first with Timi Laoye, then with others like the Ooni Adesoji Aderemi, the Ataoja of Osogbo, and the Ogoga of Ikere, and perhaps most

crucially with the Olokuku of Okuku, he learnt much not only about the institution, but about the history of the Yoruba generally.

Ulli Beier's knowledge

of Yoruba history, cultural practices and social

institutions all form a seamless whole and is the more valuable because he did not come by it as a researcher, but as a friend of those who lived and

embodied, bore and transmitted these various branches of knowledge and

practices.

He

was

also a

participant

in the activities he witnessed.

His

knowledge derived from familiarity and it was an insider's. Thus, in many ways, he anticipated the present direction which ethnographical research

methodologies are still finding their way toward (as briefly discussed in the introductory chapter).

In his perennial travellings within Yoruba country, Ulli met several obas and

inevitably

became

quite

close

to

a

few.

He

struck

up

a good

relationship with the then Ogoga of Ikere-Ekiti, oba Adegoriola, right from his first visit to that town. The palace at Ikere, layed out on a grand scale, was one of the most magnificient in Yorubaland in those days. It had fantastic carvings by the famous Olowe of Ise-Ekiti; a huge gate surmounted by a lion and a soldier cast in cement; a very smooth and round huge boulder which confronted you to the right as soon as you passed through the gates. The main house itself was a beautiful Brazilian building

with marvellous balustrades, pillars and arches. The long balcony underneath had two huge, writhing snakes along its entire length, also cast in cement.

Above the gate was a Ogoga gave to Ulli as thus woken up at dawn who chanted their oba's

little room adjoining the council hall, which the his own room whenever he was in Ikere. Ulli was every time he slept in Ikere by the royal musicians oriki on their flutes:

71

You are the thorn in the elephant's foot. You are the stone that breaks the lion's tooth You let the red palm oil flow from the necks of men. You are the husband of the black woman and the yellow one. You are the husband of the fat woman who sells tobacco market You are a great dancer: You dance even in the face of death.

on the

The title Ogoga was originally a Benin title, for Ikere was formerly an outpost of the Benin empire. With time both the title and the line of royal succession became completely assimilated. Ulli shared many happy hours of conversation and companionship with oba Adegoriola. Ulli also heard a lot of Ekiti traditional music in the palace as well as in the town. Made up mostly of calabashes and pots covered with tight skin and beaten with the hand, Ekiti musical instruments were different from the ones Ulli was used to ın Osogbo and other central parts of Yorubaland. The Ekiti people also sang in harmony, a characteristic absent too in most other parts of Yorubaland. When combined with the sounds from the skin drums, an altogether wistful, haunting music was produced. Through Asake (Duro Ladipo's wife) who is Ekiti, Ulli made sure that this music was incorporated into Duro Ladipo's play Moremi. But that was still many years in the future. It so happened that it was during his first visit to the oba, in 1952, that he also met E.K. Ogunmola for the first time. Ogunmola and his theatre group were touring Ekiti then and Ikere was their first stop. Ulli also visited the Deji of Akure regularly. That oba was already very old by then and they could not converse much, so all Ulli could do was merely stop by to pay his respects. The Olowo of Owo, Oba Olateru Olagbegi, was a much younger man and Ulli saw him frequently. A very intelligent, wellread and vigorous man, Oba Olateru Olagbegi performed all the festivals in his domain with great zeal. The passion for his people's festivals was only rivalled by that for lawn tennis. Once, when Ulli called, he was told that his

royal highness was on the tennis court. He then went across and found him playing doubles. When the other side won, they crossed over to Olowo's side and prostrated, joined by his own partner. Back in his (Ulli's) own home

base Osogbo, Ataoja Adenle was on the

throne. He had started out as a school teacher, then gone into a profitable 72

adire trade between Osogbo and Onitsha before ascending the throne of his fathers. Ulli had met him first when he wanted to start Extramural classes at Osogbo — long before he moved there. Like the Timi at Ede, Ataoja Adenle too was keenly interested in the classes and attended a few himself

at the beginning. When Duro Ladipo and Ulli started MBARI MBAYO, he came to watch plays, exhibitions, and other activities. He was an open-

minded oba who remained a great supporter of the club. Even before he became the Bobagunwa, Ulli was welcome at the palace, as a personal friend, at any odd hour of day or night. Oba Adenle left a standing instruction in the palace that even if he was sleeping when Ulli turned up, he should be woken up.

From Oba Adenle Ulli got yet more insight into Yoruba political and social organizations. Through him too, he kept abreast of important everyday activities in the town and became an integral part of Osogbo political life. He knew the limits of the power of any oba, in spite of the stock traditional

praise that described him as "companion of the gods." In theory the oba is the "owner of the land"; in practice he could not appropriate the land of any

clan as long as members of that clan were working it. Should there be unused land, however, the oba could allocate it to strangers or farmers from neighbouring towns, who then paid isakole. The beneficiary, however, could not pass the land on to his heirs. If an oba was angry and wanted to show his displeasure, all he could do was send his people to reap the palm fruit on the offending person's land. Oba Adenle took such a rare decision once in the presence of Ulli, and he explained that that was the second time in his long reign that he had resorted to such an extreme measure. Oba Moses Oyinlola, the Olokuku of Okuku, was perhaps the one with whom Ulli shared the closest camaraderie. A small town less than thirty miles north of Osogbo, Ulli could drive there any time, to work in the Rest

House, and also to be with the oba. The Rest House was situated in a palm

grove by a little stream. It was a modest mud building furnished with a bed,

one chair and a small table. Because of its simplicity, Ulli found it a good place to retreat and work in for a few days. For him, it also had an additional interest because it had a little colonial history of its own. That

history showed the infinite types of human relations that could happen even in a colonial setting when social interaction between representatives of

73

imperialism and the 'natives' was minimal and the rules rigid. Everybody in

Okuku knew the story in those days. Oba Moses was a huge, broad-shouldered man who could drink very much.

Like most Yoruba

oba, he was

a good

Christian and also a faithful

worshipper of his ancestral gods. The colonial District Officer (popularly shortened and known as D.O.) at Osogbo then was a friend, so one Christmas season he invited him to celebrate New Year's eve with him at Okuku. When the D.O. came, Oba Moses insisted that they went to church together that night. After the service, Oba and D.O, two friends but representatives of unequal, opposing and different types of power, repaired to the ‘drinking room', whereupon the oba proceeded to drink the D.O. under the table. When by the early hours of New Year's day the D.O. had passed out, the Oba Moses hauled him up, flung him over his broad shoulders and carried him through the length of the town to tuck him in nicely in his bed at the Rest House, two kilometres from the palace. Everybody in Okuku was proud of the heroism of their oba and talked about it for years. The same D.O. told Ulli that once Oba Moses was persuaded of the merits of any government plan for the community and agreed to it, he (the D.O.) just went home, rest assured that it would be perfectly executed without his own supervision. The oba controlled the town, not out of any constitutional power, but by his sheer personality. He was a big being with a tremendous sense of, and zest for, life. At weekends Ulli would pack some work in his bag, go to the Rest House and alternate the hours between the palace and his work. From his throne room a tiny door led into an equally tiny room just big enough for a small table and two chairs on either side. A small window with latticed woodwork on it let in some air and light. Into this 'drinking room' the two friends would go and relax after any serious business (Ulli in those days could chat away in Yoruba). There, Oba Moses Oyinlola would plonk down two bottles of beer between them and command Ulli in the only English word he knew: "Drink!" That first beer would be followed by Schnapps, and then more beer, and then more Schnapps, and so on. This was really hard for Ulli who was a one-beer man, but the oba loved the ritual and Ulli the company, so both drank deep and long in the cup of friendship. At the end, Ulli would have to go and lie down.

74

Oba Moses Oyinlola had his own baba kekere too, a man who was even taller than him but was thinner than a rake. This wiry man had a bad

temper, was quite violent and aggressive, and generally loved intimidating people. Whenever baba kekere went into displaying his acts of intimidation and aggressiveness, Oba Moses would watch him for a while, then burst into his deep-chested laughter. Somehow, this always completely flattened and crushed the baba kekere. The oba was not only a man of mythical proportions in his physical size and strength, his doings too were legendary. It was with him that Ulli first experienced the Okuku crown festival: the royal festival when the history of the founding of the town is re-enacted. That history 1s complex and of fabulous proportions.

Olokuku is the title of the oba of Okuku, but the town also worships an orisa oloku; whether there is a relationship between the three (the name of the town, the title of the ruler, and the orisa) on the one hand, and iku (the Yoruba word for death) on the other, nobody would tell. Perhaps because

nobody really knew anymore. As the Okuku people were originally from Aramoko-Ekiti, Ulli went there to consult the Alara. As he found out, the

people of Aramoko did indeed celebrate an Oloku festival, but it was explained that they too had adopted it from the neighbouring town of Ijero. In Ijero, the Ajero (the oba of Ijero) and the priest were seen as opponents who fought for supremacy. Apparently the historical conflict was never fully resolved amicably for, in the rituals, the priest and the oba do not

meet face to face. The priest at Ijero (called Olouku) had to reside outside town, on a farm. One night in the year, he was allowed to wear a beaded crown and dance in procession through the town, while the Ajero was confined to his palace. The explanation of this ritual is as follows. The Oloku was the descendant of the oba of an ancient town called Oluku. The people of Ijero, migrating from Ife, came upon the Oluku people, slaughtered many of them in battle, and drove out the oba. They however installed him as priest, to pacify the spirits of the land on which they had come to settle.

Ulli witnessed this ritual in 1956 outside Ijero. Then the priest of Oloku, while in a state of trance, spoke a language that was not Yoruba at all and

which had to be interpreted by one of his assistants. In the Olokuku festival of the crowns itself at Okuku, all these ancient wars and rituals were re-

75

enacted, even though neither the oba, the oloku priest, nor the townspeople had a clear idea of the complex history behind them. The festival consists of a night of ritual sacrifices, followed by opposing parades and a wrestling match the next day. During the night ritual, the oloku priest actually wears a crown while making sacrifices to his deity. On this solemn occasion, the Olokuku stands behind the priest: so for one night in the year, the o/oku priest's original position is restored and the oba plays second fiddle. Then in the afternoon of the next day, the oloku and his followers dance through town, gradually making their way to the palace. Finally, upon reaching the palace of the Olokuku in the evening, they stand outside and haul challenges, insults, missiles at its chief occupant: "Come out and fight, you usurper!" "You are sitting on my throne and I am taking it back today!" "Come out, if you dare, you coward!" Meanwhile, the Olokuku himself has been out of the palace, also parading the town with his own crowd of supporters singing and dancing to dundun music. (Both parties have of course taken care not to meet at all in the streets.) He too circles back to the palace where the other party has already worked itself up into a fighting mood. Then protagonist and antagonist confront each other, surrounded by all the townspeople. Everybody stands back while the Olokuku and the priest of oloku engage in a mock wrestling match. Olokuku wins and there is a great general shout. The status quo has been restored. Feasting and mass rejoicing follows all night. After this ritualized re-enactment of history, the arena is open to all children to practice their wrestling prowess and the ceremony assumes the character of a folk festival. The ones Ulli watched were especially memorable because of the extraordinary spectacle of Oba Moses, so huge and broad, wrestling with the tiny o/oku priest who at that time was a mere lad of twelve. Simple in plot outline and action as it is, the ritual drama is nevertheless a

dense, complex intertext of history, politics and religion. A painstaking study

of these

‘performance

texts' can reveal

a lot of what

must

have

happened in the past, and also much about Yoruba social and political philosophy. The phenomenon of that priest at Ijero speaking a totally different tongue while in trance at first appears strange and even implausible. When considered within the context of what is known of Yoruba history, however, it is neither so strange nor so implausible. The 76

story is a good example of the complexity of Yoruba history, especially of the way the conquerors fanning out from Ife absorbed and incorporated ancient gods and rituals of the land into their own religious and political

structures. The present Yoruba people were originally different peoples who came in different waves of migration. These different waves must also have met yet different groups of people in the different parts of the land,

who were subsequently subdued and assimilated. All combined to form the Yoruba people as we know them today. It would be fascinating to know how the different waves of migration affected the language — was it the

migrants that were linguistically assimilated? How much of the aboriginal

language(s) is (are) retained in the present dialect clusters and standard form of the language, and how much brought in by the invaders? Such

questions can probably never be answered anymore. What is certain is that rituals such as the one in Okuku are common in Yorubaland. Probably the most famous one is the edi festival in Ile-Ife, which commemorates the victory of the descendants of Oduduwa over the aboriginal population of the area. At the same time, it also celebrates the reconciliation and integration of the two peoples and their cultures. These

politico-religious rituals and myths find their expressive counterparts in the purely religious myths, rituals and festivals which in turn reinforce them.

Together they produce a distinctly Yoruba world view and philosophy of flexibility and tolerance in which room is always made for the new; in which the binary absolutes 'either/or' do not exist. It lies behind the distinctly Yoruba reception of Islam, Christianity (and colonialism), best captured in the popular song: Awa o s'oro ile wa o Awa o s'oro ile wa o Igbagbo o pe k'awa ma s'oro Imole o pe k'awa ma s'oro Awa o s'oro ile wa o

(We shall celebrate our lineage festivals/ We shall celebrate our lineage festivals/Christianity cannot prevent us from celebrating festivals/Islam should not prevent us from celebrating festivals/ We shall celebrate our lineage festivals). Hence the amazing survival, continuing resilience and vitality of Yoruba religio-cultural practices in the new world. In the capacious Yoruba

77

religious heart, the gods are always ready to shift and make room for a new one — provided that new one is ready to acknowledge the presence of the older, preceding ones. The multiculturalism and integration found in Yoruba socio-political life is replicated in the religious life through the multiplicity of gods, behind which is nevertheless recognized an ontological oneness of all things. Some outside (Islamic) light is thrown on this by a comment once made by Mallam Hampate Ba, the famous Malian scholar, to Ulli. As a matter of principle Ulli never played the tourist guide to any foreigner; but occasionally, somebody came along whom he felt might learn from what he himself was experiencing and learning everyday. One such person was Mallam Hampate Ba, who came in 1957. Ulli had no reservations about taking him around, in spite of being so very conspicuous in his flowing riga (gown) and fez cap. They went to Ulli's friend magba Sango in Osogbo. She threw kolanuts and prayed for Mallam Ba; he in turn prayed for her in the Islamic way. It was a very peaceful meeting, very quiet and dignified. On their way back, Mallam Ba was silent for a while, then he reflected aloud: "You know, people keep talking about polytheism and I say to them, don't you know that Allah has ninety names, and who tells you that each name is not another god?" This coming from a Muslim so pious that he was regarded as a saint in his native Bamako! He probably had never heard it, but Mallam Ba had a profound, intuitive grasp of what the Yoruba have said with the Atunda myth (2). Ulli Beier produced a book on the crown festival at Okuku, Yoruba Beaded Crowns: Sacred Regalia of the Olokuku of Okuku (1982), but it is worth noting that he did not — could not — write it until years later. Such was his involved observation-participation in the rituals, especially his affinity with the oba, that observing and experiencing them was more important to him than writing about them. By the time Ulli returned to Nigeria in 1971, his friend Oba Moses Oyinlola, the Olokuku of Okuku, had joined his ancestors. The new Olokuku was a younger man who had been a former

council secretary. A rapport developed between him and the new oba; he visited him several times, participated in the festivals with him, and shared many a keg of palm wine with him too. Still, it was a different kind of friendship, the type that gave Ulli the necessary emotional distance to work

on the book. 78

Ulli's relationship with oba Moses Oyinlola does guide us into the long, complex and highly fruitful relationship that he had with Yoruba society. His relationship with the olorisa people was of the same kind as that with some oba, only more profound. He just could not think of any better people to be with than the Sango and Erinle people. At Erin he spent every ose with the Soponna people; in Ilobu he celebrated jakuta in the shrine of magba Sango. Sango priests in Ifon, Ara, Ede, Otan-Aiyegbaju and IlaOrangun, all were close, personal friends. At Ilobu the Erinle worshippers named him Omidiji Arabagbalu, almost a cult name for it was confined to their circle. But the name given him by Sango worshippers at Osogbo, Sangodare Akanji, was so widely known and used that no olorisa called

him by any other. Even the Timi of Ede used it. Ulli was (and still is) convinced that had he been born in Yorubaland he would have been a Sango worshipper — so much did he feel at home in their company.

He did not visit these priests and priestesses or attend their ceremonies to learn anything. For the most part he did not even take photographs. Their

life radiated such intensity, there was such joy of living about them, which combined the playful and the serious almost perfectly. Nothing flippant about them; they knew perfectly well that the jocular is the other necessary side of life, that both sides were always there, inseparable. They glossed over no aspect of life at all, no matter how seemingly trivial. For Ulli, just sitting in their company, listening to and watching them, and performing the rituals of worship spiritually.

with them,

was

enough,

for it gave

him a

lift,

Another attraction for Ulli in these people was the modesty of their lives. Their life was uncomplicated, as clear and broad as daylight, and as deep.

What they lacked in material acquisitions they more than made up for in spiritual plenitude and self-sufficiency. They did without luxuries and frills not because they were too poor to afford them, but because they did not

need any. As in their personal lives, so in their acts of worship. All their activities were in the open. The Sango shrine itself was always a modest affair which contained just the two usual icons: the horseman and the woman with child. The artists who made them were known,

but were not famous.

The carvings themselves

were not representative of any abstract idea, theological or otherwise: just spirituality made corporal. They were not even regarded as ‘art’ objects to 79

be consciously admired and enthused over. They were simply there as presences. Through the rituals which had been performed on them and which they permanently attended, these sacred images became

‘accumulators of spiritual power'. Not every shrine had its own carved

images and they were not essential to the rituals, but they certainly enhanced the ritual by their charged presence. They shared in the offerings that were brought and had a life of their own: they even had names! To Ulli, this was reality itself and he was right in its midst. It was a phenomenological attitude to life seamlessly embedded in everyday attitude and in the practice of everyday life, to an extent he had never seen before anywhere else. For him, the words of the old babalorisa at Ilobu to his young grandson encapsulated most eloquently yet pithily this respect

for all that is real.

Full of the Christian indoctrination that he had been steadily receiving in school, one of this old man's grandsons came from school one day and declared to his grandfather: "Baba, your orisa do not exist." To which the old man simply replied: "Only that for which we have no name does not exist." Or, as another senior priest put it, "thought is creation." Babalorisa did not find it necessary to go further. For him, his world was real enough and needed no proselytizing offensive. Ulli had been attending various Yoruba festivals long before he moved to Osogbo. Living in that town, however, placed him more centrally and enlarged the orbit in which he could circulate. The number and variety of festivals now available to him also deepened his understanding and appreciation of them. He saw as much plurality in the religious life as in the social and political. The religious system, centred in the orisa cults, allowed for much personal difference and individual genius, without eroding the distinctiveness of that particular cult. Because you can worship an orisa in your own different but appropriate way, there ıs much room for improvisation without breaking the taboos. The main carrier of the god during a festival personifies him most perfectly. As an embodiment of that particular deity at that moment, his burden and responsibilities are great. Therefore, a state of mutual dependency results, which makes his relationship with the deity agonizingly deep. The orisa too changes his own personality a little to

accommodate the humanity of the carrier. The orisa can only manifest 80

himself through this person, so he adjusts his own personality accordingly. The carrier in a trance is performing a raid into the realm of the supernatural and he returns with spiritual booty. A powerful raider in the

end succeeds in transforming the image of the orisa. His own personality

too is gradually but permanently altered: his ordinary, daily life acquires a

depth and concentration that separate but do not isolate him.

This, Ulli has surmised, is part of the explanation for the related Yoruba deities Obatala, Ogiyan, Orisa Popo, and Ajagemo: all were one deity at

some remote point in the past, but the differences in the personalities of

generations of carriers gradually caused different manifestations of that one original deity until each manifestation gradually became a different deity in her or his own right. In other words, although the slave in the Atunda myth

is often thought to be Esu in disguise, man is the ultimate Atunda: each

strong carrier repeats that primordial act of recreating his orisa by 'splitting' him. It is not so much an act of destructive fragmentation as that of

revitalization — an act of giving the orisa infinitude and limitless fecundity. The

orisa

accompanied

the Yoruba

into the black Diaspora

where,

to

survive and acquire new vitality, they braved this kind of splitting up and recreation. The middle passage was just another spatio-historical dimension of the metaphysical abyss of transition. Even in Yorubaland the more 'universal' of the deities, like Obatala, Ogun, Orunmila and Sango, show

slight differences from community to community: as ijala chanters have

put it, "Ogun meje l'Ogun mi" (There are seven Ogun). Sango dance too

differs from dancer to dancer. There is (probably) no way such a religious practice can lead to political or cultural imperialism and hegemony.

The trance is the major state by which an orisa comes down to 'mount' his carrier. During possession, man becomes god and god becomes man or, as Susanne

Wenger

has

felicitously

framed

it,

"the

body

follows

the

experience of the spirit" (Beier, The Return of the Gods, 1975; 47). Although a universal phenomenon much studied, Ulli's experience of its variety among the olorisa in Yoruba religion hardly conformed to any of the generalizations that scholars have tended to indulge in. Among Sango worshippers for example, sometimes it is violent, at other times it is so subtle and gentle only those in the circle of initiates know when and whom the god has mounted. Professor Sergeant, the man who invented lobotomy, had studied trance worldwide and become an expert of sorts in ıt. During a 81

visit to Ibadan University in 1963, he gave a lecture in which he declared that all trances were the same the world over; that the same physiological process produced the same symptoms in all. Ulli contradicted him on the ground that the elements and characteristics of a particular kind of trance depended on the personality of the god being worshipped: possession by Ogun was different in all characteristics from possession by Oya; trances in traditional worships were in turn generally different from those in the Aladura sects. Therefore, Ulli concluded, trance was more than mere physiological changes in the body. The professor then wanted to be taken to one such worship but Ulli refused, not being an ethnographic informant. Pierre Verger, however, took him to a little Sango ceremony in Osogbo at which Ulli was also present. When the trance happened, the shiver that announced it was so subtle, so elusive that Professor Sergeant missed it completely. There is, of course, the major and highly dramatic trance, such as that which happens during the annual festival in Osogbo or Ede. It is an elaborate, highly structured performance and everybody knows in advance who Sango is going to mount - he is the one who during the circular dance holds high up a big bunch of dry elephant grass, smouldering and giving off thick black smoke. In the lightning flash of a millisecond when the bunch bursts into flames, the god also descends. The body of the carrier has

been hit by the lightning bolt (on which the god travels) and he is surrounded instantly by all the worshippers. His dress is changed; his face, painted white, gives him a daemonic appearance and he comes out with a wild and frightening roar. The crowd jerks back involuntarily at the spectacle and its suddenness, letting escape shouts of awe and wonder. In this awe-inspiring mood, the carrier, now the deity incarnated, performs a

short dance. After a few minutes of this, his dress is again changed, this

time into the proper Sango dress: red dansiki atop a pair of short trousers like the hunter's, studded with a few cowries. Now, his face also washed clean, a total change of personality accompanies the change of dress too. He is beaming with delight and mischief: the friendly god and entertainer full of jokes, tricks and sleights-of-hand that are truly frightening to watch. His audience knows some of the tricks and feats that are coming, for other elegun Sango have a similar repertoire; but Bandele of Otan-Aiyegbaju performs them with a style and panache all his

82

own, inimitable. The transitions from surprising feats of strength to demonstrations of insensitivity to pain to sleights-of-hand tricks are smooth and fast. Bandele is boisterous, enjoying his audience's anxiety when he does something really terrifying, and their relief or laughter when he takes them by surprise. One item that never fails to terrify the audience is when

he has himself shot at with a dane gun. Enjoying the tension that he is creating, Bandele slowly, meticulously loads the gun. He takes off his dansiki and hands over the gun to a young acolyte. He moves back about

twenty paces and the assistant fires into his bare chest. Roaring with laughter, Bandele displays his bleeding chest to the audience!

In another, he bends over backward, balancing on his arms and legs. When he is ready a wooden mortar is placed on his flat, upturned stomach. Two hefty, muscular men stand on either side of him, each holding a long

wooden pestle. At a signal from him they begin pounding the empty mortar

with all the energy and abandon they can muster. Even the Ataoja, who has witnessed this feat year after year, still averts his eyes and can be heard shouting "o ti to, o ti to!" (enough, that's enough) in a voice hoarse with

fright. But Bandele does not call a halt until the two men are sweating in

exhaustion.

From these feats, he moves on to a charming piece of 'magic: his assistant is holding upside down a small calabash with a long, narrow neck while he himself, standing at a distance, has a small padlock. When he opens the padlock water begins to drip from the calabash; the instant he locks it the water stops dripping. The performance finally over, Bandele changes his dress yet again, this time into immaculately white agbada. The clowning is over and he now withdraws almost totally from the human level. His face settles and he

personifies the god in his aethereal serenity. This is when the real Sango dance begins: an extremely acrobatic and strenuous dance with the typical powerful shoulder movements of all Sango dancers. As he warms up and dances through the streets, it gets wilder and more energetic. Throughout, he is accompanied on the harsh, metallic sound and relentless staccato rhythm of the bata ensemble. All of which make the entire performance a display of elemental power, like a tropical thunderstorm that takes its time to build up and then explodes in wave upon wave of climaxes from one end of the sky to another. Yet, inspite of the heat of the dance, Bandele's face 83

remains totally cool. No emotion is shown. For the dancer is in a state of complete inward-looking concentration, the state known by the olorisa themselves as fufu (cool). In this state, his appearance (or the god's) is that of an inscrutable, unpertubable ere. Ulli watched this unique performance year after year, following Bandele through the streets of Otan-Aiyegbaju, Ede or Osogbo sometimes the whole night. It brought about in him the religious emotions of awe and wonder, plus a kind of catharsis — the kind that the most powerful of Greek tragedies must have achieved in ancient days. There was a circuit of Sango

festivals in those days and Ulli would follow his friend Bandele around to

Otan, Ire, Ara, Ejigbo, Ila-Orangun, Iwo, or wherever he knew he would be dancing. Whenever he came to Osogbo, Bandele stayed at Ulli's place. He had a daughter who, by the age of ten, had started accompanying his father as a dancer. Small as she was, she already was a match for her father in power, concentration and technical skill. She also had a near-superhuman stamina: together, father and daughter would dance six continuous hours, or longer, through town. And such performances could go on for three days, with relatively short breaks in between. Bandele was the most amazing of all the baba elegun Sango Ulli ever knew. The way in which strong individuals could personify an orisa in very different ways was brought home to Ulli when he met another carrier in Ila-Orangun. Ulli had gone to that town to give his weekly Extramural classes when he chanced upon the Sango festival. This man was an amazing dancer whose skill was no less brilliant than Bandele's, but whose dance conveyed a very different feeling. His movements were sinuous, undulating; altogether round and soft. He had an almost feminine grace of gesture. During his own baba elegun performance, he displayed none of the provocative clowning or explosion that endeared Bandele so much to

the crowds. There was a certain aura of sadness to his own performance which expressed the tragic end of the historical Sango: the proud king

betrayed and cast out of town by his people; the tragic hero driven to commit suicide because the world had become too small for him, and

humanity too petty and selfish to contain his big heart. It was this aspect of Sango that the dancer from Ila-Orangun chose to express in his own dances, rather than man deified and triumphant.

84

Ulli was so moved by this baba elegun upon first seeing him that, a week later, he visited him in his house and they became very close friends. When, sometime later Ulli was given his Sango name, Sangodare Akanji, in Osogbo, the man arranged a small ebo for him in Ila-Orangun and

performed. This was how the man got the cognomen which became famous

throughout Yorubaland: 'Ajofoyinbo' (the one who dances for oyinbo, the white man). Whenever he journeyed south to attend a festival, he would

spend the night at Ulli's house. He usually travelled with a wife and two small daughters. When Ulli first met them, the daughters were about eight

and six years old. Both had been initiated into the Sango cult and were already remarkable dancers. Ulli was particularly amazed and fascinated by the younger one for, even in a people where calmness and certainty of character was common, her own

possession of these attributes was outstanding. Watching that little girl, he

understood the Yoruba concept that young children still carry some of the

supernatural power of the ancestral spirit with them — that they have the serenity that is otherwise only found amongst the very old who are in turn

on the threshold of the ancestral world. Usually this 'spiritual capital’ that the new born brings down from orun is all-too-quickly dissipated, because of the distractions and harrassments of earthly life. It is gradually built up

again with maturity and, by old age, one should have accumulated enough of it to become a potent elder. Ajofoyinbo's little girl was initiated at a very tender age — while still literally a baby — so the 'capital' that she brought down with her from heaven was secured and deeply rooted in her personality, before she began to spend it. The result was that by the age of

six, she had developed an uncanny spiritual authority. In the photograph which Ulli took of her when she was about seven, the same comparison

with the timeless icon (ere) comes to mind. It remains one of his favourite

photographs. That Sango should manifest the masculine and feminine aspects of himself in equal and interchangeable proportions is part of the metaphysical essence of that deity. His dress is feminine; the priests plait their hair like women and the priestesses prostrate before the deity, rather than kneel. This reversal and intermingling of gender attributes goes right through all of Yoruba order of things. In the Yoruba world view, female and male roles are never fully separated or watertight. Every object, action, gesture,

85

issue and event has its female as well as male aspects. The female is the

cool and the soothing, the male the hot and aggressive. The one contradicts but also complements and completes the other.

To Ulli, the spirituality of Yoruba society, as he found it then, was not confined to religious festivals only. He met it on a daily, mundane basis. He found that with certain people, talking was almost superfluous. He

quickly learnt that people did not always call because they wanted to talk.

Friends came also for silent communion, and just 'to be with.’ A friend would drop in on him, they would exchange greetings and kola nut (if he had any). He would ask if there was any problem, and the friend would say no, "I have come to greet you." Ulli would go back to his work without the friend feeling offended. After thirty minutes or so, the friend would get up and announce: "I have seen you." On the face of it, the visit was purposeless but it was not. Its real purpose was to be in a friend's company; so some communication has taken place after all. To be able to pay such a silent visit, a certain internal calm was necessary. Ulli found that old people generally, and the olorisa people especially, had it. His reflections on this aspect of his friendships (1975; 56) is worth quoting at some length: In traditional Yoruba life a man did not lose his strength as he grew older. His strength was transposed: as his physical strength weakened his psychic strength increased. The really old men became centres of power ... they became the embodiment of wisdom and knowledge. It was from them that the younger, more active people had to receive advice and strength. It was important for the community to be exposed to their radiation, because these people were really close to the orisha, they achieved the semi-divine state of 'dynamic relaxation': a perfect state of mind where intense concentration results in a state of complete repose. Each time one of these strong people paid him a visit, he came within that person's spiritual, or magnetic field. Things rearranged themselves within

him into a new pattern that restored his calm and confidence — that gave him his own 'dynamic relaxation.' Ulli came to the conclusion, quite early, that did not need a code of behaviour or theology. closer to your orisa, to the point of almost him. When you have attained that state of

86

such a religious experience It is a process of getting ever complete identification with identification, your being is

fulfilled. As Susanne Wenger has put it (Beier, Return of the Gods, 45):

1975;

All (the) activities of olorishas ... are merely a means. The final purpose of orisha worship is to extend the natural limits of human

experience into the sphere of the metaphysical. Man becomes more than man.

It is to be in a harmonious union with the supernatural world and all her beneficial as well as dangerous forces. In it is an ıdeal of integration that

Ulli met repeatedly no less in the political than in the religious festivals. In the myth of Obatala, and as ritualized during that deity's festival at Ede, the drama of integration is particularly pronounced. The ajagemo (the high priest of Obatala) is taken prisoner at the end of a war. He is then brought

before the Timi, who ransoms him with plenty of gifts. Then he is carried home,

shoulder-high,

in a triumphant

procession.

Nobody

can

give

a

historical explanation for this dance ritual, but clearly it is similar to the

ones at Ile-Ife and Okuku. The Timi line came from Oyo at a later date, so perhaps the ajagemo line might have been one of the previous powerful rulers of the land. What is important here, however, is the recognition of the complex and delicate relationship that must always exist between the political and the spiritual. The ritual's statement is clear at the religious level. It is a reenactment of the Obatala ideal: triumph through suffering, patience and forbearance.

The myth of Obatala can be read as the conflict between two divine forces

(Obatala and Sango). with each one having Being total contrasts, attract and when they last, so can contrasts

The two divinities can co-exist within the same town, his own domain, but they must not come too close. they cannot be together. Opposites do, however, meet there is a spark. But just as the spark cannot not live together permanently. Though there is an

attraction (friendship) between Obatala and Sango, the two can only exchange visits, not live together. An individual who tries to embrace and be initiated into the two cults is inviting disaster: no unification is possible. The myth of the imprisonment of Obatala, and its annual reenactment at Ede, are therefore expressing cosmic, political as well as historical truths at the same time. The simplicity of the expression contrasts with the complex

truths that are dramatized, making them all the more fascinating.

87

In Yoruba religion the complexities of the world, the ambivalence of all things and situations, are acknowledged. Nothing is purely good or purely

evil. Everything depends on the contexts in which it exists. Every action is

permissible, provided it is performed at the right time, place and occasion — and for the right reason. An orisa is neither a good nor bad being: he can be protective or dangerous, reliable or unpredictable. This is why Esu is the

omnipresent and quintessential Yoruba deity.

Ulli regularly attended the religious ceremonies, talked to the oba and olorisa, took part in their everyday lives and saw how the personalities of the devotees were influenced by those of the deities. Gradually he began to have an idea of the different and complex personalities of the deities

themselves. Through a combination of many forces and tendencies (Islam,

Christianity and Western education among them), many Yoruba gods have been ignorantly misinterpreted and viciously maligned by the new Yoruba elite: Esu is the biblical Satan; Sango is god of vengeance used by his devotees to kill people; Soponna priests spread smallpox, and so on. Ulli also discovered that simplistic reductions like 'Sango is god of thunder,' 'Osun is deity of fertility,’ 'Soponna is god of smallpox,’ etc., grossly sensationalized and — in the process — trivialized the orisa. It reduced them to the level of literary allusions and ornaments that the gods of ancient Greece and Rome became in European literature. The Yoruba orisa were still alive, and fundamentally different from the olympians. Ulli found that smallpox, for example, is merely the symbol used in the Soponna cult for human suffering. The priests of that cult are the ones who have learnt to give meaning to human suffering. As

introverted as Obatala worship, the Soponna cult teaches that suffering, in

general, is not just an arbitrary, purposeless affliction that has to be endured. If you survive the affliction and you learn its purpose, you come out a different, spiritually richer person. Only then can you have a special relationship with the deity. The theology and philosophy of Soponna worship enable its members to know and deal with the psycho-spiritual dimensions of diseases and general suffering. Ulli also found the paradoxical nature of these deities copiously expressed

in their oriki. He got much

from

Timi Laoye (who also helped in the

translations) and collected more on his own. In any particular oriki, a god in some lines is given the kind of majesty usually attributed to the Christian 88

God, then in the next lines he is abused as clothed in rags. Their awesome

power is acknowledged, but they can also be joked with! The contradictory character of the deity is in turn reflected in the attitudes that the devotees display in their own life and toward the deity. All of these are for instance reflected in the following enigmatic lines from Esu's oriki: Eshu slept in the house —

but the house was too small for him.

Eshu slept on the verandah — but the verandah was too small for him. Eshu slept in a nut — at last he could stretch himself.

Eshu walked through the groundnut farm.

The tuft of his hair was just visible. If it had not been for his huge size,

he would not be visible at all. Lying down, his head hits the roof. Standing up, he cannot look into the cooking pot He throws a stone today and kills a bird yesterday. Esu is a much feared, much loved deity by both man and other deities; yet, clearly in these lines, he is being made fun of — even in the process of extolling his mercurial power. To Ulli, the key to the essence of the

relationship between the Yoruba and their gods is found in this oriki of Ogun: Ogun, do not reject me! Does the woman who spins ever reject a spindle?

Does the woman who dyes ever reject a cloth? Does the eye that sees ever reject a sight? Ogun, do not reject me!

There is a beautiful thought expressed in these lines on that relationship of friendly intimacy and mutual dependency. One does not worship an orisa in order to become a better person in the moral sense of that word. The purpose is to enlarge and intensify one's capacity for living — to add depth

and quality to one's life. So how long one lives is secondary to how intense, how broad and resonant that life is.

Ulli saw the proof of the magnificence and splendour of the culture in the types of human beings it produced. The ability to quit life at will (which is not suicide) is the proof of the ability to live life intensely, both constituting 89

the Yoruba metaphysical splendour that informs Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. Though the main character in the play (a fictional recreation of a historical personage) does not die as splendidly as he has lived, his own father did. In the 1950s, Ulli still met such characters in the priests and priestesses he came across: people who have lived well and intensely, who choose the moment to die and do so by an act of will. The babalorisa at Ilobu (the same one who gave his grandson a short lesson in the relationship between language and reality) was also one. When he thought that he should die, he made all the arrangements, simply lay down and died. There is splendour here, but there is also a real tragedy that must be touched upon quickly. The old priests and priestesses whom Ulli met, and whose friendship he courted, were the last generation of that breed of Yoruba people. One by one, they were all dying, taking that grandeur into the grave with them. How keenly Ulli felt the tragedy of the depletion and reduction of the old on the one hand, and paucity of the new on the other, is conveyed in the following observations he made (Return of the Gods, 1975; 57): Many of the finest olorishas have not been able to make this adjustment (to the tremendously brutal impact of the West on Yoruba culture). A man like Layi Olosun, the sensitive priest of Oshun in Osogbo has remained pure ... he has gone through ritual and ceremonial in the correct way, and it is not that anything went wrong with his orisha — but that he suddenly finds himself displaced in this modern world. The crisis in such a man's individual soul is of enormous proportions. All his life was a preparation for the office he now holds. All the ritual he has been going through was a preparation for the 'mystic transformation’ that should be the climax of his life and the real function. Now he often cannot perform this sacred duty: not because he is not good enough or not strong enough,

but because he lacks the community behind him to support him and to carry him along.

I have quoted this long passage to convey something of the intimacy and

emotional intensity with which Ulli related to Yoruba traditional religion in general, and to the individuals who still practiced it in particular. He felt

their tragedy personally. There is another reason for the length of the quotation. Europhone

African

literatures

constitute

the

one

area

of contemporary

cultural activity where the tragic dilemmas that confronted Africa in the 90

historical culture-clash are narrated again and again. Yet, because most of the writers have seen the culture issue in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism and world capitalism, they have attended only to the effects of such massive historical movements on the narrow interests of the ‘educated elite' class. It is not that there are no characters who represent 'tradition' in the literatures, only that such characters are portrayed in their relation to the global movements and the new Africans they produced. The tragedies of such representatives of tradition are only narrated or dramatized as part of and illustrating the general calamity, or even as part of what has to give way to the inevitable and not unwelcome changes, hardly ever as selfcontained personal tragedies. For that reason, the imagination that those African writers who have written about them bring to bear on their story has never been completely from inside, is often truncated and distanced. In the few sentences quoted above, Ulli conveys the tragedy of a culture, through the even more harrowing tragedy of a real individual whom that literature has either been neglecting or seeing only from outside. He has put into words the metaphysical agonies of Layi Olosun as Layi himself must have lived and felt them. Or as Bandele of Otan-Aiyegbaju and Ajofoyinbo of Ila-Orangun must have increasingly felt them even while they were at the height of their power and popularity.

On the one hand Ulli witnessed the almost ineffable splendour of that life, and was close enough to such people. On the other he saw them shunted aside by "the enormous brutal impact of the West on (Yoruba) culture" plus

the homegrown neglect that followed. But he believed that such calamity might have been ameliorated. Hence the kind of empathy conveyed in the lines above. Acutely aware of that tragedy, Ulli had a pressing urge to recall the passing grandeur and remind the new generations of what they had (and could still have). This desire dictated the kind of help he rendered to Duro Ladipo's theatrical endeavours, and to the Osogbo artists. It also determined the direction and purpose of his own intellectual-literary engagements, including his 'Yoruba' plays. People like the babalorisa at Ilobu were rare, and not every Yoruba man or woman was a priest. But such individuals merely lived at the apex of a broad-based trait. What Ulli found to be quite common was that people did not have vacant faces: there was always some type of inner strength in everybody. He used to play a game in those days of trying to guess a 91

person's religion by his face. Islam for instance can give a wonderful calm,

but it comes from denial and the serenity it gives comes from closure, from

withdrawal. The Yoruba religious tradition on the other hand demands that everything be lived out, experienced. You go to the limits of human spiritual experience and, when you come back from that extremity, your face and personality change. To borrow Soyinka's terminology, you have been through the "abyss of transition" (3), during which your entire personality disintegrated. Upon re-emerging at the other side, it is recomposed into a new, higher being. Having so experienced life in its

spiritual extremities, the face of an olorisa is open, like a furrowed field.

She acquires the characteristic equipoise and equanimity of ifarabale because her iwa has emerged. Both combine to produce the Yoruba ethical (a combination of the moral, the social and aesthetic) ideal of iwalewa. This ideal is what the best of Yoruba carvers are forever trying to capture in all their icons and images. What the artist wishes to show is the essence of being, not its flippant, ephemeral and fleeting aspects. When successful, as in the works of great carvers like Bamgboye, Areogun and Olowe of Ise-Ekiti, or in many of the carvings in the Timi's palace in Ede, and the gelede masks, there is a holding in balanced tension of all forces and the result is a certain kind of radiance and luminosity. Ulli considers himself very fortunate to have met several such people, all of whom gave him contentment and ease; that is why he spent so much time with them. Although he worshipped enthusiastically with the olorisa, Ulli deliberately kept himself in the background and played as little a role as possible. He took the usual modest offerings to the shrines during the ose worship. For their part the priests might have welcomed more active participation from him, but he resisted the temptation. One reason was that he thought there was nothing new or different he could add. To have been accepted as one of them, to just be in their company and watch how their lives were so focused, so pared down to the essentials, these were enough for him. The other was that, their modesty having rubbed off on him, he sought to intrude as little as possible. In this same manner, even though a quester, his was not that of the researcher armed with a prepared questionnaire, camera, tape-recorder, or pencil and paper. Indeed, he was sure that it would have been a sacrilege for him to have thrust a microphone in the face of iya Sango at Ede, or the 92

Timi or the Olokuku, or any of the numerous other olorisa and demand: 'Now, iya Sango, what is the meaning of this ritual that you engage in? Can

you please tell me its origins?’ In any case, deliberate Western modes of knowledge Everything happened right there in the open: rapid transformations; you heard the songs,

he did not even acquisition were you witnessed the saw the dances;

think such necessary. gradual or you were

yourself caught up in the mood and ambience of the occasion. That kind of

life can only be comprehended by living it, not by questionnaires and scientific explanations. After having lived the experience with them, you

can only seek to convey it, not offer elaborate — but superfluous — explanations. And when you have made the explanations and published them, whose purpose is served? Certainly not that of the olorisa themselves. Just by being with these people, Ulli achieved a calm in his own life too. Living with the olorisa people, especially the Sango people, gave him a yardstick by which to measure everything else: if anything did not measure up to their level, it was not worth bothering about. Through them, he found what he could be. He learnt how to live and be happy with his limitations; he also learnt his potentials, and how to be contented with the essentials of life. Having reflected long and deep upon how and why he came to be granted this boon, Ulli thinks of two major reasons. The first is that the Yoruba society in which he moved was one in which people lived in public, in which therefore one carried one's privacy within oneself. So privacy did not depend on physical space. This ontology of the private and public extended to the area of interpersonal relations. In Osogbo, ordinary people felt free to call upon him any time of day or night; he too could drop in on any of his friends without notice. He was free to walk into Ataoja's palace, or Timi's, whenever he felt like seeing any of them. He could turn up in Wole Soyinka's house in Ibadan, J.P. Clark's or Prince Aderemi's (the Ooni's son) in Lagos, or Ovia Idah's in Benin City, at any time of day or night, without notice. Fine if they were in; if they were not, he would go in, be at home and stay for as long as he planned. He was of value to people, just as others were also of value to him. How else could he have become the background theatre director to Duro Ladipo without such an open dimension of

93

interpersonal relationships? For Ulli, social life perfectly and completely:

a Yoruba song captured this ethos of

Eniyan l'aso mi Eniyan l'aso mi Ti mo ba boju w eyin Ti mo r'eni mi Inu mi a dun, ara mi a ya gaga Eniyan l'aso mi (People are my clothes/When I look behind me/And see my relations and friends/Then I am happy and strong/For people are my clothes). The second was that social life in Nigeria in the 1950s and early 1960s was neither yet dominated by, nor even cluttered with, technological gadgets of doubtful value. It was still a world of little radio, little television and (in Osogbo) hardly any newspaper. In this world of immediacy, of direct human interaction, people could still listen to themselves and to one another. Ulli did not know about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 until long after it was over. But what if he had? He also began to look afresh at his German culture from these new perspectives. At twelve he started reading Shakespeare ın German; by seventeen he had read all of Goethe. The diet of classical European music on which he fed from childhood remained and will continue to be a part of his existence. Perhaps all these glories of his European culture prepared him for the equal but different glories of Yoruba culture; if so, he did not use the former to judge the latter. Rather, those humanistic values embedded in the Yoruba social life and in the best of Yoruba cultural productions became his guide for evaluating all. Once when in Europe, he attended a concert conducted by the great Toscanini himself, but found that his response was not as it should have been. He was worried, but searched in vain for the reason. Then he returned to Nigeria, and while attending a performance of Yoruba music the answer came: that Toscanini performance had been too perfect, too technical; there was more dis/playing of skill and technical mastery than the playing of music. So it had everything but the spontaneous and the living. From then on, he knew

what qualities to look for in his European culture. African music never

replaced

the

essential

position

of Western

music

in his

life,

it only

expanded it. In Yorubaland he learnt to appreciate the vitality of life, the

94

quickness and immediacy

of things. Ulli's life till then had been one of

constant uprooting, but in Yorubaland

he sank deep roots. He started

integrating all aspects of his life. Everything began to fall easily into place. That is why he can assert (Obafemi, 1993; 25): I took far more from Yoruba culture than I put back into it. What I

learnt from priests and kings and artists and friends about life and its

meaning and ultimately also about myself ... was enormous. Whatever I have become in life, I owe to Nigeria. And people like Timi Laoye and Duro Ladipo and the Iya Sango in Ilobu ...

NOTES 1. An

example

of ‘change

and

continuity’

in tradition

is provided

by this

drummer's son, Rabiu Ayandokun. He no longers drums for the deities, but learnt

the art from his father and carries on the family occupation. He is an accomplished contemporary musician and performer in his own right. He has performed with other percussionists in Australia, India, Europe and America and

leads his own troupe of alarinjo performers. 2. Atunda (or Atooda) is the slave who roled down a big boulder on his master Orisanla — the almighty and only Orisa then. From the splinters emerged all the other numerous orisa. It is thought that the slave was Esu in disguise. 3. Wole Soyinka, "The Fourth Stage (Through the mysteries of Ogun to the origin of Yoruba tragedy)", Myth, Literature and the African World, pp.140-160.

95

CHAPTER

IV

IBADAN DUN - BLACK ORPHEUS AND MBARI CLUB ... and Black Orpheus’s enduring aesthetic contribution (under Ulli Beier) may indeed have been that it made (the) goal of "a common life of mankind on earth" through an increasingly interrelated world literature a little more "visible". Peter Benson

As literary histories go generally, modern Anglophone still very young indeed. It is an overgrown, precocious variety and achievements on the international literary taken for granted, but its beginnings only date back to

African Literature is baby whose vigour, scene have become the late 1950s. True,

there was already Negritude literature as an example; there had also been in

Nigeria the 'oddity' of Amos Tutuola's The Palmwine Drinkard (1952), the market literature in Onitsha and the verses of politicians like Dennis Osadebay and Nnamdi Azikiwe; but nobody could ever have dreamt that within a decade, there would be an Achebe, a Soyinka and an Okigbo in that country, or an Awoonor in Ghana. Nigeria in 1950 had nothing on the ground or in the horizon to indicate that there could be such an amazing

flowering of talents before the end of the decade. Although the University College in Ibadan took the teaching of English Literature very seriously, it was more in the business of producing critics and teachers of English, not creative writers.

When Ulli started Black Orpheus in 1957 as a journal of African literature, there hardly existed anything from Anglophone West Africa worth publishing or reviewing in it (Achebe's landmark novel, Things Fall Apart, was still a year away from publication). It is worth stressing this point not only because of mistaken criticisms of Ulli and his Black Orpheus that would come later, but also to better appreciate his optimism and boldness of vision. After all, one does not set up a magazine and then start looking for writers to fill it; rather one starts with what is available. Black Orpheus started at this eccentric end for, even while the idea of the journal was still

gestating, Ulli had a firm notion of the kind of things he wanted for it. He believed such materials were potentially there and only needed a certain kind of organ and forum to bring it out. As the publications in the organ soon bore out his belief, Black Orpheus set the tone of contemporary African literature in English even as it rapidly grew bigger and bigger. In telling the story of Black Orpheus, most critics and historians of modern Anglophone African literature neglect or underplay the role of MBARI Club. Yet, although the magazine predated the club by four years, both together formed an institution once the latter was born, and mutually influenced each other in a unique way. Indeed, it is doubtful if Black Orpheus might have become such a seminal magazine without its complete identification with the club. When the club died, the days of the journal were numbered. That Ulli thought of the club at all is certainly unique in modern letters. In this, although Peter Benson is right to compare Transition with Black Orpheus, the differences in what the earlier magazine was and what it did are as important, if its achievements are to be assessed on its own merits and fully appreciated. The story of Black

Orpheus is not complete without that of MBARI Club; but both together are

also incomplete without the story of Ulli's socio-cultural experiences and activities in Nigeria prior to, and during, their existence. Conceivably, any other expatriate or indigene at Ibadan in those days could have started a literary-cultural journal if so minded, but only Ulli could have done what he did with Black Orpheus and MBARI Club. For he was almost alone in his passionate belief in the value, beauty and integrity of (pre-colonial) African cultural practices and artistic productions. He not only assumed the continuing relevance of their ethos in the modern era, he was also confident that they were capable of self-renewal and selftransformation in order to meet the new challenges. What was needed were the right attitude of mind, atmosphere and approach. He therefore set about creating these, first with the magazine, then the club. Only Ulli could have succeeded in these aims because of his already very deep familiarity with, faith in and respect for, the quality and tone of the social life and cultures around him. Although Ulli knew Chinua Achebe ("very interesting, very serious and sober"), Christopher Okigbo ("wild, absolutely wild") and a few lesserknown Nigerian writers as students at Ibadan, the idea of starting a journal 98

did not begin with either Black Orpheus itself or those writers who would make it famous later. His preparation for it — especially for the kind of journal he wanted — actually started with Odu, the journal of Yoruba Studies that he co-founded with Saburi Biobaku (see chapter V).

In 1954, Janheinz Jahn wrote to him asking for poems — any poems - in English by young Nigerians for an anthology he was putting together. Ulli scouted around and sent everything he could lay his hands upon, including several by Mabel Segun (now Mabel Imoukhuede). He also put Jahn in touch with her and a few others whom he knew had been writing poetry as undergraduates. Jahn published Mabel's "Conflict", which has since become much anthologized and quoted. It was not a good poem by any standard, but was a typical and — by now — ‘classic’ statement of the ‘conflict of cultures' genre. By this time Ulli was fully involved in Yoruba cultural activities, organizing seminars and conferences, and publishing Odu. As his summers were fully occupied organizing these Extramural Studies activities, he did not have time to go on ‘home leave' to Europe until autumn. In any case, Paris was always empty during summer, so he preferred that later season for his own infrequent visits. The West Indian scene in London in those days was in a state of cultural

and intellectual ferment, so Ulli naturally gravitated to places where he met

writers

like George

Lamming,

Andrew

Salkey,

Samuel

Selvon,

Wilson

Harris, and others. Likewise, in Paris he sought out the Négritude poets

who, by that time, were already changing the literary maps of Francophone West Indies, Africa and France. With Léopold Sédar Senghor (then a

deputy in Assemblé Nationale) he held long conversations, for the two

shared a passionate interest in African and modern European arts. He and

Leon Damas explored Paris together, especially as the latter knew all the best African and West Indian restaurants and spiced his already witty conversations with yarns about his travels in West Africa. Ulli found Aimé

Césaire a man of great warmth and passion, but also a parent dominated by his

small

children.

As

the

kids

constantly

claimed

his

attention,

sustained conversation could be had with this prophet of Negritude.

no

Naturally, he was in Paris when the big, prestigious conference of 1956 on African culture happened. For Ulli personally, it was memorable because

one of the two Sierra Leonians present made a special public mention of him, commending him for what he was doing in Nigeria. Ulli expected 99

neither the public mention nor the gratified for two reasons. On the one with stiff opposition all the way; on that the little he did so far was appreciation, outside.

big applause that followed but felt hand, back in Nigeria he was meeting the other hand he had not been aware already attracting attention, or even

A more crucial and revealing highlight of the conference, and which ignited the proceedings, however, was the clash between Richard Wright and Aimé Césaire. Wright by then had written his famous novels, which Ulli enjoyed very much and was teaching in his Extramural classes. Due to the importance of these books for the black culture in the United States and all over the world, the West Indian Victor Padmore, then adviser to Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, had invited Richard Wright to Ghana. The experience followed the classic pattern of African-Americans in Africa then. Wright came to Ghana armed only with a nostalgic, idealistic picture of the continent and its peoples, and little else. He was quickly, devastatingly disillusioned: there was no ‘happy homecoming’ or reunion; only incomprehension on the part of the leaders or indifference on the part of the ordinary Ghanians. This resulted in impatience and mutual suspicions on both sides. Richard Wright was bewildered, frustrated, embittered. He found nothing of value in the society around him; instead, began to see and judge it through Western eyes. In the book Black Power which he later

wrote on the trip, he described Ghana as a place riddled with "superstition".

So, at the conference in Paris, Richard Wright went to the rostrum and proclaimed: "Thank you white man for destroying our culture!" For Wright, Africa had to be stripped of its "dark" past and "militarized" in order to be totally modernized — in other words, Westernized! Luckily, the distressing performance was effectively neutralized by Césaire's impassioned and inspiring response. Ulli came away from the conference determined to let Nigerians generally, and his students especially, share in the excitement of what had happened in Paris, though he did not immediately know how. But when the opportunity to start a journal came soon after the conference, he would remember the clash and use it

creatively: the journal, in addition to its primary obligation of publishing African writers, would also publish African-American authors and thus become a bridge (re)connecting the two peoples.

100

At the end of the conference Jahn invited Ulli over to Germany to give a series of radio and television talks or interviews about West African cultures generally. He spent a whole month doing this and earned good money. When he crossed over to London, he also did ad hoc five minute talks and interviews on the BBC, money which enabled him to survive. (The only way he could have stayed in Europe was to spend the entire time at his parents’ place, his Assistant Lecturer salary would not allow travels

and hotels. Also, he broke the university regulation by going on leave only every other year.) The broadcasts were so successful that the possibility of

starting a journal became a natural outcome. So firmly convinced were Ulli

and Jahn about the necessity of such a journal that what agitated their minds was not whether it would be viable, but how to fund it and how soon they could get it going. By the time Ulli left Europe for Nigeria that

autumn, a name had been settled upon: Black Orpheus.

Jahn was a good partner with whom to start such a project: he was in his own

way

a pioneer of modern

African literature who had published his

anthology as early as 1954, when Nigeria had only the likes of Mabel Imoukhuede and Dennis Osadebay to offer. He knew, literally, everybody who mattered on all the continents and, surely, the journal could only benefit from

such

immense

contacts.

Thus,

even

at the planning

stage,

Black Orpheus was a lucky journal — it was conceived and started by two people of such unique talents and qualities, so different and yet so complementary. Back in Nigeria, the euphoria of the conference, the successes of the Negritude movement and its poetry that he was now appreciating more and more, the special mention he got, plus the success of his talks and interviews in Europe, all galvanized Ulli and he set to work immediately. In September 1957, the first number of Black Orpheus (subtitled "A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature") came out, edited by Ulli

Beier and Janheinz Jahn. Initially it was published by the Ministry of Education in Ibadan and printed by The Daily Times in Lagos. As that newspaper had no editors for this kind of job, Ulli himself had to do all the proofreading (sometimes it was necessary to do it four times), the galleys, and even the cutting and pasting. Later, D.O. Fagunwa who had been the main support in the Ministry, left public service and Ulli had no choice but to seek other 101

publishers. Longmans Publishing Company, Ibadan, was enthusiastic to take on the journal, but Dennis Williams, already then a member of the editorial board (and of MBARI Club) opposed placing its fortunes in the hands of a foreign publishing house. His fear that the journal risked losing its fiercely guarded independence was reasonable, but eventually Ulli succeeded in persuading him that this would never happen. The transfer brought great relief to the journal's workhorse, Ulli, for Longmans had its own personnel to do the copy-editing. Moreover, Dennis Williams's (and others’) fears were never borne out. Ulli and Jahn worked well together for some time, but they soon found out that their ideas about African literature were irreconcilable. The moment of separation came when Jahn wrote to an African-American contributor saying, "thank you for the piece you have submitted, but it belongs to European literature." Ulli at that time believed more than anybody else that the emerging literature should seek nurturing influence from indigenous oral literatures rather than the prestigious literature of Europe, but he did not think it was right for the editors to set themselves up legislators. When Black Orpheus number 7 appeared in June 1960, Jahn had been replaced by Ezekiel Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka as co-editors. A brief inaugurating editorial expressed simply the journal's aims: to build a local literary public for the young African writer; and to break down (through translation) language barriers between African writings in English, French, Portuguese or Spanish. The last paragraph of the editorial added a third aim, which reflected their (or at least Ulli's) intellectual, moral or even ethical beliefs and pre-occupations from the beginning of his arrival in Nigeria: .. we shall not forget the great traditions of oral literature of the African tribes. For it 1s on the heritage of the past, that the literature of the future must be based.

This was a daring thing to do for a journal seeking to capture the local and still relatively small reading public that only gazed forward to 'a great modern future’ and had no inclination to glance back at its precolonial,

'non-modern', 'non-literary' past. At the intellectual level, it was also a bit reckless, for scholars had hardly begun to acknowledge the existence of African oral literatures. But as far as Ulli was concerned, the oral literature

102

of Africa existed, was alive and well, and deserving of primary attention. He saw and heard it around him everyday (Obafemi, 1993; 12): And it was not like being a literary archaeologist! ...You did not have to go out of your way to find these things: simply by sitting on my verandah on Ibokun Road in Osogbo I would hear the mother of twins improvising her songs in praise of ibeji, I would hear the rara chanting of the bride on her way to her husband's house, I would hear the oriki of all the major orisa! It was all very much alive and I felt it would be very wrong to pretend it was a thing of the past, with no relevance to the present. In those days even political campaigns were fought with the help of dundun and oriki chanters! Its intrinsic literary merits aside, the oral literature merited consideration for just being there and relevant. The decision to recognize and bring it into the journal would, moreover, have other far-reaching consequences for

written African literature that Ulli could not have thought about at the time. It would ensure the sustenance and development of a specifically African creative effort that has been taken for granted since in African literary

discourses generally: the fusion of traditional African, oral literary aesthetics and idioms with Western literary ones; or rather, the perpetual seeking to make the former the template on which to script the new literary creations.

Although this aim appeared last — almost as an afterthought — in the brief editorial, a look at almost all the creative and critical writings published in the journal, from the beginning to the end of Ulli's stewardship as editor, reveals that it was in fact the core aim. Black Orpheus would help to build

a literature of the present and future, founded on and continuous with "the heritage of the past." Thus 'continuity in change’, 'exile and return' would become popular themes for both the emergent creative writing and the criticism that came hard on its heels. The editors immediately started delivering on this promise in the very first number by publishing an article

by Adeboye Babalola on ijala Poetry, followed by extensive extracts from that genre of Yoruba oral poetry. There

was

also

something

biographical

about

the editorial,

for it very

succinctly expressed Ulli's personal and public quest then: that the Africa

which Western-educated Nigerians wished to see confined to the past is still a living present which the society could rely upon to negotiate its journey through present traumatic changes and future ones that are bound 103

to arıse. In this regard, Black Orpheus was to serve more than just another literary journal. This aim, too, led to the formation of MBARI as a social, cultural and intellectual club four years later. Pursued with singlemindedness and zeal by Ulli, it would also lead to misunderstandings and petty comments later, even by those members whose writings or paintings benefited most from the forum and who were Ulli's friends and fellow club members. By the time MBARI Club opened in March 1961, the art and culture scene among the new elite class in Nigeria had changed tremendously. In the second half of the 1950s, the three regions making up Nigeria attained selfgovernment, preparatory to full independence (in 1960). These great political activities created a social and psychological atmosphere of renewed self-confidence, galvanized young men and women into a burst of creativity especially in the field of the arts. Ghana became free three years before Nigeria but because of her size, tremendous energy and even more abundant human resources, Nigeria was the hub of activities in

Anglophone West Africa.

Much of these energies and the creativity going on were unfocussed, however, or encouraged and supported only by foreign cultural institutes. The four — one federal and three regional — governments in the country were too busy designing ‘development plans’, did not really understand what the arts were about and had no clearly formulated, helpful policies on them, or simply were not interested. The sadly humorous episode in Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People, in which the Minister of Culture is totally ignorant of the art and literary scene in his country and can barely conceal his contempt for the artist whose exhibition he has come to open, very well describes the state of affairs in Nigeria then. It should also be noted that the exhibition in the novel is sponsored by a foreign cultural agency. MBARI

Club was born against this background,

and meant to redress it.

Situated right in the commercial nerve centre of Ibadan in unpretentious premises and with modest resources, it would have appeared at the beginning that the club could not go far, especially when measured against

the vaster resources, more imposing premises and prestige of the foreign cultural institutes. Yet it turned these seeming handicaps into tremendous advantage, for Ulli chose his site deliberately. He could do this because he knew 104

Ibadan well, loved its social life and revelled in its night life. He

wanted to make MBARI Club an integral part of all the noises, hurly-burly and chaotic energy of that life, not something separate and distanced from it. In this he succeeded, and the success made MBARI a greater, more successful cultural-intellectual force.

When Ulli came to Nigeria in 1950, he started exploring the social life and found that the atmosphere even in the big cities of Lagos and Ibadan were easy, friendly and relaxed. In his own words, "it was impossible to sleep ın Ibadan in those days", for he went dancing every night. He preferred the little clubs — where the good juju bands like Tunde Nightingale and others played — to the big places like Paradise Club that were more or less reserved for the sleek highlife bands. In the tiny clubs located in backstreets and corners were to be found bands playing fantastic juju music. You did not pay to enter such clubs and the moment you entered, the band leader would recognize you and somehow weave your praises into his songs. If he did not know you, he would ask. When he sang your praises, you were obliged to stand up, do some dance steps, and spend a

few shillings on him. In this modest way the band earned its livelihood. The girls who frequented these clubs were not prostitutes in the sense of

peddlers of commercial sex — just girls out for fun. A meal or a drink was enough and, if they liked you enough, they would go home with you for nothing; but ifthey did not, no amount of money could induce them. The clubs were also mostly class-free then and people from all strata of society could be found at any one night in any of them. Paradise Club of

course was the favorite of the white and Lebanese expatriates, and the big politicians. Ulli was on the dance floor in Paradise Club one night when someone slapped him at the back, shouting: "Hello Ulli, what are you doing here!" When he turned round to look, it was the great Nnamdi Azikiwe himself, also out on 'a night on the town'. He also met Chief S. Ladoke

Akintola at the Abalabi Club in London. Already deputy premier of the Western Region, he had detached himself from the delegation which he brought to London, to have an African meal at the club and listen to the music of Ambrose Campbell. Ulli was also on friendly terms with Chief Obafemi Awolowo, already an extremely meticulous and orderly person then. Once, when he invited Ulli to his home in Ikene, the chief told his guest that his menu for each day of the week was already worked out. As far as Ulli could tell, Chief Awolowo 105

stuck to that menu religiously, year after year. Another side of the party leader and premier that Ulli discovered was that, his strict discipline notwithstanding, the man was quite relaxed and friendly. When Ulli invited him for the seminar on Local Government at the university, Chief Awolowo actually came to his house and sat down for some minutes. He called regularly thereafter and Ulli paid return visits. But as he preferred to visit the busy man in the relative serenity of his home in Ikene, his own calls were less regular. In contrast to other politicians, however, Obafemi Awolowo was a teetotaler for whom nightclubs simply did not exist.

The decade of intense anti-colonial agitations and preparation for self-rule was still of total social (if not political) innocence for the politicians, and the society as a whole was the better for it, for it carried on well into the first three or so years of independence. It was in this easy, even-tempered atmosphere that Ulli founded MBARI Club. Although he had by now been living in Osogbo for almost a decade, Ibadan was also home. Ulli Beier, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark were the founding members of MBARI Club. When Ezekiel Mphahlele arrived in Nigeria from apartheid South Africa, his first appointment was in the Department of English, University of Lagos. He was not quite happy there, so Ulli got him an appointment in the Extramural Studies department at Ibadan. Ulli rendered the help also because he felt he needed him at Ibadan to be the president of the club, for several reasons: Soyinka, Okigbo and Clark were a triumvirate of three strong, hot-headed personalities almost impossible to keep together in one room for long. As Ulli himself was just one of them, he felt that somebody older and respected by all was needed to exercise a calming effect on all. Secondly, Ulli guessed that as an exile in Nigeria, Mphahlele would command the sympathy of all and be readily listened to. Mphahlele was the club's first president and he used these assets well, enhanced further by his solidity of character, calmness and integrity. Not long after the club started, Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke were brought in. Both artists had studied at the College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, but Ulli had known about them and the new bearings they were trying to bring to Nigerian art after their training. So Ulli invited them to join MBARI Club for two important reasons. The first was to diversify the artistic and intellectual base of the club to include as much of 106

the fine arts as possible. The other was the more crucial: to cause a change of direction in the art scene in Nigeria then. This intention can be gleaned from the conclusion that Ulli wrote for his book Art in Nigeria 1960. In that book, Ulli ended the section where he expressed his dissatisfaction

with the contemporary state of art education on a note of cautious optimism (1960; 24): Fortunately,

some

excellent

work

in art teaching

is going

on

ın

Nigeria at the highest academic level ... the Art Department of the

Nigerian College in Zaria has made the highly imaginative work of

students like Demas Nwoko and C. Uche Okeke possible ... The new

Nigerian generation must come to terms with its past before it can pass on to a creative future. Only then can we hope that Nigeria will have another contribution to make to the world of art that is as

important and revolutionary as that of its traditional wood-carving

and brass-casting. Here

we

have,

again,

expressed

for art, the

same

hope

that Ulli had

expressed for the new literature in the editorial inaugurating Black Orpheus three years earlier: the creation of a new art that is a synthesis of the traditional and indigenous, and the foreign. Ulli wrote that concluding chapter against the background of what he saw as the elevation of Europe-

inspired, studio-produced art that was then considered respectable along with the Europe-trained artists who were producing them on the one hand, and the contemptuous dismissal of indigenous art and artists on the other. Ulli was pained by the rapid marginalization or, in most cases, outright abandonment of the latter, and skeptical about the uncritical imitation of Western styles. He was even more concerned that society as the poorer, spiritually, for it.

a whole was

Moreover, in the career of Ben Enwowu, Nigeria's most feted artist then,

Ulli was seeing what could happen to a good artist once he became a salaried civil servant. Ben Enwowu was trained at the Slade in London and had one exhibition that received raving reviews from even The Times and

The Observer. Upon his return to Nigeria he was made Art Adviser to the Federal Government, given a big house and studio. Whereupon he gradually

slid into the role

of art ambassador

by

career rather than

a

professional artist. He had no respectable gallery to exhibit in, and no other artist to measure himself against. Ulli saw in Ben a highly gifted artist who had lost his roots and direction, was caught in a dilemma that he himself

107

hardly realized, and going to seed. As far as Ulli could foresee, the type of ‘successful’ modern Nigerian art and artist Ben epitomized was a dead-end. Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke on the other hand broke away from the academic training they had received in Zaria, and were trying to make something new on their own. They said no to the European naturalistic type of art they had been taught, reoriented themselves differently, and brought integrity to traditional art. In their own way, they were carrying on the kind of revolution that had already started in literature So they added diversity to an already dynamic club. It was an experiment worth trying and it proved enormously successful. There was also a personal element in it for Ulli. Although the founder and editor of Black Orpheus, although a man of letters, translator and even modest playwright, Ulli's passion and first loves have always been art and music. Thus, for him, an MBARI Club without art would have been inconceivable. It was the one activity of the club that he jealously dominated and poured all his energy into. At some stage, Dennis Williams, the Guyanese artist and art historian, was also brought in. Ulli had met him in Khartoum and, through him, had known Ibrahim el Salahi the Sudanese painter. It turned out that Williams wanted to come to Nigeria, so Ulli made this possible by getting him a job at the University of Ibadan's Institute of African Studies, then headed by his old friend Saburi Biobaku. Dennis Williams spent his time in Nigeria researching on Yoruba iron smelting and edan ogboni for the Institute, but he joined hands with the architects Pancho Guedes and Julian Beinart in conducting the art workshop which Ulli organised at MBARI. D.O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola were accorded honorary membership of the club — Soyinka especially (and rightly) argued their case. Ulli of course

already had an excellent working relationship with the famous Yoruba

novelist.

D.O.

Fagunwa

was

then the head

of the Literature Bureau

in

Western Region's Ministry of Education, Ibadan. When Ulli started his activities on Yoruba

culture, Fagunwa

was

there to support him

in the

publications aspect. It was Fagunwa's bureau that published Odu, Black Orpheus and Ewe (1). Amos Tutuola for his part had already become famous

abroad (and controversial at home)

for his novel

The Palmwine

Drinkard. So there were good reasons for bringing both men in.

108

However, being of an older, different generation of Nigerians, the two gentlemen played no active part in the club's affairs. MBARI was simply not

their kind of scene and they could not feel at ease in its turbulent, heady and youthful atmosphere. Still, they got all the respect and honour which the younger men felt were their due on the infrequent occasions that they came. For Ulli, they were "gentlemen with old fashioned manners and great modesty inspite of their considerable achievements." Mrs Begum Hendrickse (of South African Malay origin and wife of the paediatrician Ralph Hendrickse) was the club's hardworking and committed secretary.

MBARI Club was as much a social centre as a cultural-intellectual organization, and its social side needs stressing. It was a place for likeminded people generally interested in the arts and culture to gather freely and

informally

—

something

like

the

Paris

café

but

with

an

African

character. There was a Lebanese restaurant upstairs which supplied very good food and drinks at any time, and very quickly too. At night members sat in the open courtyard to eat, drink, relax and talk. It was an open house kept strictly informal, with a library that anybody could just walk into, wander around in, and browse to his heart's content. There were paintings and pictures everywhere. This made it possible for people not to have to wait for something to be happening in the place before visiting it. In any case something or other was always happening and it was a magnetic point for the members, the university people, young American Peace Corps volunteers (who made it a place of cultural pilgrimage), and the townspeople generally. It was in MBARI that Ulli and Soyinka created the fashion for adire shirts (made

famous

as the trademark of the artist in Achebe's

A Man

of the

People, and source of the Minister's initial irritation with him) — a good instance of the combination of economic, social and cultural revival if ever

there was one. Perhaps the great virtue of MBARI Club was its convivial atmosphere, which enabled it to make the impact it made in its short life. MBARI

Club expanded into and brought together the personal lives of its

members. Perhaps it is more precise to say that it was an extension of their

prior friendships and interactions. Ulli already knew Christopher Okigbo as

an undergraduate at Ibadan. After graduation, he went to teach at Fiditi, from where he returned to Ibadan first as assistant to Philip Harris, representative of Cambridge University Press, Nigeria. When Harris

109

returned to Britain, Okigbo took over as representative and moved into Harris's official quarters at Eleiyele. Ulli always found the house surrealistic. Philip Harris's Swedish wife had kept an extremely meticulous household, though Ulli thought her tastes "girlish": the entire house was fitted with fluffy white carpets "of the type", in Ulli's own words, "European bourgeois families had their naked babies photographed on earlier in the century." To Ulli, these fluffy white carpets gave the feel and impression of huge polar bear rugs. The Scandinavian furniture was elegant, but sterile looking. Ulli never ceased to be amazed that Okigbo genuinely enjoyed such icy comfort and thought he must be visually blind. He did not add or subtract from the house, hung not a single picture on the wall, replaced not a piece of the furniture. Ulli was always welcome in his house whenever he was in town. Then they would have long arguments and conversations far into the night. Ulli witnessed the birth of Heavensgate in that weird house. Even when he moved to far away Nsukka, Ulli paid regular visits and was aware that it was at Okigbo's house in Nsukka that J.P. Clark composed Song of a Goat. Ulli had of course met Wole Soyinka in London and published his ‘immigrant’ poems in Black Orpheus. It was only natural, therefore, that upon his arrival in Nigeria later in 1959, both would seek each other out (and strike a lifelong friendship). Wole Soyinka then lived on the university campus, in a tiny, one-bedroom bungalow. Whenever Ulli turned up, Soyinka would vacate the bedroom and bed down on the couch in the sitting room, all protestations by the guest not availing. J.P. Clark worked in Lagos as a journalist but came up to Ibadan very regularly. In his capacity later as a newspaper editor, he guaranteed a regular press for the club's numerous activities. Even before the formation of the club and while independence was just around the comer, they all went out to the clubs together, arguing long into the night on the prospects and problems of the new, imminent political dispensation. These friendships would have an intellectual focus in Black Orpheus and a social-cultural meeting point in MBARI Club; but the idea of a club, formal or informal, did not arise until actual preparations for independence began. Ulli had previously been a member of the Nigeria Council — he was invited

in by its founder, Kola Balogun — and so, when preparations for the independence celebrations began, he submitted a play to it, suggesting that 110

it was a suitable one for the historic occasion. That play was Forests by Wole

incomprehensible.

Soyinka.

Ulli

A Dance of the

The Council rejected it out of hand as being

suddenly

realized that this Council,

set up

in

imitation of the British Council, was packed full of philistines for whom the young writers were obviously too sophisticated. Clearly, it could not be

relied upon to support and encourage the arts in any meaningful way if at all. Ulli saw clearly, too, what was needed: an independent body, a club of some kind. So the offhand rejection of Soyinka's play roused him into action

and

the club

was

formed

less than

a year

later.

Once

again,

a

discouraging situation had been turned round and used in unexpected ways. Wole Soyinka, Ulli and the others started casting around for a suitable name for the as yet non-existent club. Then one day, as Ulli was sitting in

Soyinka's office in the university, Chinua Achebe rang from Lagos and talked with Soyinka for some time. Soyinka then relayed to Ulli that Achebe had suggested the word mbari!

It was a perfect name:

short and

memorable, it also had the added advantage of carrying a traditional philosophy of art which Ulli himself had researched in Igboland and written on.

At periodic intervals, the earth goddess Ala would demand an mbari of the community. Its importance was more in the process of creativity and communal survival than in the finished product; especially as the entire community (of gods, ancestors and mortals) was involved. When finished,

the mbari images would be left in the open air, to gradually sink back into the earth from which they came. When the deity demanded them, new images were created. The name mbari was good for the club therefore, as it expressed

the

spiritual

and

communal

roles

it conceived

for itself;

its

‘literal’ and figurative centrality in the city of Ibadan, and its drawing of sustenance from the ‘earth’ of traditions to which it would also be a contribution.

Although J.P. Clark's job later as newspaper editor in Lagos guaranteed a press for the club's activities, the trouble was that the club started before the job and needed a press immediately: it was crucial that the club be known and its activities widely publicized right from the beginning. As the other members were already fully engaged in their places of work, this task fell squarely on Ulli's shoulders. What he did at the start was to go round the newspaper houses persuading them to create an art and culture page (or just 11]

a corner)

where

MBARI's

activities

could

be

reviewed

among

others.

Though quite receptive, the editors complained that they had no one on the staff capable of writing about such things. So Ulli started reviewing for several papers, sometimes reviewing the same event for several papers under different names. Meanwhile, he was frantically looking for somebody to replace him. Finally, Diana Speed (the wife of Frank Speed the film maker) agreed. She started a weekly page in Jakande's weekly, Daily Service. To Ulli, this was a great relief and even a greater success in another respect. The intention of creating a readership for MBARI's activities succeeded for, after a few months, other papers felt the need for their own review pages and commissioned young people to do it. Thus, literary (or more generally, cultural) journalism took root in Nigeria. Other organizations, including the foreign cultural institutes, benefitted from this. The Tribune in Ibadan for example had a regular reviews section, run by one young and very enthusiastic Mr Awe. Ulli's childhood love was art and he never outgrew it. His father, though a medical doctor by profession, was a musician and a passionate devotee of art. As a country doctor during the years of the hyperinflation in Germany, he was paid by his patients in food. Every now and then, he travelled to Berlin to exchange food for drawings or prints by contemporary German artists since, even in the cities, money had completely lost its value. Ulli grew up surrounded by this small collection. Then, by the age of five, he started following his father to museums and art galleries on Sundays. He thus learnt the value of exhibitions — and how to organize them — very early. His first opportunity to stage one did not come, however, until about thirty years later. In 1952 in Ibadan, he converted a passage running along the main reading room of the University College library into a gallery! He ran many small displays in this improvised space, two of which were very revealing of things to come: one on Sango, comprising carvings from the Timi's palace shrine in Ede; the other, called "Artists Against Apartheid",

was an exhibition in support of the victims of the South African Treason Trial. Susanne Wenger, Mick Pilcher and Rusty Ghoul artists who donated pictures.

were among

the

Now, MBARI Club gave him his first full opportunity and scope to run a proper gallery and the exhibition programmes 112

were Ulli's own scene. A

joint Nwoko-Okeke exhibition was the first, followed by one called "Nigerian Popular Art". It was a recognition and promotion of popular culture (Ulli was also the first to recognize Onitsha market literature and bring it to critical limelight) before the age of popular culture studies ın Nigeria. Cement lions and other forms from Brazilian houses; Hausa bedspread embroideries sold in Kano market; barbers' signs; paintings behind glasses from Benin, etc., were mounted. The exhibition was national and intercultural in character, and Ulli especially loved it for its variety. The theme of interculturalism present in a modest scale in this particular exhibition was to acquire an ever-widening international scope with each and all subsequent ones, just as the club itself plus the writings of its members acquired an intertextual, intercultural, and international flavour. Very soon the works of artists from other African countries, then USA and Europe, began to appear in this unprepossessing premises located in Gbagi, the downtown market of Ibadan. Like the goods sold in this commercial area which came from all corners of the globe,

local and foreign artists jostled for space in MBARI Club's gallery. The

stories behind how three such exhibitions came about are worth telling. About 1947, the glossy American magazine Fortune published colour reproductions of paintings by the African-American Jacob Lawrence, in an

eight-page centrespread. The themes of those paintings were the black

migration from the South to the North (of the USA), all very stylized. Ulli

so loved numerous Présence book The

them that he cut them out migrations and even forgot Africaine conference in Paris Art of the American Negro.

to keep. He lost them in his own the name of the artist. Then, at the in 1956, Cedric Dover presented his The styles and modes of expression

of the artists in the book were mainstream (white) American and about the

only things "negro" in it were the subject matter and the artists. But in it Ulli rediscovered Jacob Lawrence! When Nigeria gained her independence in 1960, an organization called American Society of African Culture was formed, composed mostly of African-Americans. It started off with a big bang six months after independence, spending much money to bring in big jazz performers like Lionel Hampton, Odetta, Simona, Randy Weston (2) and others. Seeing that the society obviously had money to spend, Ulli went and persuaded it to bring Jacob Lawrence to Nigeria. The artist came and had his exhibition 113

at MBARI. So taken with Nigeria was Jacob Lawrence that, upon his return to the USA, he got himself a grant and came back to Ibadan for six months to paint. Another artist Ulli discovered, for the first time, in Dover's book was the late William H. Johnson. Johnson died early, but his works were being looked after by the Harmon Foundation in America. They were also brought through the same association for exhibition at MBARI. Then both artists were featured in Black Orpheus number 11. Ibrahim el Salahi from the Sudan also had an exhibition of his paintings, and there was one of Valente Malangatana from Mozambique. The story behind the exhibition of Vincent Kofi, the Ghanaian sculptor, is interesting because of the political cloud that hung over it, and which

presaged things to come

later in Ghana and the rest of black Africa.

Vincent Kofi made very huge semi-abstract, semi-representational and intriguing figures which impressed the Nigerian audience very much. Long after the exhibition had closed, visitors to MBARI kept asking when it would be brought back. In response, MBARI wrote to Ghana requesting for Vincent Kofi to come back again, two years later. The Ghanaian Minister of Culture kindly replied explaining that the Osagyefo (Kwame Nkrumah) was working on a policy paper on foreign exhibitions of Ghanaian arts and until that paper was ready, no artist was allowed to go out to exhibit! Of course, the real reason was different: Vincent Kofi was one of those apolitical artists who believed that if he left politics alone, politics too would leave him alone. But the Nkrumah government interpreted this aloofness as opposition and punished him for it by denying him opportunities for exhibition. The persecution of the artist in Africa had begun, and in very progressive Ghana; but nobody could have predicted that worse was to come. Sometime in 1958, Ulli went to Germany to exhibit the works of Susanne Wenger in the Kunstkabinett Frankfurt, a gallery owned by a rich, eccentric old lady, Frau Becker von Rath. She owned one of the largest collections of the German expressionists, some of whom were influenced by African art. Ulli persuaded her to let MBARI have thirty large woodcuts by Schmidt-

Rottluff. This was a large undertaking that would not have been possible

without the contribution of the German Embassy in Lagos, which raised the money for insurance and air freight. From a financial point of view this was MBARI's most ambitious undertaking. Ulli's point was not to demonstrate

114

that MBARI Club had joined the international big league of museums and exhibitors, however. Rather, he intended this particular exhibition to have two messages for Nigerians. One, Schmidt-Rottlufs woodcuts showed how

traditional African art forms could be transposed into a modern setting. Two, it demonstrated to the middle class Nigerian public (or the members

of it that visited MBARI) the prestige which African art had enjoyed ın Europe for half a century — the same period when Africans themselves had learnt to despise it. On the local scene, another exhibition mounted

interesting

American

story behind

Peace

Corps

it was

volunteer

by MBARI

that of Igbo masks serving

in the

East

from had

and with an

Afıkpo. spent

An

much

money buying the masks. He brought them to MBARI and Ulli had a spontaneous exhibition of them. When the young man was leaving, he realized that the masks could not be legally exported, so he offered them to Ulli, who paid with his own money. Again, why Ulli bought them and for

what purposes reveal his interculturalism and belief in the real purposes of art. He bought them for the Osogbo Museum because he thought it was necessary for Yoruba people, great carvers themselves, to see other styles and traditions of carving. This made depositing them at the National Museum in Lagos, which in any case already had many examples of them,

wasteful and superfluous. While keeping the club's gallery occupied all the

time, Ulli also had time to mount

exhibitions of traditional and modern

African art in Europe, and even as far away as India. While he promoted multiculturalism through art at the international level, he also promoted it at the local level on other fronts: the frequent visits of Agbor Dancers to Osogbo and Ibadan; their successful and triumphant inclusion in Duro Ladipo's play about reconciliation, tolerance and multiculturalism, Moremi.

Three members of MBARI — Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark — were of course writers and, not unexpectedly, the club's literary

side was as vibrant as the art side, especially with publications. Actually, the publication side started before the founding of the club. Ulli had gotten

some money from Farfield Foundation to start a series of Black Orpheus special publications, of which the first was Ezekiel Mphahlele's The Living

and Dead. The second was Leon Damas's African Songs of Love War Grief and Abuse, a collection which Ulli had secured for translation from the poet himself at the Paris conference of 1956. It was already in the press

115

when MBARI Club came into being in 1961, but Ulli had the imprint changed to MBARI Publications at the last second. So the club was born with two very important assets and a promotional blitz: a journal, a publishing outfit with a capital of two thousand pounds, and two books! To the two books were soon added others that would not only establish modern African literature in English, but also form part of its canon: Three Plays by Wole Soyinka; J.P. Clark's poems and his play Song of a Goat; Christopher Okigbo's poems Heavensgate and Limits; Dennis Brutus's Sirens Knuckles Boots; Rediscovery by Kofi Awoonor; Poems by Lenrie Peters; Tchikaya U'Tamsi's Brushfire, and Jean-Jacques Rabéarivelo's 24 Poems. It even published Alex la Guma's novella A Walk in the Night. There were also four art books: a book of drawings each by Uche Okeke and Ibrahim el Salahi, the third on Asiru, the metal relief worker from Osogbo, and one on the brass caster Yemi Bisiri. Altogether, twenty-four books in three years. Two points are worth making about this feat: by far majority of the publications was poetry; all were done on the two thousand pound capital. Enough has been written about the magazine Black Orpheus which, though started several years before MBARI Club was born, more or less became its organ. Literary scholars like Louis James, Bernth Lindfors and Peter Benson (see chapter VII and bibliography below) have done a good job stressing its crucial role in the "Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa" (Benson's subtitle), placing it in socio-historical as well as political contexts, and generally assessing its published items. The charges that have been levied against Ulli and his magazine (that he should have started publishing Nigerian authors earlier than he did; that he overly favoured Francophone authors) have come more from journalists with little or hazy sense of the historical facts than from scholars. However, by way of setting

the records straight, it is only necessary to list the authors who were first published in Black Orpheus: Gabriel Okara, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, George (later Kofi) Awoonor, J.P. Clark, Lenrie Peters, Dennis Brutus, Ama Ata Aidoo. Novelists could not be published, but their works were reviewed. In short, if these pioneers of modern Anglophone African literature had written earlier, they would have been published earlier in the magazine — it would have been born earlier to serve them.

116

It can also be argued, surely, that the regular publication of Negritude poetry in the magazıne stimulated and quickened the growth of modern African poetry (if not prose and drama) in English. The influence of that poetry on Okigbo and Clark 1s evident, in subject if not in style and idiom. Furthermore

reactions

against Negritude

poetry by Anglophone

African

poets were also part of the influence: there was something to react against, to inspire growth and development in a different direction. The literary anecdotes behind some of the firsts are also worth telling. When he was in London sometime in 1958, Ulli visited Fatayı Williams, a Nigerian then working as a programme editor at the BBC. In the course of

their rambling conversation Williams suddenly said: "Oh, by the way, you know, there is a young fellow here, a Nigerian, who has written three very funny but good poems. I think you should see them." That was the first time he ever came across the name Wole Soyinka; he read the three

‘immigrant’

poems

and

immediately

rang

their

author

to

book

an

appointment. A few days later, they met at Gallery One, where Susanne was having an exhibition. Editor and author, as the saying goes, ‘hit it off

together immediately' and the poems came out in the next issue of Black Orpheus in 1959. Not long after, Soyinka himself returned home. At one stage Black Orpheus organized a short story competition, the prize

for which included a trip to Ibadan to meet the MBARI writers. An unknown writer from Ghana called Christiana Aidoo won with a story titled "No Sweetness Here". She came and, in the little speech she made while receiving her prize, revealed that she had never written anything before: it was in fact the competition that tempted her to try her hand at writing. Christiana (later Ama Ata) Aidoo has since become one of Africa's

foremost female writers. Another whom Black Orpheus helped to launch

on a successful writing career was Adrienne Cornell, an African-American

lady then in Lagos. Her husband, the sociologist John Kennedy, was quite close to MBARI. One day he told Ulli that his wife was writing stories but was too shy to show them to anybody. After much persuasion the sensitive lady finally agreed to let Ulli see one titled "Because of the King of

France", a very poetic story very delicately written, totally different from the sometimes strident outpourings that was coming out of many AfricanAmerican writers then. Ulli was very excited by this story and thought "it was pure magic". Black Orpheus published it at once. It was Adrienne

117

Cornell's first published work too and she went on to become a successful playwright in New York.

The

drama

and theatre

scene

at MBARI

was

part of its literary side

naturally, as Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark and Demas Nwoko were theatre people. Here too, the club scored a few firsts. Clark's Song of a Goat was first performed at MBARI, with Soyinka in the lead role and as producerdirector. In this capacity he turned the performance into a ritual: very intense acting; a live goat slaughtered on the stage. The result was wild and dangerous — Francesca Pereira, who played the leading female character, went into a trance. In this first stage realization of the play, the performance left the realm of play-acting far behind, to enter into that of the uncanny. MBARI also hosted the first performance of Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero, produced and directed by Wole Soyinka himself. Yemi Lijadu played the part of Brother Jero and Ralph Opara that of Chume. MBARI was an ideal setting for this kind of play and the performance was sparkling. On the music side, MBARI Club was also quite adventurous in its activities. Duro Ladipo's musical career started in earnest at MBARI. His daring Easter Cantata, rejected at Osogbo by the Anglican church, was brought to MBARI along with the recently composed Christmas Cantata, after which Segun Olusola took it to Western Nigerian Television (WNTV). Duro was so excited by the atmosphere at the club that he told Ulli: "We must have an MBARI Club in Osogbo!" The then famous acrobatic dancers from Agbor (popularly known as 'Agbor Dancers') also came, accompanied by the Obi (king) of Agbor himself. Soon after, the Timi of Ede and his palace drummers followed. The Timi introduced a variety of rare traditional Yoruba musical instruments, but what struck Ulli most about the event was that not many Yoruba people from the campus, who were in the audience, understood the drum language. There was some attempt at multiculturalism at the international level here too. The Goethe Institute once brought a full-fledged student orchestra of about twenty-five musicians from Tübingen, Germany. It came to MBARI and performed Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart. Then Duro Ladipo took the stage to perform his opera Oba Koso (see chapter V)! The impact of the multimedia and total performance on the young German musicians was indescribable.

118

With the present state of literature and the arts in Nigeria in mind, it is instructive to reflect on why Black Orpheus and MBARI were so successful. The first reason is the hard fact that MBARI was situated at the central market in Ibadan and was part of that bustling market's prismatic and tumultuous scene. It drew some of its energy from it and gave back something: 'Culture and the Arts’ were not things that happened only among the so-called educated and elite circles of the university campus but what went on everyday, even in the midst of frenetic commercial activities.

Without romanticizing the issue and by contrasting it with colonial and postcolonial Nigerian societies, it can be said that 'Culture and the Arts’ were a part of daily life in precolonial or traditional Africa and still are in rural areas. This became lost in colonial, elite-dominated, rapidly urbanized Africa. By deliberately siting MBARI Club in Dugbe Market in Ibadan, Ulli

sought in his own modest way to recover and make contemporary that lost connectedness. Thus, although MBARI was a club, its activities were open. In this it resembled those African cults whose memberships are exclusive, but whose activities are open — whose secret power lies in their paradoxical openness. In its informality, activities and choice of premises, MBARI Club had the right atmosphere that was neither daunting nor 'free for all.' The curious apprentice or the ordinary woman in the street who had come to the

market and merely wanted to look in and see what was going on could do so without feeling overawed; the elite genuinely or pretentiously looking

for ‘culture’ could come in and be relaxed with food and a bottle of beer. So people came to MBARI Club not just because it was the new, fashionable place to be seen at, but because they wanted to be there. It was a place where you could relax.

Open and yet exclusive in membership; informal, democratic yet rigorously discriminating in its activities; a disciplined membership that did without organizational hierarchy: these were the paradoxical qualities that made MBARI Club so flexible, vibrant and creative. In combination they produced its perhaps more salutary importance, and that of Black Orpheus. Ulli brought a group of kindred spirits into a club that was neither a professional body nor a semi-political association. Had the writers and artists themselves created something like an Association of Nigerian Writers and Artists, membership would have had to be thrown open and an unwieldy organization of opposites, pretenders and office-seekers would 119

have resulted. In such an organization, compromise would have been the rule, standard the casualty. Ulli did not make such a mistake and MBARI Club was no such association — not even a proto-Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). MBARI Club was of course no club of sweet friends agreeing with each other on every thing every day. "The members quarrelled about almost everything," Ulli has testified but, he has also added, "they did agree on high standards." These are about the only two points on which all agreed, loudly and repeatedly stated by all the members at the 1962 Kampala conference. Since both the journal and the club insisted on high standards and wanted to have a particular character to make their points, they had to be selective,

to impress a particular form of cultural vision and high critical judgement

on their readers. This inevitably placed Ulli, the spirit and workhorse of the journal, in the eye of the storm and did not always make him popular. People felt offended when they sent in things that were not published. No explanations or apologies were owed to such people, but there were a few delicate instances when Ulli felt that some form of explanation was necessary. One such tricky situation arose after Ulli had given a talk on Nigerian Literature on the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) radio. Dr Azikiwe, then already Governor-General, wrote a letter to him marked "Confidential". Dr Azikiwe started it by congratulating Ulli on his work of “encouraging the Nigerian literati." Then the letter went on to accuse Ulli of having said that Dennis Osadebay was the first Nigerian to write poetry in English, whereas there had been two or three preceeding authors. Well, Ulli wrote back a polite letter asking for the names of these authors. Dr Azikiwe then sent back some poems by two authors. They were too poor to be published in Black Orpheus. The real issue was left untouched: the great man, who fancied himself a writer, felt hurt that he had been neglected in the talk, that his poems were not considered worthy of mention in the talk, and least of all for publication in the by now very prestigious and popular journal. But being a gentleman with no meanness in him at all, Dr Azikiwe did not attempt to hassle the editor. Shortly afterwards, Ulli went to his office to try and explain his position. As friendly as ever, Dr Nnamdi

Azikiwe brushed the poetry issue aside, to spend more time lamenting his

position as Governor-General. His parting words to Ulli summed up the political arrangement in the country then, and especially his own position

120

in it: "I am sitting in a cage. It's a golden cage," he said, "but it is still a cage." Other pressures were not so subtle or applied with such politeness. But as steadiness of purpose and high standards constituted the sole criterion by which Black Orpheus and MBARI Club did everything, it was not difficult

to deal with them. In this there is a lesson for those who have been minding

the institutions of literature and culture in Nigeria in the last two or so

decades.

MBARI Club started in 1961, the founding group broke up in 1964, the club

itself staggered on till 1967 when the civil war finally killed it. Sometimes in literary affairs, as in politics, nothing fails like success. MBARI Club died so early because of its extraordinary, early success, coupled with the even

more remarkable, precocious success of some of its members. But it was far from being a case of burnt-out energy. That it should die so soon, in spite of such a record of activities and achievements, and with such obvious potentials for greater things, was therefore an avoidable fate. When the lease on the premises expired in 1964, J.P. Clark and Demas Nwoko did not want it renewed because they wished to move the club to the Central Hotel, a bigger place with a much larger courtyard. Neither Ulli

nor Wole Soyinka was keen on this new place. To both, the Central Hotel was an architectural abomination,

a nouveau

riche, ostentatious building

whose many rooms would be wasted unless the club wanted to start hotel business.

Moreover,

the

two

argued,

the

hotel

was

too

pompous,

its

location and atmosphere bound to destroy the relaxed atmosphere of the present place and restrict the clientele to the elite. These arguments did not persuade the others, so both Ulli and Soyinka withdrew while the rest went ahead and moved. Meanwhile Ezekiel Mphahlele who might have exercised a cooling effect on all was gone. Wole Soyinka for his part quickly found a new premises for his Orisun Theatre, which he had just put together. Ulli's suggestion that they all move in with him was turned down. Christopher Okigbo then persuaded the rump to offer Ulli club chairmanship for the first year in the new premises. This was a face-saving gesture which Ulli thought was beside the point and totally unnecessary, so he did not accept it. By then,

too, he was having more than enough to do at Osogbo: MBARI MBAYO

121

Club in Osogbo, with its own cultural activities, was taking up much of his time and whatever was left of it he spent with the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company, then in the heat of preparations for its first overseas tour. In the midst of the rift, Ulli travelled on a short holiday to Dahomey (now Republic of Benin). Upon his return, he met a court interdiction: J.P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo and Demas Nwoko had gone to court in an ambitious bid to keep the publications and block the club's accounts! The publications aspect was Ulli's idea and he had secured the money (two thousand pounds in all: half at the beginning, half at a later stage) before the club was born. In outrage and disgust, Ayo Ogunseye called everybody together, at which meeting Ulli disclosed the source of the money and its existence before the club. Very embarrassed, the would-be litigants apologized and promised to withdraw their court action. Ayo Ogunseye then made them sign a statement to this effect. Ulli had thought to keep the publications going by himself but with such developments, he lost interest completely. Ulli nevertheless remained on friendly terms with everybody. He could see the argument from Clark and Nwoko's side: theatre people who genuinely thought they needed the bigger space that Central Hotel offered. And there, they actually did a few plays; Nwoko also brought Hubert Ogunde and Duro Ladipo to perform at different times. It did not last long, however, for everything fell apart. Ulli still stayed at Okigbo's house in Ibadan and later in Nsukka. He continued to edit Black Orpheus till his departure from Nigeria in December of 1966 (number 22 which came out in 1967 was still his issue). He left MBARI Publications and its assets to the others, but not a single publication came out after him. After his departure from Nigeria, the magazine itself could only stumble on for just a few more numbers before expiring. Perhaps the remaining members could not have done much more in the name of MBARI Club really, for it must be remembered, this was a period when the troubles in the Western Region escalated by the day. Perhaps, too, even if the original club had not broken up when it did, it would have had to sooner than later, by force of political circumstances. The troubles in the Western Region were overtaken and surpassed by the chain of even more horrible national events set in motion by the military coup of January

1966. The friends saw the terrible preambles to the civil war and discussed them in anxiety-laden tones. Christopher Okigbo moved to the East and 122

that calamity which he himself had prophesied in his last poems claimed his life. Wole Soyinka was already having his own problems with the pirate government in Ibadan and, as the threat of a civil war came nearer, with the Federal Government; he ended up being incarcerated throughout the duration of the war. J.P. Clark became politically estranged. By this time too, Ulli had already become more devoted to MBARI MBAYO and Duro Ladipo in Osogbo.

Uche Okeke has written nostalgically — and rather grandiosely — of the club as follows (1982; 2): By

far the

most

important

cultural

event

in recent

years

is the

founding of the MBARI Artists' and Writers' Club in Ibadan. The spread of the creative thought of this group, its liberal philosophy, and the acceptance of continuity of the creative process have enduring effect and encompasses race and creed. MBARI philosophy is universal in meaning and appeal. In the process of years, MBARI

may well be the word for Africa's new awareness and cultural emancipation. It is a movement dynamic and far-sighted indeed. Such exaggerated, universalist claims (typical of the period) aside, MBARI's successes were truly spectacular, which, too, may have contributed to its early death. If so, surely, its demise was a ‘happy tragedy’. It is also one not to be regretted — and Ulli did not regret it — when looked at from a more

philosophical perspective. The foundation MBARI Club lasted three very

hectic, happy and bounteous years. As a cultural centre, its impact on Ibadan, its immediate environment, was immediate and profound. This impact then radiated out in time to cover not only Nigeria but the rest of

Africa (its example inspired Rajat Neogy to start Transition and make it do for East Africa what Black Orpheus had done and was still doing for West Africa). Especially in literature, the effects of the waves it created were

also felt on more distant shores. These effects and influences cannot be measured in quantitative terms and are probably best left for future historians of twentieth century African literatures and cultures. One

can

briefly speculate on a point though. Soyinka's first novel, The Interpreters, is about artists who move together

in a circle and gather around created in reality at MBARI. Its large canvass in which one of figures whose contemporary,

places whose atmosphere resembles that central narrative metaphor is also that of a the artists is painting Yoruba mythological human incarnations are the interpreters 123

themselves. J.P. Clark also has a few poems about paintings and sculptures, or inspired by them. Christopher Okigbo's images and symbols, especially in Labyrinths, have strong qualities of visuality and stillness about them that could have come from familiarity with paintings and sculptures that the club regularly exhibited. Moreover, there are also the architectural structure of Labyrinths, its references to geometry and use of geometrical figures as images and symbols. It would have been surprising indeed if the presence of the artists Demas Nwoko, Uche Okeke and other architects in the club, plus the exhibitions of paintings and sculptures that went on regularly, did not somehow find their way into the writings produced by the three. Certainly, Okigbo got the famous images he used in Path of Thunder from an earlier publication of Yoruba poetry by Ulli. This 'thick' kind of intertextuality (between literature, painting, sculpture, music) is notably absent in their post-MBARI writings. It is almost totally absent in other Nigerian writers of the same generation who did not belong to MBARI, and hardly present at all in the writings of younger writers. The borrowing from the other arts to broaden and deepen the literary experience remains unique to the literature of the MBARI period. In a subsequent literature in which the areas of human experience that are explored are generally so narrow, the absence of that source of references, symbols and images is surely to be regretted. No other journal in Nigeria has tried to combine literature and the other arts at all since Black Orpheus, or certainly not in the way it did. A more certain and quantitatively measurable indication of MBARI's impact can be gleaned from the sales of two of its publications, however: two thousand copies of books of poetry were sold; over three thousand printed copies of a book of Yoruba children's poetry in its English translation also sold out. After MBARI first published Soyinka, Okigbo, Clark and others, they became known abroad and international publishers began falling over

themselves to grab their works. Thus, MBARI Club and Black Orpheus more than fully served the purposes for which they were set up.

Both created a reading public and audience that were at once local as well as international; both had produced a mood and a standard, plus an atmosphere

for cultural

reawakening

and

development

in the

country.

Perhaps most important of all, both — but especially MBARI Club — had demonstrated that these things could be done in one's own way and style, 124

without

government

involvement.

This

point

is especially

important

in

view of later developments in Nigeria when governments began to set up arts and culture councils that remain merely extensions of the bureaucracy and which, for that reason, have never really achieved much. MBARI had

done its thing, made its point and achieved much else in the process; perhaps to have continued would have been superfluous. Ulli felt that this was exactly the situation then. It was time for something else to happen.

MBARI Club has proved to be lıke the (Yoruba) proverbial plantain tree that dies to replace itself with new shoots. The club spawned a string of many other things: MBARI MBAYO at Osogbo; another MBARI at Enugu; the art gallery created by Tayo Aiyegbusi (an artist himself, but also a promoter of other artists) in Lagos, also called MBARI; Ori Olokun at Ife, started by the very energetic historian Michael Crowder; the Olokun Gallery in BeninCity built by Chief Ovia Idah, Es'kia Mphahlele's Chemchemi Centre in Nairobi, and Uche Okeke's Asele Centre at Nimo. The efforts by members

of the Osogbo art group are also offshoots and spin-offs of the original

MBARI idea: The Art Man's Gallery of Twins Seven-Seven; Buraimoh's The Heritage Gallery; the museum at Iragbiji set

Jimoh up by

Muraina Oyelami. All these different individuals or groups have revived and kept alive the MBARI and degrees of success.

idea, in different situations, with varying aims

Paradoxically Nike's Art Gallery in Osogbo, started without any fanfare but with much determination and hard-headed realism, is the most successful

of these rebirths. Her gallery and its numerous artistic activities are only indirectly linked with MBARI Ibadan and MBARI MBAYO at Osogbo. Nike was not even around when the two clubs happened. She got the spirit through Twins Seven-Seven and picked up fragments of what was left. Yet she now caters for a particular class and continues to make a powerful impact on the cultural scene everywhere. Her gallery and workshop have a

strong popular base and economic motive, but without sacrificing art for commerce.

She has thus combined

the revolution

in the adire industry

started at MBARI and continued by Georgina Beier in Ife between 1971 and 1974, with the renewal of traditional aesthetics started by the Osogbo art movement. Again, her example proves that one does not need government to do these things; that elaborate offices and clubs are not even necessary. In the 1990s Nike invited Georgina, who was then at IWALEWA-Haus

in

125

Germany, to conduct workshops in her centre. Between 1990 und 1994 she conducted seven workshops in textile technique, painting, and metal sculpture. Thus the link between MBARI MBAYO and the Nike Centre came full circle. Ulli himself has taken the MBARI touch with him wherever he has been and kept its flame alive. He and his wife Georgina, a famous and accomplished

artist in her own right, established the Centre for New Guinea Culture and

Gambamuno Gallery in Port Moresby when they were in Papua New Guinea. In Australia they started MIGILA House. When they returned to Nigeria in 1971, Ulli turned the University of Ife's Institute of African Studies which he directed for four years into a kind of super MBARI; he followed his own example later when he went back to Papua New Guinea to head that country's Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. IWALEWAHaus in Bayreuth, Germany, which he directed from 1981 to 1996 (with an interruption between 1984 and 1988), owes much to the MBARI idea. Each time somebody somewhere in Nigeria feels that there is something lacking in the artistic-cultural life of her or his environment and starts to do something about it, without waiting for government and beyond the merely

personal, the seed of MBARI that was sown in 1961 germinates anew.

NOTES 1. Ewe was a Yoruba children's comic originated by Ulli. It told stories from children's daily lives, retold Yoruba myths and highlighted events in the history for them. 2. In July 1995, Ulli brought Randy Weston to play at the prestigious Bayreuth Opera House, with Tunji Beier and the OKUTA PERCUSSION, and others. At the

dinner which followed, Randy Weston spent the whole evening reminiscing over life with Ulli in Lagos in 1961. Ulli's capacity for friendship is legendary, a component of which is surely the capacity to make such friendships last a lifetime.

126

CHAPTER V OSOGBO OROKI - MORE FRIENDS, 'FURIOUS ENERGIES' AND FUN Every people should be the originators of their own designs, the projector of their own schemes, and creators of the events that lead to their destiny — the consummation of their desires... Martin Robison Delaney (1852)

On the face of it, the Yoruba society and culture that Ulli met when he

arrived in Ibadan in 1950 were both alive and well. Anywhere you looked, even in a city like Lagos, ordinary Yoruba people still carried on their ageold festivals and ceremonies, or added new ones; the performing arts, the

fine arts, as well as literary arts were still alive. The populations of other big towns like Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode, Ilesa, Ile-Ife were

still predominantly agrarian and in any of them, you could happen on an agbegijo or apidan performance. The orisa worshippers still observed their

ose, performed their annual festivals with conviction, zeal and enthusiasm. Although Islam had been in Yoruba society for a long time, and Christianity was evident everywhere, the ancient belief systems and practices were still holding up. The oba institution, despite many decades of confused colonial tampering, was still strong. On the whole, the society might even perhaps have appeared secure in its ancient moorings, able to adapt to the new civilization brought from across the seas without losing its way in the wilderness of modernity. [fa divination poetry had somehow accommodated Islam and Christianity; Brazilian returnees had brought a new architectural style that was adapted to the social environment. These returnees, plus those from Sierra Leone, had in fact started some kind of Yoruba cultural renaissance in the last century. A newspaper in Yoruba had been in existence since the middle of the nineteenth century. Yoruba literature, in both oral and written forms, appeared quite strong and could only grow from strength to strength: it had produced a major novelist in D.O. Fagunwa who, though too heavily

influenced by Christian moralism, was clearly a master of the language. Although Western education, 'progress' and 'modernization' were turned into a faith whose catechism was drummed into parents and school children everyday, tradition seemed capable of existing and thriving side by side with it. Action Group, the political party formed mainly by Westerneducated Yoruba, had even started as a cultural association. Ulli saw all these and more, to have more than a passing than he began seeing that unstoppable forces had been their

effects

would

begin

and was fascinated. But no sooner did acquaintance with the society and the all was not as well as it looked. let loose and it was a matter of time to

corrode

the

foundations

of

the

he start culture Certain before huge,

magnificent edifice. Like the undertow of a strong ocean wave, these forces dragged away more than the surface swell deposited. Perhaps because he was an outsider, perhaps because he had come from that same Europe where the twin faiths of modernity and progress were born and where they did a lot of irreversible damage, Ulli was not as sanguine about the future as most of his Nigerian friends. Most of his educated Yoruba friends and acquaintances either took their own culture for granted, or, believing that an age of enlightenment had dawned and nothing but 'progress' was ahead, wished that the sooner all signs and relics of the African medieval and dark ages disappeared the better. All took a bright, modern future for granted. Ulli took nothing for granted. Even as he got more familiar with the olorisa people, he realized that the particular ones he knew and was friends with would be the last generation of their kind. The larger community that supported them, and for which they existed, was abandoning them for new, strange gods. Membership of the orisa cults dwindled by the week. Each time the great priests and carriers of the gods looked around them, they found themselves more and more isolated and alone. Together with their gods, the great priests grew weaker with each festival. The students he met both in the University College and at his Extramural classes, the 'new Africans', did not want to know about what they had relegated to the past but which, in truth, was still a present. For them, it was more ‘civilized’ to read Shakespeare and Wordsworth than to know about ijala. Better still, it was certainly more useful to acquire English without being really articulate in it, than to master Yoruba. At the political level, 128

Action Group, the party which had started as a cultural organization and done much to foster a single Yoruba national identity, started practicing its

own sermon of rapid modernization with much misdirected vigour and imagination.

It was

a political

programme

that

continued

the

war

on

tradition that had been started by colonialism, but now with greater vigour because derived from absolute conviction. It was also now a war waged from within, by the new (Western-educated) heritage. In consequence, the damages were was on the two fronts that mattered most: traditional educational systems with Western Western curriculum) through its programme reduction of obas and the oba institution

Yoruba elite against their own greater. The war of attrition an overnight replacement of education (with a completely of free primary education; the to mere props of the ruling

political party and government. Within fifteen years, and in the names of ‘modernization and progress’, the Action Group in the West managed to do more damage to culture and tradition — and therefore to the society as a

whole in both short and long terms — than during the previous fifty years of indirect colonial rule. Ulli was neither a Nigerian, party member, nor colonial officer. Even if he

were any of these, probably no single individual could have stopped the dam that had burst. Even in his modest and private capacity as a lecturer first in the English department, then in the Extramural department, he soon

saw the futility of trying to talk his students into stopping to reflect about what their society was being led into. So he changed tack and became more practical, more involved. It should perhaps be repeated at this point that Ulli was no secular missionary trying to rescue a society from itself. As he has consistently — and modestly — maintained, he lived among the people in order to learn and he gained more from Yoruba society than he could ever have hoped to pay back. He embarked on so many

activities because he

became a part of the culture and society, because he responded to what he saw and met, and because the people treated him like another human being,

not like a European or a colonialist or a scholar. Most important of all — and this is 'the secret of his success' — because of his infinite capacity to make friends. As Extramural Studies tutor in charge of Western Region, Ulli travelled around a lot, mostly in Yorubaland, but also often in the non-Yoruba parts of the region (and of course in other parts of the entire country). The two 129

closest friends he made in the eastern part of the region were Mr S.S. Alanah and Chief Ovia Idah. Through his visits to the former in Agbor, Ulli got to know the obi of Agbor and the Agbor dancers, whom he would later bring to perform at MBARI Club Ibadan (accompanied by the obi) and later still incorporate into Duro Ladipo's play Moremi. The works of Chief Idah would also be exhibited at MBARI MBAYO Osogbo later. Mr Alanah was the Extramural Studies teacher in charge of the Eastern sector and Ulli visited Agbor frequently because of him. They would go round the villages together, sit down with people and talk quietly for hours. Already in the 1950s, osu outcasts had established their own communities where they were no longer bound to the caste system, so Ulli and Mr Alanah frequented some of their villages. The marvellous landscape around Asaba, where the land sloped gently towards the Niger river, was also a favourite haunt of theirs. Mr Alanah wanted to buy land and build a house in that beautiful valley of fertile red soil and lush vegetation. He so much wanted to live there and would invite Ulli to do the same. "Then," he would say again and again, "you can get yourself a beautiful girl from the village to marry." Ulli was tempted, for it was such a beautiful, idyllic place. But the dream never materialized, not even for Mr Alanah himself, for he died suddenly. Almost immediately after their first meeting, Chief Ovia Idah became the main reason why Georgina and Ulli visited Benin more frequently. Mr Ovia Idah had been trained as a traditional Benin carver in the royal court. He was not supposed to work for outsiders, but patronage from the palace was almost non-existent. So Ovia Idah had to go and take a job as Art Tutor, King's College, Lagos. While in Lagos, he created and developed the art of ebony carving, which he taught to his students. Not a great lover of that city, he eventually returned to Benin to live as poorly as before. Chief Idah was not a great artist, but what attracted Ulli to him were his uniqueness and originality, his aesthetic sensitivity to objects and to life in general: not only was Mr Idah an artist, his life itself was artistic. He was a collector who purchased antiques to display, or remake in such a way as to make art out of them. He once bought a huge Victorian brass chandelier which he dismantled and created new, interesting objects. When Oba

Akenzua decided to have his own little church within the palace, Ovia Idah

130

designed the reliefs on the cement blocks one by one, with no two blocks having the same design.

Upon his return to Benin, Mr Idah asked and got permission from the oba to build himself a house upon the old city wall (which even in its collapsed state was still extremely wide). The house that Mr Idah built was not an

architectural wonder, but it certainly was an artistic one. It was about ten metres wide and twice as much in length. He cut a flight of steps into the old wall which led up to a circular sitting room. As you reached the top of the steps and entered the sitting room, you were directly confronted by

yourself — a life-size mirror had been installed into the wall directly

opposite the entrance door. The room was also populated by Idah's terracotta reliefs. From the circular room other short flights of steps led

down into different rooms. The steps and rooms were constructed so that each room was on a different level. Ovia Idah's own room was an alcove,

with a slanting wall above each end of his bed. On the wall above his head he had painted his own portrait; on the other above his feet he also painted his feet. One day when Ulli and Georgina came, they found that a fine little house

had been added next to Mr Idah's. It had its own sitting room and bedroom, and

also

a semi-circular

toilet

and

bathroom

downstairs.

staircase led up to this pretty little house, which

A

revolving

also had a balcony

overlooking the river. After conducting Ulli and Georgina round, Ovia Idah

announced: "I have built this place for you. This is the only place you will stay any time you are in Benin. And when you finally retire from the University, you will come and live here." Georgina and Ulli were overwhelmed. He also thought about everything. When Georgina noticed a

hook sunk into a wall in the sitting room and asked about it. "Oh yes, I know you always travel around with a monkey," Mr Idah explained, "so that hook is for it." He then asked Georgina to make a mural on the wall. The Beiers and Idahs were indeed one family.

Chief Ovia Idah lived poor, for though he was a hardworking man who made beautiful, original carvings and potteries, he gave away more than he sold. Ulli observed these and other qualities in his friend and wrote about him in Nigeria Magazine. Soon, Mr Idah's custom increased and he became fairly comfortable. "You wrote about me," he would tell Ulli and Georgina in inordinate gratitude, "and I became famous as well as rich." 131

Ulli's activities that relate specifically to Yoruba culture, traditions and society can be put under five headings: the conferences and seminars on various aspects of Yoruba society and culture, leading to and including the founding of publications like Odu; the founding of MBARI MBAYO with Duro Ladipo and his participation in that dramatist's Theatre Company; the Osogbo art movement; the founding of a theatre company called Theatre Express; his collection, translation and publication of Yoruba poetry, and his own plays. Towards the end of 1951, Ulli transferred to Extramural Studies of the University College, barely spending a year in the English Department. He was having much fun in this new department: he travelled around a lot and met many people from different strata of the society; his teaching too had meaning. He designed his own courses but, occasionally, the students would ask that one of the set books in the General Certificate of Education (GCE) syllabus be included and Ulli would oblige. One evening in Abeokuta, Ulli was going through Hamlet, one of the prescribed texts, when a student raised up his hand and asked: "Excuse me, Sir, is this a true story?" The teacher was jolted! He suddenly realized he had assumed something all along that perhaps he should not have: namely, that the students knew what literature was and did not confuse it with history. If at this level they still did, how did the confusion come about? Could it be that the entire foundation was wrong — that they had never been told that literature also existed in their own society? Further probing that evening revealed that this was indeed the case: although several knew, or claimed to know of folktales and festival songs, they had never regarded this as literature at all. Literature was what the white man wrote down. Ulli's solution to this monumental problem, confronted as early as 1952, showed how far he had travelled, mentally and culturally, so soon after his arrival in Nigeria. Rather than give his students a lecture on (European) theories of fiction, he decided to reintroduce them to literature, starting with their own: Yoruba traditional — or oral — poetry. He had witnessed some festivals and already knew of ijala poetry. There was very little, however, in print, translated or otherwise. As he was scrounging around for

materials to use, he heard of S. Adeboye Babalola, then working on ijala.

He took whatever Mr Babalola could offer and foraged for more, to use not 132

just in Abeokuta but everywhere else. Thus Ulli began the study and teaching of African Oral Literature before that subject was officially recognized in academia. What is more important, it began his multidirectional, multilayered intellectual involvement with Yoruba cultural expressions, more in the realm of imaginative-creative

participation than in that of dry, scholarly investigations.

While looking for materials on oral literature to use in his classes, Ulli discovered that most educated Yoruba people were either not interested or

already absolutely ignorant of their traditions. There were also the hostile ones who reacted to his inquiries with something like: these things are no

longer important, for we are modernizing; it is better that our young ones read Shakespeare or Tennyson than learn about /fa or ijala, which are primitive and can only drag us back. Among the ignorant were a few who

would like to know. Then there were the very few who knew something and would like to know more. Ulli, himself at this early stage not yet knowing much but already embarked on his quest, found support among these last two groups. Together, they started doing things. Fortunately, the Department of Extramural Studies to which he transferred was one in which there was wide latitude for personal initiatives, and actually encouraged this in its extracurricular activities. Robert Gardiner,

the head of department, was open to daring and unconventional ideas. Then,

also, Ulli had moved

to Ede-Ilobu

area and already had in Timi

Laoye a friend and mentor, and a firm believer (despite being a Baptist) in

Yoruba religion, arts, values and institutions. He began organizing conferences and seminars almost immediately. The first was a modest one at Abeokuta in the same year, 1952. Called "Conference on Yoruba

Poetry", it covered oral as well as written poetry. In attendance were some people writing in Yoruba then, but more notable was the presence of S. Adeboye Babalola, who had collected a lot of ijala poetry and even started translating them into English. A more important conference followed in 1953. As the University College campus was always empty in Summer, Ulli was often left alone to run the

conferences that the department would have planned for the period. That year he took a risk by organizing

one on "West African Culture".

The

University authorities did not permit such esoteric, non-existent and academically non-respectable subjects and Ulli could have been sacked for 133

organizing it. So what he did was to wait till everybody had gone to Europe on vacation before announcing it. Two of the people invited to speak at this conference on Art, Music and Literature were Ben Enwowu and Fela Sowande, both then still in England but sure to be back in Nigeria soon. Also to be present (among several others) were Philip Gbeho, a musicologist at Achimota College, Ghana; Gerald Moore, then Tutor, Extramural Studies Programme, Eastern Region; and oba Laoye, the Timi of Ede. All the speakers came: Ulli and Ben Enwowu spoke on art, Gerald Moore on literature. Then Fela Sowande, fresh from Europe, went on the stage to speak on African music. He took a piece of chalk and filled the board with musical scores. Whereupon he proceeded to prove that there was nothing like African music: "African music," he concluded, "is just a lot of bloody noise"! After everybody had recovered from the shock, Philip Gbeho began the counter-process of correction by simple demonstrations of the varieties of complicated beats of African percussions. By the time he finished he had enthused everybody. Timi Laoye followed, with a proper lecture on all aspects of dundun: its history, uses, techniques, and so on. An accomplished drummer himself, he then brought in his palace drummers and together, they gave a demonstration that was actually a full-dress performance. It was in fact the first time that this oba would perform outside his palace in Ede and it showed how close he and Ulli had become so soon. There was also an exhibition of the marvellous carvings in his palace, and from other places. Subsequently, Timi Laoye took these carvings to the Darmstadt Exhibition of Yoruba Traditional Arts in 1962. This was followed by another in Salisbury (Harare), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1963, to which his drummers also accompanied him. These exhibitions of Yoruba art were preparatory to the big one, on Contemporary Yoruba Art at Prague, 1965, just before the period of the Prague spring. An exhibition of Osogbo artists basically, it was so successful that it went to the Musée de l'homme in Paris, after which it returned to Prague, on permanent display. The success of the 1953 conference encouraged Ulli to organize an even bigger one the following year, focussed specifically on Yoruba culture. This was also not just a Yoruba conference in subject, but even more so in

location and invited speakers. It was held in Ede and among the speakers 134

were the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi;

Timi Laoye of Ede; and the

Ogoga of Ikere, oba Adegoriola. Again, that Ulli could get such obas to the conference shows how far he had travelled in just three years of being in Yorubaland, how seriously he took what he was doing, and the kind of esteem the obas held him in return. Most importantly, it showed how he

was getting them to reflect on the culture, traditions and history they were custodians of, especially in the rapidly changing times. Other invited speakers were S. Adeboye Babalola, T.S. Sowande, E.L. Lasebikan and

D.O. Fagunwa. General attendance was made up mostly of primary and secondary school teachers. Oba Adesoji Aderemi spoke on the /wofa system; the Ogoga on traditional

administration of Yoruba towns while the Jimi spoke more elaborately on Yoruba music. S. Adeboye Babalola delivered a paper on ijala, E.L. Lasebikan on characteristics of oral Yoruba poetry, and T.S. Sowande on Yoruba philosophy. It was a highly successful conference, and a landmark

too: from it arose the idea of founding a journal of Yoruba Studies.

Parallel to these conferences were those which the Extramural Studies department of the University College organized every summer. Since the task of running them fell on him sometimes, Ulli never wasted the opportunity to inject into these seminars or conferences his own ideas, even

if at considerable risk to his appointment. For example, the first of these

departmental conferences, the one on Journalism and Local Government

which

took place

invitation

in the summer

of Chiefs

Obafemi

of 1953,

Awolowo

did not originally

and

Ladoke

Akintola,

include

nor

Dr

Nnamdi Azikiwe. As has been narrated in chapter II, he could easily have gotten his fingers burnt over the unwanted presence of these politicians on the university's hallowed grounds.

That

conference

international

one

was in

followed 1955,

on

by "Four

an

even

West

more

African

high-powered Kingdoms:

and

Ashanti,

Benin, Dahomey and Yoruba". A scholar spoke on each of the issues examined in each kingdom: kingship, women, art, religion and poetry. The quality of delegates from Ghana was especially impressive, for it included J.B. Dancquah, Kofi Busia, Alex Kjerematen and Kofi Antubam. John Bradbury, the famous anthropologist of Benin, was among those who read papers on the Benin kingdom. Timi Laoye, Ulli and Morton- Williams were three of the more notable names who spoke on the Oyo empire. One of the 135

most impressive facts to emerge from the papers and deliberations was the originality and inventiveness of these four kingdoms: ın a relatively small area of West Africa, and within periods not too distant from each other, four kingdoms had arisen that had also developed different approaches and solutions to specific or similar problems. By 1959 Ayo Ogunseye had become the head of the Extramural Studies department. Concern about how the African could negotiate his way through the new political practices that colonial rule had instituted was carried over into Ayo Ogunseye's administration, so he and Ulli also organized another conference on "Parliamentary Government in West Africa". It was meant to build on the one on Journalism and Local Government that Gardiner and Ulli did sıx years earlier. Present at this conference was Mr Rotimi Williams, then a young lawyer who had challenged every constitution that was produced for Nigeria, all of which were meant to smoothen the way to self-government and eventual independence. Somebody came from Conakry who presented a paper in which he stoutly defended the one-party state. One participant who made a vivid impression on Ulli was Patrice Lumumba, all the way from the (now) Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba was more of a sheer presence, a passionate flame that burned intensely, strong yet fragile. When events took a bad turn in his country and he was so easily but tragically snuffed out, Ulli was not surprised. The man carried an innocence about him that had no chance against all the cynical, brutal forces ranged against him. Though separate and parallel, these two series of conferences had their points of convergence in the person of Ulli who, for that reason, made them extensions and compliments of each other. The two series also got more international in subject and participation, and more multicultural in scope. It is therefore not surprising that the last that he organized, in 1957 at

Osogbo, should be on "The African in the New World". Present at this conference

was

Pierre

Fatumbi

Verger,

the

famous

photographer

and

passionate devotee of Yoruba culture who had studied it as much in the New World (Brazil) as in the Old (Nigeria and Dahomey). He delivered a

stimulating report on Yoruba survivals in the New World that was received with equal enthusiasm. Ulli presented a paper on the African roots of some of the contemporary literature coming out of the Americas. 136

The emphatic success of the 1954 conference on Yoruba culture at Ede encouraged the participants to start thinking of starting a journal of Yoruba

studies. With his energy and drive, Ulli wasted no time in putting ın place all the requirements necessary to inaugurate it. In January 1955, the first number of Odu: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies (1) came out, jointly published by Western Region Literature Committee, Ibadan, and Thomas Nelson & Sons, Edinburgh. The journal brought Ulli and D.O. Fagunwa (head of the Literature Committee) together and a friendship

developed, which would ease some of Ulli's publication problems when he

started Black Orpheus two years later. Although the editor of this first number was not mentioned, it was Ulli. At any rate both the short Editorial and the journal's stated purpose are characteristic:

to interpret the culture, religion and the way of life of the peoples of Western Region to the outside world and, above all, to the peoples themselves.

Ulli edited this number alone just to get it off the conception stage, present

all those concerned with a baby that they would have to rally round and nurture. The names of the editors appeared in the second number: S.O. Biobaku (a historian and university lecturer) , Ulli and L. Levi (a colonial

education officer in Ibadan). This last person was no longer a member of the editorial board by number 4 and S.O. Biobaku and Ulli edited it alone till number 7. A.Y. Eke (also an education officer) joined them in number

8, when the organ's subtitle was also expanded to "Journal of Yoruba, Edo and Related Studies".

The journal lived up to its name and stated purpose in many respects. More

than ninety-five per cent of the contributions in the first nine issues, for instance, were on Yoruba culture, history and society generally. While the majority of contributors were not Yoruba, many who have since become

acknowledged scholars of Yoruba studies were: S.O. Biobaku, S. Adeboye Babalola (pioneer scholar of Yoruba oral poetry), E.L. Lasebikan (scholar of Yoruba traditional philosophy) and J.F. Ade-Ajayı (even then already a

renown African historian) among them. Also, one of the first and regular

contributors was Pierre Fatumbi Verger. Perhaps the rare feat of Odu in its

early years was that Yoruba obas also wrote in it! In number 3, there was an article each by Ooni Adesoji Aderemi

and the Ogoga

of Ikerre; Ulli

137

reviewed Timi Laoye's autobiography in the same number while that oba himself contributed a very scholarly article on Yoruba drums in number 7. Ulli himself wrote articles, translations and reviews (sometimes three) in eight of the first nine numbers. All but one were on various aspects of Yoruba mythology, history, art and society. He published an uncommon, but sociologically and historically illuminating article on "The Yoruba Attitude to Dogs" in number 7 — the kind of article which takes more than merely scholarly interest to research and write. It is also worth mentioning that, in these first nine numbers, Yoruba poems were published in the original, books written in Yoruba were also reviewed, sometimes in Yoruba. As promised in the inaugural editorial, Odu lived up to its purpose of interpreting "the culture ..., above all, to the peoples themselves", like an Odu Ifa. It is worth remembering that while editing Odu. and some children's magazines, Ulli started Black Orpheus in 1957. When Ulli left Nigeria in December 1966, Odu folded up and was not revived until Michael Crowder assumed the directorship of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ife. Michael Crowder's Odu, however, became more or less a university journal in content, contributors and readership. Ulli also edited another journal called Ewe (Youth) alongside Odu. Both were under the umbrella of the Western Region Literature Committee. It came into existence not long after Odu was started and firmly launched. Because of this, and also because it was a children's magazine, it was considered to be Odu's 'offspring'. In form of strip cartoons, Ewe told Yoruba folktales and narrated significant events in Yoruba history in a simplified version. Founded as a war camp during the Yoruba civil wars of the last century, the city of Ibadan grew phenomenally during those wars and and after, and faster still as the capital of the Western Region during the colonial period, to become the largest indigenous Yoruba town. Though geographically as

well

as politically

central to the entire Yoruba

society

(while

Lagos

retained the economic power and set the social pace), Ibadan was nevertheless socially heterogenous and culturally amorphous, unlike other

Yoruba

towns

communities.

138

which The

still

presence

retained

many

of the University

characteristics

of

College

meant

there

single the

creation of a centre of new forms of cultural and intellectual activities. But as that institution isolated itself both spatially and socially, the direct impact of such new activities did not enter into the mainstream sociocultural experiences of the host city. Rather, the College steadily produced graduates who went out to institutionalize the 'two nations, two cultures’

cleavage that colonialism had started.

If it is valid to speak of a Yoruba cultural reawakening at all at any time in the last half-century, then it started in the 1950s and peaked in the 1970s —

the decades of the travelling theatres. This was also the period when Ulli

was in Nigeria (1950-66; 1971-74) and when he catalyzed the reawakening, participated fully in it, and was at the centre of all the different activities that might be said to constitute it. The centres of these activities were wherever Ulli was: Ede, MBARI Club Ibadan, MBARI MBAYO Club Osogbo. In the years 1962 to 1966, Osogbo was certainly the

centre and source of the revival, from where it radiated out to the bigger

towns. To Ulli's intense annoyance, 'the left bank of Nigeria’!

some people took to calling Osogbo

How were these possible? The answers are not remote, and more factual

than speculative. In his own personal life and public activities, all these otherwise

different

activities

were

integrated

seamlessly.

Culturally,

intellectually, socially, he lived and operated at three levels. Resident in

Ede, Ilobu or Osogbo, he was at one level in daily, intimate contact with the peak of Yoruba culture as embodied in the obas, olorisas, and the

rituals in which the ideals as well as the essences of the culture were articulated in language (poetry), action and disposition. On the plain below,

he was also a part of the daily lives of the ordinary people who to a large extent lived what one might call the characteristic Yoruba

life in these

semi-rural communities. There was also the other separate peak, inhabited by the university community and members of the new Nigerian elite that the institution was steadily producing, and to which he belonged, even if only by education and employment. Below the new elite class was the

burgeoning lower middle class and urban underclass, to be found mostly in the rapidly expanding towns and cities. A creation of colonial rule, these two new strata were rapidly losing meaningful or creative contacts with the

first two. The links between the old and the new were becoming more

139

tenuous, them.

and social as well as cultural borders

were

going up between

To Ulli, however, such borders did not exist at all: he crossed them everyday or, more accurately, inhabited all the territories simultaneously. He brought them together in his own works and activities, through which he tried to make others see the necessity of their integration for the new political process, social cohesion and new artistic productions. The conferences on culture, the journal Odu, his involvement with Duro Ladipo and the co-founding of MBARI MBAYO Club; his collecting,

translating and publishing of Yoruba oral literature; his own writings of plays on Yoruba history and myth and; finally, the Osogbo art movement; all are a product of his habitation in the older society. At the other end, Black Orpheus, MBARI Club plus its activities, constitute the results of his belonging to the new strata — the levels of modernism and internationalism in art and literature, and national outlook in post-independence politics. MBARI MBAYO Osogbo was inspired by MBARI Ibadan and some activities by the same people were carried out in the two places. Again, while he gained much from his friendship with Timi Laoye, that oba also became some kind of cultural apostle: he delivered papers at conferences, contributed to Odu, brought his drummers to MBARI Ibadan, taught drumming to the young men gathered in the Duro Ladipo company at Osogbo, exhibited the images in his palace in Nigeria and overseas. The knowledge of Yoruba religion and history that Ulli gained from his daily

interactions with the obas and olorisas influenced the kind of help he

rendered Duro Ladipo the playwright, an influence and help that would radically change and energize the Yoruba travelling theatre from that moment on. Furthermore, neither Black Orpheus nor MBARI Club could have been what they were without his familiarity with a// the social classes: journal and club showed how the new, or modern, could animate the traditional, rather than erase it. His interaction with the lower classes in

Osogbo, Ede and Ilobu prepared him to understand the young men who came from the urban underclass to the art workshops at Osogbo, and to

know what kinds of assistance they needed in their effort to become artists. None of these things was of course planned for except being a born teacher, Ulli never started out as a cultural missionary or revivalist. He saw

140

possibilities in people or situations, and responded as best as he could. He did not go out 'to help anybody' either. Rather, as he has always asserted, those from whom he gained most, the obas and olorisas, were those who needed him least: their lives were so complete and self-sufficient, so radiant, that they needed nothing from him, and he recognized it. But the new generations were thoughtlessly throwing away such selfsufficiency and many other cultural invaluables. So he sought ways of alerting the people to this, and of reminding them of what they had, if only they would just look around them, rather than to the distant horizons of Europe and North America. Having gained so much from the culture and society, he also sought ways of putting something back, in gratitude. Hence the Osogbo art movement; the kind of collaboration he had with Duro Ladipo, and the various exhibitions of both contemporary and traditional Yoruba arts that he either organized or encouraged others to, in Nigeria as well as abroad.

Ulli's connection with Nigerian art, traditional or contemporary, is generally well-known. He was the first to write about the mbari tradition among

the

Owerri-Igbo;

the

first to pay

attention

to

Onitsha

market

literature and bring it to world notice. He helped in bringing out for exhibition the marvellous collection of ere in the Timi's palace at Ede. He exhibited several forms

of contemporary

art in Nigeria at MBARI

Club,

where he also brought artists from other countries to exhibit. While his name has, somewhat exaggeratedly, become synonymous with the Osogbo art school, he was also in touch with those new artists whose training and orientations were Western. Thus, as a friend of Ben Enwowu's, he saw and

wrote about that artist's works in the manner of an involved observer rather than that of a disinterested academic art critic. He brought Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke in as members of MBARI Club and, last but not the least,

he took Susanne Wenger to Osogbo. Yet, strange as it may sound, Ulli made only one direct attempt to make an artist of anyone, and this happened as early as 1951, just months into his stay in Nigeria. This was the chance visit he paid to the Lantoro Mental Home in Abeokuta and his spontaneous act of encouraging the inmates to do anything they liked with the paints, brushes and cheap paper he brought. Ulli himself has given a brief but vivid description of this foray into art-astherapy (1982; 82-84) and the story need not be repeated here. What may 141

be stressed here, however, is that Ulli did not do it out of any theory of artas-therapy, but because he had spontaneously made friends with some of the ınmates and would like a reason to come back and see them again. Second, he was equally interested in just trying to do something to punctuate their bleak and monotonous existence: it was simply a matter of empathy with another, leading to friendship, leading to creativity. This trajectory is traceable in all his subsequent connections with arts and artists in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Ulli moved out of Ibadan in 1951 and settled fully into the life of the communities in which he lived, into their daily rounds as well as the dramatic high points of festivals and ceremonies. His friendships with the obas, olorisas and other people became very strong and, through them, his understanding and knowledge of the society deepened. Thus, when Black Orpheus was born, it had a definite cultural direction: it would recognize the old while promoting the new, and seek to make its readers see the links between all the arts. This principle would also be applied to MBARI Club when it was founded four years later, in its membership and activities. This might have come from Ulli's own aesthetic belief that the arts could and should really not be separated from one another; if so it would have found abundant confirmation in the festivals, shrines and palaces that surrounded him in Ilobu, Ede and Osogbo, or that he saw in all his constant travels in the rest of Nigeria. Thus, although MBARI Club has become more famous as a literary society (because of the phenomenal successes of Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark), its membership consisted of more artists, whose different nationalities made its arts programmes cosmopolitan: Ezekiel Mphahlele (South Africa), Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke (Nigeria), Vincent Kofi (Ghana), Jacob Lawrence (U.S.A.), Dennis Williams (Guyana), Ibrahim el Salahi (Sudan), Valente Malangatana (Mozambique). Enough has been written in this book already about MBARI Club as a

whole, but there remains one point to be made here, which is an extension of one made earlier in chapter IV: that not only did the presence of artists and constant exhibitions of works influence the writings of the club's

literary members, it also led to a cross-fertilization. Thus, Demas Nwoko was at once an artist and a theatre person who designed the backdrops for

E.K. Ogunmola's dramatization of Amos Tutuola's novel The Palmwine 142

Drinkard (see chapter VII). This traditional fusion of the fine arts with poetry, music and dance would find its most contemporary, triumphant realization in the theatre of Duro Ladipo, of which Ulli was a member and

background director. To return to the arts proper, among MBARI

Club's diverse and numerous

activities during its most active and fertile years — when Ulli was its

moving spirit — were two art workshops. One of the first and most successful art exhibitions that MBARI did was of the Mozambican artist, Valente Malangatana. This excellent artist had been 'produced' by Amancio Pancho Guedes, a very creative Mozambican architect. Seeing how conventional and Westernized art teaching was in Nigerian schools, Ulli thought that there was no way any truly exciting work could ever come out of such an imitative practice. So he invited Guedes over to MBARI in 1961

to conduct the first art workshop, with Julian Beinart, another architect

from South Africa. Present too was Ru van Rossem, a Dutch graphic artist (of whom more presently). Among those who attended this first workshop

were Rowland Abiodun, an undergraduate in Fine Arts from Zaria and the late Mr Akinola Lasebikan, a lecturer in painting at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The same architect-artists conducted a second workshop in 1962. The two workshops were not for artists as such, but for art teachers. Ulli's lofty and overly optimistic aim in organizing both workshops was to try to get the teachers to break their set molds and inhibitions, so they perhaps

might approach the teaching of art more adventurously. The two architects exerted themselves enormously in the workshops, but with minimal results. First, the teachers were already too set in their ways

for any amount of

‘shock therapy’ in so short a time to shake them up. Furthermore, they came from all over the country, so there was no way of following up on the workshops.

These perceived limitations led Ulli to start thinking in a different direction. He began to think that perhaps it was better to conduct this kind of thing with those who had nothing but their imagination to work on — people without any prior Western training and who would, therefore, come

to the workshop without any self-consciousness that they were artists in the making. Ulli's thinking on this, so instructive and typical, is worth quoting (1991; 63): 143

What struck me about the courses (at MBARI Ibadan), however, was that the most interesting paintings were produced, not by the students

for whom the courses were intended but by odd people who drifted into it ... Their minds had not been cluttered up with respectable

ideas of what a picture should look like or what an artist was supposed to do. Their imagery was infinitely freer and more original than that of the art teachers. It seemed logical, therefore, to attempt another course, designed only for such people who had no preconceived ideas about art.

So when MBARI MBAYO Club started in 1962, everything suggested that it was the right place for such a workshop (1991; 63): An obvious location for such a course was Osogbo, where the newly founded MBARI MBAYO Club offered an ideal venue. The actors and musicians of the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company ... offered a reservoir of potential artists; and the situation of the club on Osogbo's main road would draw curious passers-by into the workshop. Dennis Williams, the Guyanese painter and art historian, was already at

Ibadan then, so Ulli invited him to guide the first Osogbo art workshop in 1962. Ulli also hoped that Williams would be able to come over to Osogbo

every fortnight to follow up on the works of whichever of the students showed promise. Tijani Mayakiri attended this workshop, but the major discovery was Jacob Afolabi. The first of the Osogbo artists before the movement was born, Afolabi showed much originality and enthusiasm, but as there was no follow-up, he was left dangling. So Ulli organized another workshop in August Williams.

This time, Jacob

Lawrence,

1963, again led by Dennis

the African-American

artist whose

works Ulli had exhibited at Ibadan and whom he had gotten invited to the University, was also around. Also present was Georgina, who had just come to Osogbo from Zaria (where she was teaching Art), along with one of her students. Neither Georgina nor Jacob Lawrence took active parts in the workshop, however — they were just around. The Ghanaian sculptor Vincent Kofi was also present to open his Osogbo exhibition. This time, another discovery was Rufus Ogundele, who now joined Jacob Afolabi to make two promising talents. They both had learnt some things, the most

important of which was that they wanted to continue.

The trouble was that Dennis Williams was too busy with his own research at Ibadan to be able to come to Osogbo every fortnight. So the duty of

144

supervising the boys devolved on Georgina. ‘Supervision’ was not exactly what she did though; her most important achievement was to wean the two earnest young men away from imitating each other, to guide them discovering their own highly distinctive and individual talents.

into

On all counts, however, the two Osogbo workshops were just preparatory to the beginning of the Osogbo art movement proper which, if a date must be put on it, began in 1964 when Georgina organized and guided the third one. This was the workshop that would launch not only the most important art movement in contemporary Nigeria, but also be the turning point in the

lives of the young men who participated in it.

Another pivotal figure in the development of the Osogbo art school was Ru van Rossem, a Dutch graphic artist whose role, Ulli has complained, "has never been fully appreciated." Ru van Rossem had made a series of

etchings on the theme of the Black American 'Blues’, and in 1957 had come

across the magazine Black Orpheus. He wrote a warm letter of commendation to Ulli and the two began an unbroken correspondence.

Then Ulli asked van Rossem to do a series of illustrations for Black Orpheus number 4. When the idea of the first Ibadan workshop occurred to Ulli, he went to the Dutch Embassy in Lagos to ask if a trip by van Rossem

could be sponsored. The Embassy obliged, and he came. Now, he got him invited again in 1964 to Osogbo.

Ru van Rossem

came to teach etching

techniques and the benefits of the course were extended to Jacob Afolabi and Rufus Ogundele as well as to established artists like Solomon

Wangboje and Bruce Onobrakpeya. The techniques proved so congenial to the latter that he has continued to use them ever since. Georgina also participated in the workshop. She was not interested in etching herself, but she thought it might be a technique she might pass on

to others

later.

She

introduced

Twins

Seven-Seven

to etching,

who

produced some of his finest work in this technique.

When van Rossem came back in 1974 (to the Oguntimehin studio and workshop in Ile-Ife, which Ulli and Georgina had set up), again on the invitation of Ulli, he introduced monoprint and drawing from the back, which became popular. Rufus Ogundele did not use these techniques but he passed it on to others. Tijani Mayakiri specialized in monoprints, creating masterpieces: three tryptichs, each panel being eight by three feet. Of his

145

experience of working with the artists, Ru van Rossem himself has been quoted as saying (Beier, Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art, 1991; 72): (The artists’) metaphysical world is so closely interwoven with their real life, also with the cult, that they can draw apparently on an endless supply of emotions and thoughts. The technique was soon

understood, born sculptors as they were. They have a terrific feeling for materials on their fingers. I needed to help them, for that reason, only in technical matters and could for the rest leave them to it.

Georgina herself, the central figure in the development of Osogbo art school, has recorded her recollection of Ru van Rossem's visits in the same book as follows (1991; 72): Ru quietly gives you the means to achieve what you want. I remember Ru saying at the end of the Ogun Timehin workshop that the students had produced more work in one week than his Dutch students produced in one year. As always in a good situation, there are gains on both sides. Ru was certainly inspired by the students' energy and they grabbed the skills he offered like a hungry man devouring pounded yam. Georgina's 1964 "Experimental Art Workshop’ took place after van Rossem's visit, attended by all those who would later be known as the Osogbo artists: Jacob Afolabi, Rufus Ogundele, Tijani Mayakiri, Jimoh Buraimoh, Muraina Oyelami, Bisi Fabunmi, Twins Seven-Seven. Why did this particular workshop succeed far more than earlier ones? Why were its effects so permanent, or lasting, on the young artists? The explanations, as complex or subtle as they may seem, are not far-fetched at all. To the contrary, they are the very obvious kind of things that have been overlooked, brushed aside, or thoughtlessly repressed by the educational

establishments in Nigeria from the colonial times to the present. That Ulli

and Georgina did not overlook them — and therefore achieved results where the educational establishments failed — speaks volumes about their own personalities. What 1s more important, it is an eloquent expression of their intuitive understanding of, and empathetic identification with, their surrounding society and people. Only a belief in the worth of traditional education plus its cultural-artistic products, and a respect for the integrity of the society and its people — collectively and severally — could have led

them to approach the experiment as they did. The result is the continued productivity of the beneficiaries of the workshop.

146

For this reason, while the story of the Osogbo art school is interesting in itself, it is certainly more important to stress those characteristics that made

the experiment so uniquely successful. It is also important to stress that, singular as those features were, they are repeatable, with a little dash of the kind of imagination that Ulli and Georgina applied. The first is the educational background of the artists themselves. Virtually all the young participants at the workshop, plus Asiru Olatunde and

Ademola Onibonokuta - all of who would make the Osogbo art school — belong to the class that the establishment in Nigeria has consistently put down as 'school drop-outs and illiterates'. Urban-dwellers all, the younger among them (the 'drop-outs') were engaged in menial and artisanal jobs:

petrol station attendants, medicine-sellers, apprentice electricians, etc. Ulli saw this as an advantage, though, rather than a handicap for, as he noted regarding the first Ibadan workshop, those who produced the most

interesting paintings were "the odd people who drifted into it — the caretaker of MBARI, or the man who had come to deliver a pair of pliers and then stayed for the rest of the afternoon to paint pictures" (Thirty Years

of Oshogbo Art, 1991; 63). In other words, this class was ‘illiterate’ only in

the distorted and narrow sense of not having Western education. As the examples of Asiru Olatunde, Tijani Mayakiri, Muraina Oyelami and Ademola

Onibonokuta

most

emphatically

show,

they were

educated in

their own domains of Yoruba intellectual traditions. Each of them brought something precious into his works which, fortunately by being ‘illiterates and school drop-outs', Western education had not stamped out. It was on these that the Osogbo artists built, through the gentle guidance and

motivation of Georgina. Because these foundations are there, solid and inexhaustible, the artists' inspiration and imagination have never dried up.

Furthermore, there was the happy coincidence of Duro Ladipo's theatre which came first. Except for the much older man Asiru Olatunde, most of the Osogbo artists were either members of the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company for the first three crucial years, or started out as members. Duro

Ladipo had employed them all either as actors, dancers and drummers or, as in the case of Jimoh Buraimoh, stage electrician. At this formative stage, their lives thus revolved

around the arts. There

were

the many

intense

excitements of the stage which they alternated with the different but no less intense excitement of the workshop and studio. Both were continuous with 147

each other in the daily lives of the actor-artists. Rufus Ogundele (1991; 46) has described that life simply but vividly: We led a really exciting life in those days; in the morning we attended the rehearsal at the theatre company; then at lunch we went

to work with Georgina for the whole afternoon until, in the evening,

we

returned

to MBARI

to attend the second

year we worked like that.

rehearsal.

For

a whole

The two artistic occupations were united at a deeper level of their consciousness, for both theatre and art drew from the same store of Yoruba aesthetic and literary traditions. Georgina has put her finger on this symbiotic relationship as it existed in Osogbo then (1991; 69): It must be stated here, that the existence of the theatre company, to which they all belonged, had made my work a great deal easier: because already these young people had developed a lifestyle of their own; they were open-minded and anxious to develop their potential, in fact the evolution of Duro Ladipo's plays proceeded in a manner that was akin to the evolution of our art workshop ... Critics and historians of contemporary African art may wish to look at the works of the Osogbo artists again to see how theatrical elements or aesthetics have in one form or another found their way into the paintings, especially of the period when they were members of the theatre company and immediately after. The Osogbo artists were of course also linked to MBARI MBAYO Club, where most of them had their first exhibitions and saw those of other artists like Ovia Idah the Benin carver, Vincent Kofi, Valente Malangatana, and Christoph Meckel the German artist. There was also an exhibition of Brazilian architecture and arts, and a documentary exhibition of the art movement in Germany called "The Blue Rider". Exhibition of photographs were not excluded, for there was one by Michael Crowder (then editor of Nigeria Magazine) titled "Nigeria's Neighbours" in April 1965. All in all, the artists' association with the club also exposed

them to other arts, artforms and artists while they were starting their own careers.

Moreover, and following from the above, although Ulli and Georgina would vehemently deny as presumptuous any assertion that they helped in

the making of the Osogbo artists, it is nevertheless true that they fostered

an ‘artistic environment', a community of artists in the social as well as psychological senses of that word. Being also members of the theatre 148

company,

the artists became

a close-knit band

of young

friends

living,

playing, eating and sleeping together — one family in short. At the head of this family, but as supportive rather than authority figures, were Georgina, Ulli and Duro Ladipo. Employment in the theatre gave them a regular, albeit small, means of livelihood; some were accommodated by Ulli and Georgina; others got regular financial support from them - as cost of living was very minimal in those days, this was no strain on Ulli's own modest university salary. To a large extent, the young men were freed from the immediate problems of food and accommodation, and therefore able to focus all their energy and creativity on the theatre and studio. By the time

they had to start selling their works, they had developed a sufficient sense

of personal and artistic integrity that could withstand the temptation to create quick, cheap works for the market.

In helping the artists to explore and discover their artistic talents, Georgina did not forget an elementary but very vital necessity: the tools for them to

work with and the space for them to work in, if the interest was to be sustained beyond the merely occasional. Thus, she set up two modest

studios: one in their house at 41 Ibokun Road, the other in the museum at

the Ataoja's palace. Both were open every day of the week and the young,

keen artists went in freely to work for as long as they wished or had the imagination and energy. When

they returned to Nigeria in 1971, Ulli and Georgina repeated the

experiment in various ways. They converted a part of their house on the

campus into a printery. When Ru van Rossem came back in 1974, they rented an unused cocoa depot in town and converted it into a studio (called

Oguntimehin). Upon leaving later that year, Ulli paid the rent of this huge space twelve months in advance.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Ulli also began to see to it that the artists had outlets for their works with exhibitions and sales in respectable places. In many respects, perhaps the most important exhibition in Nigeria (outside Osogbo) was the one at the Goethe Institute, Lagos, shortly before the Beiers left in December 1966. It started off that institute

as a patron of contemporary Nigerian art. When the director was transferred to Kenya, he introduced Osogbo art to East Africa through another

exhibition

mentioning

where

at the Goethe

the Osogbo

Institute, Nairobi.

artists were

Other places

exhibited

worth

either jointly or 149

individually or together with other artists are: the Neue Münchner Galerie;

the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London; the Traverse Theatre and Art Gallery in Edinburgh, and the Otis Arts Institute in Los Angeles. All of these exhibitions happened between 1964 and 1970. (A selected list of individual or joint exhibitions of Osogbo artists that Ulli has arranged all over the world is provided in the appendix.) There is the seemingly mysterious influence of Georgina herself, who conducted the 1964 workshop and was there until she and Ulli left two years later. Of Georgina's and Ulli's relationships with the young artists, Twins Seven-Seven has been quoted as follows (Thirty Years of Oshogbo

Art, 1991; 19):

Georgina — I don't kind of personality with her. Ulli was because of his age like one of us. Any and talk to her first.

know - I like Georgina a lot ... but she has the around her that makes people feel like working more like a father to us; we have to respect him and because he was a chief. Georgina was more time we need something from Ulli we would go

While this does not sum up the totality of the relationship that prevailed between her and the young artists, it gives an idea of the liberating informality, communal friendship and confidence that characterized it from the beginning (to the present). The Osogbo art school was no regular school at all: it had no theory or philosophy of art and taught no art history; there were no teachers, syllabus or teaching method; there was not even a building! In 1985 an art teacher from a French University took a group of students to Osogbo to study all these paraphernalia of a proper school but found nothing. When the visitors finally tracked down the Osogbo artists in their different locations, all they got were, in Georgina's words, "lots of anecdotes and entertaining stories." There certainly was euphoria, and a secret to the success of the adventure, but none of the artists was able to capture them in words. Pestered so many times on the subject, Georgina herself has only been able

to say that all she tried to do was to guide all that artistic creativity that was

in the air. She did not attempt to teach creativity for she had adopted Chuang Tsu's famous saying as her motto: "To organize is to destroy". The pesterings have, however, made her to reflect on what happened at Osogbo

150

1.

41 Ibokun Road, Oshogbo. Ulli Beier‘s residence from 1958-1966. Also housed several artists‘ studios.

2.

Shango priest in Ede, in trance during the 1958 Shango festival.

3.

Bandele of Otan, famous Shango priest and dancer, in trance during the Shango festival in Otan Aiyegbaju, 1962.

4.

The Olokuku of Okuku, in full regalia with beaded crown and dress, surrounded by his children, 1971.

5.

The Ogoga of Ikerre, on a throne donated by the British Museum, 1953.

6.

The Ataoja of Oshogbo at an exhibition opening at Mbari Mbayo in Oshogbo, 1962. On his left (with cap) Duro Ladipo, on the right (with glasses) the African American artist Jacob Lawrence.

7.

Timi Laoye, the Oba of Ede, receiving visitors, lying across the threshold of his inner chamber, 1953.

Me Lore ka

ie ga

Th er

”

TI oo

2 ye

ua

ERe

|

re

re a P

wget

run 42

4

8.

Kola Ogunmola with his wife and lead actress in the play „Love of Money“, 1965.

a

9.

Duro Ladipo with his wife and lead actress Abiodun Ladipo in his play „Oba Koso", Berlin Festival 1964 (photo: Berlin Festival 1964).

Chief Ovia Idah, famous artist in Benin City, 1963. He built a special little house for Ulli and Georgina, which they could use whenever they visited Benin.

11.

Young boy in Okuku, an oracle priest‘s apprentice, 1965.

4

“AR T EKHIBITIO from

December

14th

to

23rd

at the

GERMAN

CULTURAL

174,

Broad

Asıru

Street,

INSTITUTE

Ist Floor

Olatunde

Adebisi Akanji Jacob Afolabi Georgina Beier Jimo Buraimoh Adebisi Fabunmi Rufus Ogundele Muraina. Oyelami Twins. Seven Seven Susanne Wenger Open

12.

from

9 a.m. to 6 p.m,

TA

Closed on Sunday

Poster of the first exhibition of the Oshogbo artists at the Goethe Institute in Lagos, December 1965. Woodcut „Oshogbo“ by Bisi Fabunmi.

MBARI

MBAYO

FOURTH 25th

OSHOGBO

ANNIVERSARY —

27th March

1966

Friday 25th 7 p.m. Exhibition: THREE OSHOGBO ARTISTS Saturday 26th 10 am. PROCESSION OF SACRED IMAGES 8 p.m.

Duro

Sunday 27th

Ladipo

"KINI

Theatre

IGBAGBO"

and

“MOREMI”

10 am. NIGERIAN DANCES 8 p.m. Theatre Express “THE

13.

FALL”

Poster for the festival to mark the fourth anniversary of Mbari Mbayo. Woodcut by Georgina Beier, representing Gelede masks, 1966.

14.

„Onibonokuta‘s Yoruba Percussion“, a trio formed at Iwalewa Haus in

1983 (from left: Ademola Onibonokuta, Tunji Beier, Rufus Ogundele). Performance at Fürth Folk Music Festival, 1983

(photo: Erich Maller, Erlangen).

15.

The Agbor dancers from the Western Igbo kingdom of Agbor. Performance at Mbari Mbayo, Oshogbo, 1963.

16. the

Es‘kia Mphahlele, South African writer and colleague of Ulli Beier in the Extramural Department of University College of Ibadan, opens Mbari Club Ibadan in July 1961. Behind him a painting by Demas Nwoko.

17.

Chinua Achebe, one of the founders of Mbari Ibadan, 1962.

18.

Ulli Beier with Segun Lagos in December about to leave Nigeria. conferences organised

Olusola at the Nigerian Broadcasting Studio in 1966. Farewell programme for Ulli, who was In the background posters of Extramural by Ulli, designed by Susanne Wenger.

19.

Georgina and Ulli at the Berlin Festival in 1964, on the occasion of Duro's first overseas performance of „Oba Koso“.

20.

President Léopold Sédar Senghor at Ulli‘s exhibition, „Neue Kunst aus Afrika“, at the State Museum in Mainz, 1980. On his left Sebastian

Beier, aged 13, on his right Ulli Beier (press photo: Klaus Benz).

21.

„The Face of the Gods“, a photo exhibition by Ulli Beier at the

Configura festival in Erfurt, 1995. The photographs were 2.5 metres high. The exhibition was subsequently shown at Iwalewa Haus.

Wole Soyinka (photo: George Hallett, 1977). Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier were co-founders of Mbari Ibadan and co-editors of

Black Orpheus.

then and her own attempt to capture the experience in words goes to the heart of the secret of its success (Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art, 1991; 70): Twins Seven-Seven says: "Perhaps the most important thing I learnt from Georgina was energy ..." And I thought I'd learned that from Yorubas! We all motivated each other's energy! We worked furiously in those days; we slept little and we lived for the daily surprises that we discovered in each other's work. For such a euphoric situation to develop, the time, the place and the human chemistry have to be right. In the case of Ulli, the "furious energy" was certainly prodigious. It must not be forgotten that in these same years, MBARI Club Ibadan was at its most active; that Black Orpheus came out promptly even as it got better

and better; that Theatre Express which he and Segun Olusola started was

performing in different places; that membership of MBARI MBAYO Club Osogbo and the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company took a lot of his time and energy; that he wrote his own plays or translated others from German to

English (which Duro would then render into Yoruba) as well as from Yoruba to English; that he wrote books while regularly contributing to Nigeria Magazine; that he edited Odu, the journal of Yoruba studies; that with the assistance of the Timi and the olorisas, he was collecting Yoruba oral literature and with Buraimoh Gbadamosi translating them into English

for eventual publication; that as a chief in Osogbo he had regular civic

duties to perform in the palace as well as in the town; that, finally, he was

still a teacher and coordinator (Western Region) of the Extramural Studies programme of the University. It remains, in this chapter, to deal with the three other activities that fully engaged Ulli, especially between 1958 and 1966: his association with Duro Ladipo; his own literary activities; and his co-founding of a travelling theatre company. It is extremely difficult to separate these activities: they dovetail so much into each other as to be merely different aspects of one gigantic creative endeavour. For one who never for a moment considered himself

either

as

a playwright,

or

even

as

a theatre

director,

Ulli's

achievements in both the Yoruba theatre and Nigerian theatre generally, are remarkable. Around this time, the huge success of Hubert Ogunde (see chapter VII for more about this Yoruba dramatist) — then Duro Ladipo and Kola Ogunmola later

—

had

turned

the

travelling

theatre

(2)

in

Yoruba

society

into 151

something of a growth industry. There were many companies, of which sometimes a town like Osogbo would play host to two at different locations in one night. They all seemed to be doing well. In contrast, there was only one theatre company in English — Wole Soyinka's — and even that was not professional, being composed of relatively well-paid public servants. Half of the members of the company worked in Lagos and the other half in Ibadan, so Soyinka would bring the Lagos half to Ibadan for rehearsals one weekend, and take the Ibadan half to Lagos the next. In effect, there was no professional theatre company in English while there were so many in Yoruba. So, Ulli thought, since there are so many professional theatre companies in Yoruba, most of them must be doing well. It must be possible, therefore, for one in English to also make a living. This could be done if the troupe was kept small and props kept to a minimum. There were young, good actors available to form the core group while Segun Olusola and one or two other people could come in when needed. Segun Olusola's cooperation was very vital to the realization of the idea. Ulli had first met him as a member of Wole Soyinka's 1960 Masks, a very powerful theatre company in those heady days. He was then a producer on Western Nigerian Television (WNTV) and had helped produce a television version of Soyinka's The Strong Breed for an American television station. Segun Olusola had also been part of the production team of Kola Ogunmola's My Brother's Children, a play on family planning, for the British Family Planning Association. Their friendship led to Ulli doing several poetry and drama programmes for the television station. One of such programmes was very ambitious and involved Duro Ladipo: Ulli translated a radio play by Friedrich Diirrenmatt into English, then Duro translated it into Yoruba and it was produced by Segun Olusola for radio. So when Ulli came up with his ideas of a professional company playing in English, Segun Olusola was enthusiastic. Theatre Express was born in 1965, composed of Ulli Beier, Segun Olusola, Segun Sofowote, Wale Ogunyemi and later, Segun Akinbola and Wole Amele. Segun Sofowote and Wale Ogunyemi were the two core- and full-time actors: they were

therefore probably the first professional actors in English in Nigeria. Segun Olusola was the director and Ulli the producer. As it was necessary to have a repertoire immediately, Ulli translated two other radio plays by 152

Dürrenmatt and adapted them for the stage. These two plays were presented as a double bill in the company's first performance. Its repertoire grew gradually to include Ulli's adaptation of Anton Chekov's The Proposal (in which the dowry transaction became a bride-price one) and an original, The Fall (3). Segun Sofowote wrote Sailor Boy in Town and Wale Ogunyemi contributed Business Man's Headache. A very inventive company, Theatre Express improvised lighting, props, costumes, even the stage. It performed in people's sitting-rooms or gardens.

Among Ulli's friends was the bank manager of Osogbo. He would get the

manager to invite the company to perform in his garden (for which he invited friends and neighbours). He also got the company engagements in Igbajo, Ikirun, and other towns. Ulli's car became its company vehicle which, tiny as it was, was big enough for the regular cast to move around in, props and all. The company had several important and memorable performances, including one at the Goethe Institute in Lagos and another at the National Museum. It performed The Fall during the third anniversary of

MBARI MBAYO Club, 1965. Another actor played God while Twins SevenSeven's boys played the animals like agbegijo masks. The Catholic fathers from nearby Inisa who came to watch enjoyed this skeptical play. In 1965,

the company participated in the Traverse Theatre season in Edinburgh,

where it performed two plays (a pidgin adaptation of Salazar S. Bondy's The Suitcase and Diirrenmatt's Sunset in Late Autumn) and Segun Sowofote

did an improvised dance drama, "Morning, Noon and Night". There were even plans for the troupe to go to Japan (which fell through in the last minute).

On the whole the Theatre Express experience was artistically stimulating and liberating for all the members, most of whose lives have remained closely intertwined with the theatre ever since, in one form or another. Wale Ogunyemi became a moderately successful playwright and a more

accomplished actor, Segun Akinbola a teacher and director at the University of Ife's Department of Theatre Arts, while Wole Amele went into film-acting. It was also financially very rewarding for the two core actors, for they earned enough to live on it. The company

continued to

thrive long after Ulli had left Nigeria. It was still intact and going strong when he returned briefly in 1970; so much so that he could borrow his old car briefly for a visit to the East.

153

Theatre Express gave Ulli another kind or dimension of intellectualcultural experience that, though continuous with Duro's theatre, was nevertheless different. From the time when he had to find local materials for use in his Extramural classes, he had been increasingly and constantly drawn into translating. Even then, it was more for immediate, practical needs (as in building a repertoire for Theatre Express) than as an intellectual or artistic pursuit in its own right. Whatever the reasons, it became an important aspect of his entire cultural outlook and creativity, for to translate from one language to another is to cross cultural boundaries, to be multicultural. His involvement with the Duro Ladipo theatre was in itself a big act of translation (border-crossing, multiculturalism) which enfolded other smaller acts. Duro Ladipo's theatre was and remained essentially a Yoruba theatre and that was as it should be: only that way could it creatively absorb materials from other cultures. Thus, it was only natural that Ulli would translate and adapt the medieval European classic, Everyman, for him. Next to Oba Koso and Moremi, Eda (the Yoruba title for the adaptation) was Duro's most popular play. So well was it absorbed into the Yoruba socio-religious world views, so well did the actors play it, that it might as well have been another original Duro play. In support of their own more political than artistic theories, some Nigerian drama historian-critics have so distorted the Ulli Beier-Duro Ladipo cooperation and partnership that telling the story straight has become extremely difficult. Countering these distortions, plus the fanciful theories that they have been made to support, however, belongs more properly in the realm of dramatic history and criticism and will therefore be reserved for chapter VII of this book. For now an attempt will be made to tell the story so that the nature of the friendship, leading to dramatic association, will be better understood and appreciated. This can only positively serve the short history of Nigerian contemporary drama, as well as highlight Duro's own originality as a dramatist. It is necessary, however, to tell another story in tandem: that of Ulli's association with Kola Ogunmola.

This particular association will give an idea of the general context of the kind of Yoruba drama that existed before Duro Ladipo thundered in, literally, on the stage. Sometime in 1952, Kola Ogunmola was touring Ekiti with a play, Joseph and his Brethren, and Ikere-Ekiti was his first stop. Ulli too happened to be 154

in town that night and he went to watch. The play was not great, but Ulli was charmed by its attention to social details and mannerisms, and even more by the lead actor's prowess on the stage: clearly, thıs actor (Kola Ogunmola) was not only a great actor, but also a perceptive though

sympathetic observer of human nature. Ulli followed the troupe and saw the same play for all the two weeks of the tour. So well did Ulli become familiar with Kola Ogunmola's theatre, in just two years, that he published an article on him in the first number of African Music, in 1954 (4). Kola Ogunmola started out as a primary school teacher in Ado-Ekiti but was

doing theatre on the side. As he became more interested in theatre, he got himself transferred to the bigger, more central and urban Osogbo where he

continued to teach at the All Saints Primary School. Also a fine musician, he

converted

his

actors

to

musicians

whenever

he

had

no

theatrical

engagement. He plied his two trades either at Fakunle Major Hotel, or Gemini Bar. In this latter place he and Ulli, by now good friends, saw each other regularly. For Ulli, Kola Ogunmola's theatre was so good, so consummate that there

was

nothing

anybody

could

add

to it. He

specialized

in portraying

contemporary, lower urban class types and their foibles on his stage. Being

a member

of this

class

himself,

he

had

a personal

experience

and

understanding of its aspirations, pretentions and weaknesses. His unrivalled

gift was in portraying its morally ambivalent character-types, with such verve and sympathetic imagination, that he made them lovable even while they were being nasty. For Ulli, this was particularly endearing because he himself knew that class very well: most of those in his Extramural classes

were from this class; he mixed with them in beer parlours and other places in Osogbo, Ibadan, Ede, Ilobu and other towns. Furthermore, unlike other

troupes, Kola Ogunmola did not make fun of traditional religion and its figures; the butts of his own

satires were

the moneydoublers

and their

dupes, or the village schoolteacher who, like Lakunle in Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel, imagined themselves to be models and torchbearers of modernity in primitive backwaters. Himself a village schoolteacher for many years, Kola Ogunmola saw through the pretensions of such characers and measured their fantasies against the commonsensical

realism of the ordinary village people. At the end of each play, he always brought them crashing down. The added spice to these plays was that he

155

played these deluded characters himself. Ulli always wondered how he was able to play them so convincingly, yet ironically. And as far as he was concerned, Kola Ogunmola was certainly one of the greatest stage actors he had ever seen. This opinion was not Ulli's alone. When Tony Isaacs, the man sent by the BBC in 1970 to make the film on family planning, arrıved, he met Peggy Harper (then a lecturer in dance at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ife) who in turn introduced him to Segun Olusola as the man who could help with logistics and personnel concerning his documentary. Segun Olusola suggested that instead of a dry propaganda kind of film, why not a drama sketch to illustrate the problems of having too many children? Tony Isaacs agreed and Kola Ogunmola was invited. The story would be that of an older brother in Lagos, invited to the village for the naming ceremony of his younger brother's seventh child. In one of the episodes, the enlightened senior brother would give advice to his excessively productive, village-bound younger brother on how to go about family planning so that a pregnancy did not result each time he and his wife made love. This was a delicate subject that must be handled with just the right combination of seriousness and jest. This was briefly explained to Kola Ogunmola (in the role of the enlightened older brother), who would improvise a necessary dialogue with his junior brother. In a few minutes, Ogunmola and the other actor had got the drift and the scene was done as the two brothers walked across a field in Oke-Mesi (the location). Tony Isaacs did not have to do another take of this eight minute scene. Then, towards the end of the filming, Tony Isaacs thought that there should be some dramatic climax to the film by, for example, Ogunmola staging a quarrel with his wife. The actor consulted with his senior wife and main actress and, after barely two minutes, told Tony Isaacs that they were ready. The following brief exchange ensued: Tony Isaacs: "Don't you need to rehearse?" Kola Ogunmola: "I don't need tu rehearse to quarrel with my wife!"

As Tony Isaacs later told the anecdote to Ulli and Segun Olusola, it was so perfectly done that, again, he did not need another take. "I have never seen

such combination of natural acting and professionalism," was the experienced film maker's verdict. Sadly enough, this slight sketch, My

156

Brother's Children, and not any of his great plays, ıs the only record of Kola Ogunmola's amazing theatrical genius on film.

All

these

and

other

great

acting

achievements

came

later,

however.

Throughout the 1950s the great actor languished in the shadow of Hubert Ogunde, celebrated entertainer and showman whose theatrical freight comprised mainly several elements of Lagos slickness: jazzy, highlife music; dancing girls; dazzling, seductive costumes; and saccharine songs about city life. Audiences appreciated Ogunmola and after watching him, would say: "Well, he is trying, but ...," and then go on to rave about

Ogunde's spectacular shows. Ulli himself has recorded (1976; dramatist's predicament then as follows:

115) the

I felt everybody ought to know about this gifted man. I could not

understand why he was not famous already and why he had not been

given

the support

company.

School.

to enable

him

to create

a fully professional

He seemed to be wasting his time teaching in a Primary

So the first thing that Ulli did was to take D.W. McCrow, editor of Nigeria Magazine, to an Ogunmola play in Osogbo. The editor was charmed and an

Open-air performance was arranged later in Ede for him to take pictures for a pictorial article in number

44 of the magazine.

Finally,

approached

Still, such respectable

publicity did not make much difference to Kola Ogunmola's reputation or pocket. The troupe continued to live precariously. around

1961,

Ulli

Robert

July,

his

friend

at the

Rockefeller Foundation. Could that Foundation help by giving Ogunmola money to buy himself a vehicle and equip his theatre properly for travelling around? Mr July agreed but said that the Rockefeller Foundation did not give out money to individuals. However, if Kola Ogunmola's company might be attached to the University of Ibadan School of Drama and do a

kind of workshop production there, then the Rockefeller Foundation would provide the money for the entire project, after which there would still be enough left for him to buy a vehicle and other necessary props for travelling around.

Kola Ogunmola and his company went to the University in 1962 and the arrangement worked fine generally, except that the Drama School decided to produce Ogunmola instead! Thus, when Amos Tutuola's The Palmwine Drinkard was decided upon, Dr Collis, a paediatrician, did the adaptation 157

and wrote the play script; Ogunmola himself never read the novel. The script was good and, with Demas Nwoko as producer and stage designer, and other people in the theatre having inputs, it was of course a fantastic production. Kola Ogunmola himself played the lead role with great subtlety and skill. Amos Tutuola's fantastic world, very Yoruba in conception, was, however, reduced to a Joke: after all his adventures, the hero suddenly woke up! So it had all been one wild dream! But Kola Ogunmola was finally launched. Not The Palmwine Drinkard but Ife Owo (Love of Money) was his most famous and beloved play, however. Ulli saw this play "close to fifty times over a period of twenty five (sic) years" and has written (1994; 8) of it as follows: As time went by, I watched Ogunmola refine the details of each scene. He was able to achieve tremendous effects on stage without the use of props. In Love of Money he and his senior wife, alone on stage, were able to conjure a Yoruba compound bustling with activity! By now Duro Ladipo had already started his own theatre in Osogbo and soon, the two became the biggest and best travelling theatre companies in Western Region (Hubert Ogunde belonged to Lagos, which was not a part of the region). When it came to which company should represent the region in festivals abroad, government stepped in and, having little respect for the dramatists, politicized its choices in the most atrocious manner. This created bad blood all round. It was in part due to Ulli's intervention that the crisis between these two excellent theatre practitioners was resolved and the love and appreciation which Ogunmola had for Ulli remained till the end. There was also an intensely poignant side to their relationship, made more so by the grievous end of this actor at the prime of his life and career. Kola

Ogunmola

was

no slapstick comedian

practictioners of his day, he knew

but, of all the Yoruba

best how

to make

people

theatre

laugh. He

struggled for a long time in obscurity before recognition came; when it did his life was cut short at the peak of his career. When Ulli came briefly to Nigeria in December 1970, Kola Ogunmola had been laid low by a stroke. Wole Soyinka took Ulli to the University Teaching Hospital Ibadan to see

158

his friend of eighteen years. Ulli recollected that sad visit in these words (1976; 117): To see him prostrate and partly paralysed was a tremendous shock. I

had never known

him to be sick, not even mildly. He had always

shown incredible stamina; his energy had seemed boundless. I had no idea how old he was: he was one of those alert, ageless people

who did not seem to change over the years. Now he looked ravaged

but his courage had not left him. He was a philosopher, who could accept the hardest fate calmly. But it was also clear that he was quietly determined to do the impossible: to get back onto the stage.

Kola Ogunmola's health improved and he did get back to the stage (in the performance narrated in chapter VI). However, he was still too ill to attend the party organized by MBARI MBAYO in Osogbo to welcome Ulli back in 1971 and had to send a friend to present him. The stage was Ogunmola's life, on which he turned the personal struggles

of life into laughter, and from which his illness could not keep him away for too long. Impatient of his slow recovery, he exerted himself and fought

gallantly to make his body obey his spirit. But this could not last: he died as suddenly as his 'resurrection' of 1972. Much has been written — most notably by M.J.C. Echeruo, Joel Adedeji, 'Biodun Jeyifo and Ebun Clark — on the relationship between modern theatre in Yorubaland and the missionary and nativist churches, from the former's beginning in the last century to the 1940s (5). From all the

accounts, it seems that what emerged in that decade out of the topsy-turvy and troubled relationship was that drama and theatre were effectively back

under the heavy hand of the churches and their schools. Thus, even when in 1946 Hubert Ogunde left his Aladura church to set up a fully professional,

secular company, biblical subjects, church hymn and highlife tunes sung to Western musical instruments and dances characterized his performances. In inland Ekiti, Kola Ogunmola too was a teacher who either directly took the

subjects for his early plays from the holy book, or derived the morals guiding his plot from its teachings. In other words, even though the Yoruba travelling theatre in the 1940s and 1950s was now secular, its fare consisted mainly of 'morality plays’, which were thought to be 'modern'. Being Christians themselves, the practitioners of course saw themselves as 'modern' and catered to their equally 'modern’,

159

urban audiences as such. As both performers and audience were united in their view of themselves as 'civilized', motifs or elements from indigenous performance traditions were out. Where traditional religion and its representatives (the babalawos and olorisas for example) featured at all in these 'concerts', they were reduced to caricatures, objects of thoughtless condemnation and butts of wild jokes. In this regard, Ulli's identification of the social class and religion of the members of Kola Ogunmola's company in the early 1950s would apply equally well to the audiences in the rural and expanding urban centres (1954; 33): E.K. Ogunmola is a schoolmaster in a junior primary school. He is about thirty years old and has written and produced plays for the last seven years. His company consists of fellow teachers, school children, traders, seamstresses, etc. All have some degree of primary education and all are Christians. This brief digression into theatrical history 1s necessary both to place in proper perspective the theatrical relationship between Ulli and his friend Duro Ladipo, and therefore to better appreciate its truly revolutionary effects on the subsequent development of Yoruba theatre in the next two decades. As has been noted earlier in this narrative, Ulli's relationship with Duro Ladipo started purely on a note of friendship. The latter came back to Osogbo (his hometown) in 1958 from Northern Nigeria where he had been a primary school teacher, opened his Popular Bar and also managed Ajax Cinema. Initially it was just one of the three places where Ulli stopped by at night, on his way home from his teaching rounds. But soon he lost interest in the other two (Gemini Bar and Café de Paris). Their friendship deepened as Duro was a very curious man who plied his friend with endless questions about everything. "Duro was such stimulating company

that I quickly lost interest in the other bars," 1s the way Ulli has described the beginning of their friendship (1994; 11):

We would talk about local politics, space-travel, Christianity, Yoruba

history, the cold war, there was nothing he wasn't interested in.

Then, in 1961, Duro invited Ulli to his church in Osogbo for the Easter celebrations. Ulli declined, saying that he had not been in a church for so

long, and would not go now, even for his friend. Then Duro informed him

that he had composed an Easter Cantata and would like his friend to hear it!

160

This was the first time Ulli knew of his friend's interest in music and Ulli went. Upon getting to All Saints Church, Osogbo, that Easter morning Ulli met an entire congregation seething with anger and outrage: Duro's

composition included sessions on bata and dundun! While the church fathers welcomed foreign musical instruments like guitar, organ, bongos and tambourines to accompany their hymns and special numbers, they were

scandalized by the inclusion of native and "pagan and idolatrous" drums dundun and bata. It bordered on blasphemy and could not be allowed. However, Duro stood his ground on the integrity of his composition and,

eventually, a compromise was worked out. The composition would be performed on two conditions: first, the ‘pagan' instruments must be used very discretely; second, a regular Anglican hymn accompanied organ must be sung between the different sections of the cantata.

on the

Ulli made things worse for his friend by writing an aggressive letter on the matter in The Daily Times, to which, surprisingly, many correspondents contributed in support. Another newspaper, the Daily Service, actually

thought the controversy important enough to deserve an editorial, the ideas — if not the words — of which were certainly inspired by Ulli's own letter. In view of later efforts by all Christian denominations in Nigeria to indigenize

their music and general modes of worship, a portion of that editorial is still worth quoting here (6): Duro Ladipo, a young composer from Osogbo recently produced a Yoruba Easter cantata, which was performed at All Saints Church

Osogbo ... The compostion was truly Yoruba in character and a welcome change from the usual dreariness of the English hymns ... The church authorities hardly appreciated the importance and significance of his work ... He has certainly taken a step in the right direction. If Christianity is to survive in Nigeria, it must under the

process of Nigerianisation.

By now the church elders had had enough.

They responded by banning

Duro from his position as lay reader, and even hinted at excommunication. Duro's father too, a catechist in the church, threatened to disown him. All

these were very hard for a man who had actually grown up in the church (he attended its primary school). But Duro was unrepentant about his love of Yoruba music and Ulli told him that church music could also be performed outside the church. So when in December he composed a Christmas Cantata, it was tried out at the local Teacher's Training College. 161

Ulli then arranged performances for it at MBARI Club Ibadan and on WNTV. It was on this occasion that Duro met Segun Olusola for the first time in the studios of WNTV, a meeting that would prove highly beneficial to Duro the playwright ın the years to come. It was also after the exhilarating experience of being at MBARI Club Ibadan, meeting the writers and artists there and being infected by their drive and enthusiasm, that he told Ulli that there must be an MBARI at Osogbo. Between the two cantatas, Duro had also composed a play which, to Ulli, was simply "a slapstick comedy built on the conventions of the Yoruba travelling theatre." For music, it had also gone back to the ubiquitous bongos and church tunes. Its moral message was the simplistic type fed to children in Christian sunday school teachings. In this, Duro Ladipo was simply reverting to the theatrical fare that he met when he arrived in Osogbo. This type of church drama (biblical subjects with highly didactic messages; clashes between Christians and 'pagans' leading to easy conversion of the latter, all peppered with sentimental, sing-along lyrics) had been firmly established and made respectable in the town by Oyin Adejobi, who himself had been in Lagos where he was almost certainly influenced by Hubert Ogunde. Knowing what he already knew of Yoruba tradition on the one hand, and on the other what his friend was capable of (as already proved by his composition of the two cantatas), Ulli disapproved of his friend's composition and told him so. Mercifully, the play (probably titled Eyin Ola) was also a flop on the stage. Duro was not discouraged; rather, he proved his determination to have an MBARI by offering his family compound, Popular Bar and all, to Ulli to create the club. At that time Ezekiel Mphahlele, who had been first president of MBARI Club Ibadan and Ulli's colleague in the Extramural Studies of the University, was in Paris as head of the African programme of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. So Ulli wrote to him and Ezekiel Mphahlele sent two hundred pounds. Popular Bar plus the family compound in which it was situated on Station Road, Osogbo, was turned

into another MBARI Club, complete with its own theatre, gallery and social

area. Curious passers-by did not know the Igbo word mbari, so they converted it into Yoruba by adding the alliterative subjunctive clause

162

mbayo to mean "when we see (it) we shall rejoice". MBARI MBAYO was born early in 1962.

Leaning

on the resources

of his Extramural

Studies

programme,

Club

Ulli

organized a drama competiton among schools in Osun (Osogbo) area, from which actors were recruited. Ademola Onibonokuta, who would internalize and play the role of Gbonka so well in the early performances of Oba Koso, was ‘discovered’ during this competition. Duro wanted to launch the club with a bang; but there was no play and so little time left. Ulli for his part wanted to get his friend away from the slapdash routine of the travelling theatres, into the kind of production that “would make full use of his musical gifts" (1994; 17). So he gave him Samuel Johnson's History of the Yorubas (7). Like most of his generation, Duro had never heard of this book, for none of the educational authorities, missionary, government or even community, attached any importance to

Yoruba history. With total fascination, Duro first read the book from cover to cover, after which he chose a story. Oba Moro, the play that resulted, would be the first attempt to put any aspect of Yoruba history on the travelling theatre stage. MBARI MBAYO Osogbo opened with this play and an exhibition of Susanne Wenger's lino-cuts on March 21, 1962 (the first

public performance, though, was on March 17). It was performed in Ilesa Town Hall in the first week of April, and then taken to MBARI Club Ibadan in May. There is an interesting aside to Oba Moro's history. The play being about

an alaafin of Oyo, Duro Ladipo felt that Sango's praise chants should be used. He and other members of the Osogbo Cultural and Dramatic Society (the play's producers) engaged six young ladies from the famous Sangoworshipping Layiokun family in Osogbo for this role. When, almost immediately

after,

he

started

work

on

Oba

Koso,

the

play

on

Sango

himself, he would go back to this family for more insight into the character of that deified king as well as for more of the chants (8). Ulli is of the opinion that probably the greatest things he did for Duro Ladipo were: one, he did his duty by his friend by being honest with him

about his first dramatic composition; two, he gave him Johnson's book to read. It is no exaggeration to say that this second gift was not to Duro alone, but to the entire Yoruba theatre, travelling or literary; and even to

163

Nigerian drama in English by Yoruba playwrights. It is also a gift to the general public, for the consequences of that simple act are truly extraordinary and need looking into at some length. Some of these results

are elaborated upon briefly below, but the reader must bear in mind that

they were not present in Ulli's mind in the form and details in which they are given here. All that was immediate in his own mind then was the tragedy unfolding before his eyes everyday. The olorisas he knew were old and their cults were dying with them. Even if younger priests succeeded them, the next generation could not have the same grandeur, depth, certainty and followership as this dying one: Islam, Christianity and Western education had made sure of that between them. Yet, as pervasive as they were, neither of these two religions and their educational systems was the source of good drama, whereas Yoruba history, myths, religion and traditions could: so much theatre and drama in the festivals and rituals just waiting to be ‘translated’ onto the modern stage! People could not be expected to return to the orisa worships but, if mythical and historical subjects were put on the secular stage, dramatized within their period — or even contemporary — settings and ethos, something of the passing grandeur might be recovered in this new socio-cultural form and medium. This might lead to a

reappraisal of both past and present, in which the former would be assessed less negatively and the latter more soberly.

Oba Moro, Duro Ladipo's first mythico-historical play, was about the return of an alaafin of Oyo from exile in Igboho to Oyo-lle in the 16th century. Some members of his court did not want to return, so they 'created' some weird spirits to go to the old site and frighten off the alaafin's advance party. The trick was quickly discovered, the 'spirits' were caught and brought back to Igboho. Obviously a man with a good sense of humour, the alaafin turned them into palace entertainers. Thus was born the apidan theatre. Duro Ladipo's first serious play was therefore also a reflexive play about the origins of Yoruba secular theatre. It was only

moderately successful but, as Ulli has recorded Duro's state of mind then, it set him on the road to his own re-education in Yoruba history, religion and literature (1994; 26):

His (Duro Ladipo's) Anglican education had taught him nothing about the world of orisha. He had never attended an ebo of Shango, 164

he had never been inside a Shango shrine, he didn't know Shango's oriki. During the following weeks I introduced him to Shango priests in Oshogbo, Ede and Otan Aiyegbaju. Timi Laoye of Ede was particularly helpful. Oba Moro was followed by Oba Koso (another mythico-historical play about Sango, one of the early rulers of Oyo empire), which not only took the playwright further into his Yoruba education, but now radically

challenged all his Western education. Ulli has again described the reception of this second historical play, performed for the first anniversary of MBARI MBAYO in March 1963 (1994; 26): The

first performance

... had

the

impact

of an

explosion.

The

audience was stunned — overwhelmed. They had never seen anything

remotely

comparable

on

a Yoruba

stage:

the fierce

entrances

of

Duro, the moving plaintive voice of Oya, the wild, yet disciplined

dancing of Gbonka, and Timi, the incantations in the witches' scene, the thundering interventions of the bata drums.

It will be too tedious to repeat the stage history of Oba Koso here and, for the purposes of our argument, the reader need be reminded of only two of the numerous places where it was performed: at the Alaafin's palace in Oyo, in the presence of the descendants of the play's three major characters; in Bahia, Brazil, where there is a large concentration of Yoruba

descendants and where Yoruba deities are still worshipped. If these two plays brought about the education of Duro Ladipo himself, they

also

started the re-education

of the Yoruba

people

as a whole

—

through drama. Ignorant of their own history, educated Yoruba audiences

in Nigeria suddenly began to know that Sango was not just a dreadful god

whose priests are to be avoided, but the name of a historical king in an important period of their history. The phenomenal success of Oba Koso would start the trend of historical drama in the Yoruba travelling theatre which literary dramatists in English and Yoruba would later take up. Yoruba audiences also began to be better educated about their arts of poetry, music and dancing. The performance at the palace in Oyo also demonstrated that drama, contrary to the colonial and Christian education doctrines, was not just frivolous and libertine entertainment, but a crucial

aspect of political education, and a part of the political process in any polity.

165

With Duro Ladipo's Oba Koso, tradition, banished for so long from the contemporary stage, returned in triumph. The subject that Duro chose was a combination of political history and (living) religious myth, the full dramatization of which would require all elements of traditional art forms in costume, dancing, music and poetry. Thus, even if Duro had not already taken an interest in dundun and bata music, he would have had to now, for he probably would have been the first to realize that you could not possibly ask Sango or a babalawo to dance to bongos and saxophone! Moreover, the story of Sango is a tragedy, the dramatization of which it would have been incongruous to accompany with the breezy, life-is-good mood that highlife music produces. Likewise, it was a subject that required as much of all forms and genres of Yoruba poetry and choral singing as could be woven into the plot. This in turn called for actors who knew these things: actors who could chant ese Ifa and incantatory poetry for minutes nonstop, who could play bata and dundun drums, who knew traditional songs and dance steps, and who knew the traditional costumes appropriate for each role. Only by acquiring a vast knowledge of these things could they appropriate and adapt the multimedia nature of the various traditions of performance and theatre in Yoruba society for the modern stage. Only then, too, could they begin to realize the full dramatic potentialities and intensity of the material they had on their hands. All accounts show how seriously the playwright and his actors took this research project, the overall result of which was that the Yoruba traditional arts of poetry, dance and music were revived and shown not to be out of place in the new environment. When the other troupes took this up, there was a large-scale revival that was part of the Yoruba cultural reawakening. This was not between one results out of aesthetics and aesthetics that

was

the

himself.

the only aspect in which that strictly private and tiny act friend and another produced wholly unexpected but happy proportion to the act. It also produced radical changes in the internal dynamics of the theatre itself. In the performance preceded Duro Ladipo, particularly in Hubert Ogunde's that

model,

the

Plots were

founder-director-producer-main sketchy,

loosely hung

actor

dramatized

together and characterization

almost nil. Whatever character the fictional hero had was absorbed into the

real personality of the actor, while all other characters/actors merely were

166

on the stage to enhance his stature. In real life as well as on stage, the all-

in-all boss of the group was 'cock of the roost’. Duro Ladipo's chosen subjects precluded this trend in 'vanity shows’ in his

own plays, and checked it in others. He had stories that existed objectively, whose plots could only be developed and elaborated upon but not changed. The dramatis personae involved could neither be assimilated into the persons and personalities of the actors nor merely used as foils of the hero. Rather, the actors had to grow into the characters and roles they played. The immediate effect of this was that the actors became identified with those stage characters: Duro Ladipo himself gradually grew to take on the personality of Sango and was so called until he died; the other surviving actors have remained known by the names of the characters they played in Oba Koso, even in spite of having gone on to play other memorable roles in other plays, and more than thirty years after.

Perhaps

the most gratifying result of all is that the entire experience

replayed the Yoruba religious experience on a modern

religious

practice,

the one possessed

stage. In Yoruba

by a deity at once

carries

and

impersonates that deity. Repeated experiences of such possession gradually change the personality of the carrier, even in his profane life, to become

more like the god's, whose personality in turn shifts to accommodate the carrier's. The

carrier grows

psychically

and spiritually until the highest

level of identification possible between man and god 1s attained. This,

certainly, was

what

happened

in the Duro

Ladipo

dramatization

of the

Sango story. The more the company performed it, the more the play took on the character of a ritual performance involving a prolonged act of possession during which the god made himself manifest, followed by release.

It was

no wonder

that the olorisas,

especially members

of the

Sango cult, in Osogbo and other nearby towns, came to see Oba Koso whenever it was on stage at MBARI MBAYO. This, coupled with its performance

in

the

Alaafin's

palace

at

Oyo,

in

the

presence

of the

descendants of Sango, Timi and Gbonka, transformed it into a communal action. Duro Ladipo had evolved a theatre that the people could recognize as theirs, in all aspects. Of this politico-cultural awareness that Duro Ladipo caused through his theatre, Ulli wrote as follows (1973; 3): In his plays the Yoruba gods and kings are resurrected with both dignity and vigour and one of his major contributions to the quality 167

of Nigerian life is his ability to demonstrate the relevance of the past for the present. Traditions that were decried not so long ago as

"pagan", are shown to be of the utmost value in the modern search

for identity. Ladipo does not glorify the past, but he reminds people of the richness and intensity of life Nigerians had evolved before the coming of the Europeans. He shows his Nigerian audiences that they can recognize their current tensions and conflicts in the great historical confrontations of the past. The 1960s and 1970s were truly the golden age of the Yoruba travelling theatre, when all the numerous new companies that sprouted followed the examples of Duro Ladipo and Kola Ogunmola. Many mythical and historical subjects were dramatized; all the genres of Yoruba oral poetry, especially the incantatory ones, became regular features; all used traditional musical instruments, dances and costumes; all became conscious that they were transmitters of tradition in one way or another (though with varying degrees of sincerity and artistic integrity). The dramatists also began paying more attention to their own social environments: more contemporary subjects and social experiences began to be scrutinized on the stage against the backcloth of the older ways. Banished for so long from the modern stage in Western Nigeria by the churches, Yoruba tradition returned to it not just triumphantly, but with a vengeance. So now, with Duro Ladipo's theatre fully launched, Ulli's own involvement in theatre and drama were at three levels. On one was his role as playwright to and member of Theatre Express. On the second was his equally demanding role as background director, occasional co-writer and adviser to the Duro Ladipo theatre and co-founder of MBARI MBAYO. At the third level was his constant and participatory experience in the festivals and ceremonies of the orisa cults and kings in virtually all the towns and villages around Osogbo. As in his multi-layered connections discussed

earlier in this chapter, these involvements in the totality of the theatrical

life in Yoruba society around these years were mutually enriching. Cumulatively, they explain, or at least provide the immediate cultural context for, Ulli's own creative (and more discursive) writings of the period. Before going into that, one other circumstance that suddenly threw

many free hours on his lap is worth recording. In all these years Ulli took his job as Extramural seriously.

168

He

travelled

from

town

to town

Studies tutor very

and would

sometimes

hold

classes in two different towns in one night. Because he taught mostly in the evenings, he could devote the mornings to seeing his local friends,

watching festivals and participating in the little ose rituals of his olorisa friends. He did not write anything and did not even think of doing so.

Then the time came for Robert Gardiner to leave the department at Ibadan. The University thought that Ayo Ogunseye, who Gardiner recommended to succeed him, was too young, and much wrangling followed. Eventually

Ayo Ogunseye was appointed on a probationary basıs, and on condition that one professor from Leeds University be brought in. At his first meeting with the Extramural tutors and teachers, the professor demoted everybody.

Then he decreed that no class should be started unless there was a certain number of students on the register, and that once attendance fell below that

number, that class should be discontinued forthwith. Ulli ignored this particular set of directives, on the ground that it was better to have one or two

motivated

students

in a class

than

twenty

bored

ones.

Then

the

professor came up with another decree stipulating minimum number of hours and classes that each lecturer must do per week. Ulli was in fact doing far more than these, but he got fed up with these superfluous orders and stayed at the minimum requirements. So, suddenly, he had plenty of time to play with! Just about this time, the editor of Nigeria Magazine asked him to write about the things he was seeing, so he started writing. He would now travel around to watch a festival he had not seen before, or watch again those he had seen several times before, to write about them. He looked at and wrote (no interviews) about everything: local architecture, festivals, histories and myths, the arts. There were times when Nigeria Magazine carried two

articles of his in one issue. The immediate result was that he did a special issue for the journal on Wood Carvings From One Small Yoruba Town (1957), soon followed by another: A Year of Festivals In One Yoruba Town (1959).

Living a life so rich in theatre as he lived in Osogbo, it was natural that, eventually, he too would try his hand at writing plays, even though he had never at any time in his life before (or since) aspired to be a playwright.

Duro Ladipo never wrote down his plays but soon enough, this became necessary. A German television producer wanted to produce Oba Koso for ZDF television in Munich, so a complete script became necessary. First 169

there had to be a Yoruba text, which Duro wrote scene by scene at the end of the day. The next day, he and Ulli would spend the whole morning together struggling to render each scripted scene into English. It was a very challenging, but stimulating task, at the end of which they went on to Oba Moro and Oba Waja (another historical play about the aftermath of the death of an alaafin). MBARI Publications published all the three under the title Three Yoruba Plays in 1964. Exhausting as the project was, it only excited Ulli's own imagination and border-crossing instincts (1994; 63): Working on the English version of Duro's texts had been an experience of great intensity. For weeks I lived with the rhythm of his language and with the store of delightful surprises of the Yoruba imagery. I even dreamt about it, and when suddenly it came to an end, I felt like a sprinter who had been stopped abruptly in his tracks. My heart was still pounding so fast I started running again. The result was The Imprisonment of Obatala, a play written under the name Obotunde Ijimere. The play was of course not written solely out of the excess oxygen of translation that came with helping in the translation of Duro's plays. It also came as a result of Ulli's by now long familiarity with Yoruba history, myths, rituals and ceremonies; and especially with Yoruba religion. By now he had watched the Ajagemo festival (in which the priest of Obatala is taken prisoner and ransomed by the Timi, a Sango devotee and Oyo descendant) in Ede more than ten times. In Osogbo, Ulli watched Bandele and Ajofoyinbo, the two most accomplished elegun Sango in the area then, and close friends, year after year. Ulli was a friend of many Sango priests all around, and worshipped with them every ose. Thus, the play, which is about both deities, was in many ways a personal act of worship and homage, an artistic expression of his own religious feelings at the time. The Imprisonment of Obatala was not written for Duro Ladipo's theatre, but his next attempt, the adaptation of Hofmannsthal's Everyman, was. During the 1964 Berlin trip with Oba Koso, a German theatre agent had suggested that the company might undertake a wider tour of Germany. He

had one reservation though: Oba coupled with its power, might be provinces; so why not a double bill the audience for the intense and

170

Koso was too short in duration and, too hard to digest for Germans in the of one light-hearted comedy, to prepare severe tragedy Oba Koso? A Yoruba

version of Everyman

came to Ulli's mind instantly, and for good reasons

(1994; 63): This was a story familiar to every German through the version by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It could be easily translated into a contemporary Yoruba situation. The hedonistic lifestyle of Everyman had been adopted by an entirely new breed of Yoruba politicians and nouveau riche businessmen. And I could visualize how much a Yoruba audience would enjoy the poetic justice of such a play. The adaptation was first tried out at the third anniversary of MBARI MBAYO in March 1965, and Duro's Yoruba translation was published as Eda by the

club in 1965. Eda was almost as popular with Yoruba audiences as Oba

Koso, and it established permanently the reputation of one of his main actors, Lere Paimo, in the theatre: from then on, this actor was simply known as Eda. That Duro contented himself with the small part of God in the 'Prologue in Heaven' scene was proof of how quickly the company had

matured. It also showed how different Duro's company was from almost all the others, in which the founder-owner tended to dominate his actors on

and off stage. Eda

is of course

one

more

instance

in Ulli's multicultural,

or border-

crossing activities. It should be noted that it was also one of the rare instances in which cultural assimilation, via language, went in the other

direction. The prevalent activity had always been (and still 1s) for African

language texts to be translated into European ones. Since such texts are at

least partially assimilated into European languages (through academic study, for instance), the donor languages and literatures have always been the poorer for their gifts. The Yoruba play Eda is as much a part of Yoruba literature as D.O. Fagunwa's novels.

Ulli's last play for the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company in this period was Born With the Fire on His Head, a historical play on a relatively minor but very distressing moment in the tormented Yoruba society of the nineteenth century. The reigning Alaafin then had promulgated a law to check slavery, especially the selling of friends and family members. However, one of his own princes had come to Apomu, a market town on the trade route to Ijebu and the coast, and sold his best friend. Apprehended, the prince was duly punished by the baale of Apomu. When this prince later became the alaafin, he sent for the head of the baale who, he said, had so humiliated

171

him long ago. But Apomu was not under Oyo but Ife, so the poor baale sought protection from the Ooni of Ife from whom, after all, he had got the orders not to spare any apprehended slave dealers. However, the Ooni was afraid of the power of the Alaafin, so he abandoned the baale and his town to the terrible retributive anger of the Oyo military might. To save his town from certain destruction, the baale took his own life, and his head was taken to Oyo. Written in December 1965 when political treacheries, private betrayals and a local civil war were once again tearing Yoruba society apart, the play was politically relevant without being topical. The author himself had this in mind, as he summarily stated in the introduction (1967; xvii) to the published English version: . Ijimere's play ventures an interpretation of Yoruba history, according to which the Oyo empire collapsed not so much because of the pressure of the Fulani from outside, but rather because of its internal corruption and degeneration, as symbolized by Alafin Aole. This, indeed, was another major characteristic of the which Ulli's membership helped to bestow on it, and from all the other theatres: cultural expressions first plays were also political in the deeper sense in which are political, without descending into propaganda.

Duro Ladipo Theatre, which distinguished it and foremost, all the truly national theatres

In any case, Duro Ladipo had enough immediate political minefields to negotiate his way through around this time. His rise to fame coincided with the period when the 'troubles' in the Western Region reached its peak. Anarchy descended on the land; the travelling theatres found it hazardous to travel. Then, Hubert Ogunde produced his thoroughly political play which directly intervened in the crisis, and rightly so. Such was the damage this play did to the party in power then in the West that Hubert Ogunde was officially banned from performing anywhere in the region, thus laying the

sinister precedence of political censorship in Nigeria.

The

party's

strategists

and propagandists

notorious honour, though.

One night some

were

not satisfied with this

fellows in a black limousine

paid Duro Ladipo a visit. They gave him the script of a play in praise of Chief Akintola and his Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), followed by very precise instructions: he should take the play on tour of the region for the two months preceding the federal elections; two TV 172

performances would also be arranged and at the end he would be paid a lump sum of four thousand pounds (an astronomical sum in those days)! This piece of propaganda was to counter the truly extensive damage that Hubert Ogunde had done with his play Yoruba Ronu (a play about a saintly Yoruba oba who is betrayed by his trusted courtiers and who suffers very much in consequence. He triumphs in the end. Immensely popular at the time and even turned into a photoplay, this allegorical propaganda play was clearly about Chief Obafemi Awolowo, his 'betrayal' by fellow party members, and eventual imprisonment). The philistinism and open contempt for artists which the offer implied was bad enough, but it was also a trap that carried grave danger. If Duro Ladipo agreed, he would become an instant target of Action Group's supporters, who already had more than enough reasons to be violently intolerant of any further act of betrayal from any quarters. If he did not, the government's party thugs would be after him. Ulli was out of town when this cup of hemlock was thrust in his friend's hands. By the time he returned to Osogbo Duro was in great distress. Duro of course did not want to produce a play in

support of anybody; in his political naiveté he had hoped that by not hobnobbing with politicians, or producing plays that took sides in the conflict, he would be seen to be above politics and left strictly alone. He did not realize that his prestige was by then too high for politicians not to want to align him on their side. But what was he to do now? Ulli supported his friend and said that since he was already in trouble either

way, he might as well do the right thing by not producing any play. He further advised that Duro should either disperse his company and

reconvene it after the elections two months later, or arrange a highly visible

tour. If he did the first, he could tell the sinister fellows that he no longer had a company; if the second, harming him while on a highly publicized tour would only further damage NNDP

and the government. Duro Ladipo

took the second alternative but the people in the black car kept coming back. Finally, Ulli took a trouble-shooting trip to the Premier's home town Ogbomoso and sought private audience with him. Playing on his wellknown love of Yoruba language and admiration for Duro Ladipo, Ulli told the Premier that there were at least two dozen other groups who could produce the political play, whereas only one playwright could achieve the 173

greatness of Oba Koso; Duro Ladipo was an asset too valuable for the entire Yoruba people to be wasted on such a campaign. Moreover, Ulli argued, such a play might not achieve the desired results but would certainly succeed in ruining Duro Ladipo in the process. Ulli also told the Premier that should anything happen to Duro, he would let the whole world know who to hold responsible. Chief Akintola appeared genuinely shocked and promised to put a stop to the harassment. He did: from then on no more was seen of the black limousine. There was another, even more dangerous situation in store for Duro Ladipo, however. When the coup happened on January 15, 1966, mobs roamed the streets of Osogbo seeking revenge for the past years of political injustice, humiliation and misrule. Naturally, several of such gangs were out to get personal enemies, who were then accused of having belonged to, or sympathized with, S.L. Akintola and his hated NNDP. Under this cover, some thugs in rival theatre groups accused Duro Ladipo of having been, if not exactly amember, at least a sympathizer and beneficiary. They deduced this from two circumstantial facts. The oba of Otan-Aiyegbaju, Oba Gilbert Fawole, was an old classmate and friend of Duro's and was frequently involved in the activities of MBARI MBAYO Club. A tall and impressive man who spoke both English and Yoruba very eloquently, he always lent royal dignity to activities in the club. But this oba was an NNDP man while the rest of the town were staunch supporters of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the Action Group. On one occasion the oba invited Duro and his company to give a 'Command Performance' of Oba Koso in his palace. It turned out that the audience consisted only of Mrs Akintola, other high ranking NNDP members and thugs, and government officials. The audience paid little attention to the performance and chatted loudly throughout. The thugs and bodyguards too, taking their cue from their masters, drank noisily in the back rows. Duro had been manipulated into giving 'support' for the party. Ulli and Georgina

realized this and pointedly walked out, but Duro had to play the game to the end. By November

1965 the people of Otan-Ayegbaju had had enough of oba

Gilbert Fawole, for they were sure that he had helped in the blatant and cynical rigging of the elections into the Western Region House of Parliament. The oba had to go into exile, but before leaving, he set fire to 174

his own palace (thus also destroying the beautiful mural which Georgina and the Osogbo artists had spent months painting on the palace walls). When the government tried to reinstate him, the people fired dane guns at

the police who had escorted him back, whereupon they wisely took to their farms immediately. When the police returned with reinforcement a couple of days later, they met a ghost town, roamed only by stray dogs and other

abandoned domestic animals. That was how Otan-Ayegbaju remained from November 1965 to January 15, 1966. Then, S.L. Akintola himself, who was a genuine lover of Yoruba culture and an excellent user of the language, had consistently and publicly commended Duro Ladipo's theatre, saying that people should go and watch Oba Koso to learn Yoruba. From all these, it was (falsely) concluded that

Duro Ladipo must be a member of the much despised NNDP. Thugs and

bodyguards of rival theatre companies in Osogbo even claimed that he had used his party connections to get selected for the Commonwealth Festival,

that it was Chief Akintola himself who had sponsored his trips abroad. Now, on the night of January 15, 1966, when Akintola and his party had fallen, the mobs in Osogbo broke out to finish what the soldiers had started at dawn, and Duro Ladipo was on their list. Jimoh Buraimoh, a member of

the theatre company, happened to be in a petrol station where he overheard

Duro's name mentioned as next on the list of those whose houses were to be torched. He ran back to Duro's house and, with some other people and

the actor David

James,

stood

guard

all night around

the compound,

successfully fending off the arsonists. Duro himself spent the longest night

of his life upright in a nearby cocoa-yam farm. He had to be buying off the thugs with ever larger sums of money for the next couple of days.

Ulli and Georgina had been spending some days in Offa when the soldiers struck. When they returned, they found their friend distraught and already at his wit's end. Ulli decided the best thing was for Duro to come out of hiding and go around town and be seen by everybody. So together they drove around town, making themselves ostentatiously conspicuous

everywhere. They also went to see important people who could control the thugs. Soon enough, the threat was over. Ulli's last cooperative dramatic venture with Duro Ladipo was in 1972, when he was the Director of the University of Ife Institute of African

175

Studies. He got Duro and his company invited to Ife to compose, rehearse and present a play for the Fifth Ife Festival of the Arts (November 27 to December 8, 1972). Duro himself chose Ulli's Woyengi, a dramatic adaptation of an Ijaw myth which Gabriel Okara had published in Black Orpheus number 2. Oluweri, the title which Duro gave his own play, was subsequently performed in other places in Nigeria and abroad. Thus, in this cycle of multi- and interculturalism, a story had passed from Ijaw into English and then into Yoruba. It was a typical cycle almost from the start of Duro's company: Ulli would translate a German play into English which Duro would translate into Yoruba, then adapt for the stage, television or radio. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan der Weise and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Doppelgdnger are two notable examples of this. In Moremi, another of Duro's famous plays, Igbo music and dance from Agbor were brought in, to juxtapose with Yoruba music and dances, and to merge in the play's last reconciliation scene. Produced in 1966 when the January coup had sharpened the ethnic tensions that were always a part of the Nigerian polity, the multicultural music was also meant to convey the play's political message of reconciliation on another level. By 1965, Ulli had become a public figure in Nigeria and a famous one worldwide. He (with Georgina and Susanne) had entered local folklore and even into the African novel, as Emil in Ezekiel Mphahlele's The Wanderers. Journalists (including Colin Legum, who would later write one of the first and best books on the Nigerian civil war) came by the score from Europe, America and Australia to do interviews and write about the momentous events happening in Osogbo. The town itself had suddenly become a mecca to which people came on cultural pilgrimage. People from embassies in Lagos; the Goethe Institute and other cultural institutes; American Peace Corps members; writers visiting Nigeria; everybody came. There were also those who drove up every weekend and others who,

travelling from one corner of the country to another, made a detour to the town. The famous Osun festival, held in the wet month of August every year, was also another occasion for MBARI MBAYO club and the Beiers to be inundated with visitors. During the MBARI MBAYO anniversary in 1966,

the Rest House and all hotels in town were overbooked. The Beiers' own big, three-storey house at 41 Ibokun Road was so full that ambassadors

176

slept in their cars on the narrow, dusty street in front! Fast becoming an icon and a tourist attraction, Ulli began to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was time to leave? Ulli started thinking that perhaps,

too, Duro

Ladipo's theatre and the

Osogbo art movement needed to be on their own. Both had been gotten off the ground in various ways and Ulli thought they now needed to mature by

being on their own: it would be wrong, he felt, for him to continue being their agents. Then, both the theatre and the art experiment had succeeded

beyond even Ulli's and Georgina's own imaginations. Awed by the extent

of the successes, they were wondering whether both would stand without

them. Would Duro Ladipo's theatre continue to grow? Would the young

artists carry on and mature? The more Ulli and Georgina worried about these questions, the more they realized that it was necessary to put some distance between themselves and these achievements in order to gain a proper perspective on them. That, too, was the only way they could get answers to the questions. They had no doubts at all about the theatre and the art movement surviving their departure, but confirmation of what was only a feeling was necessary. At any rate, it was time to give them room. There was also a personal element to these issues. Ulli had now been in

Nigeria for sixteen years, during which his life had radically changed in ways he had not anticipated at all. He also needed a perspective on these

happy changes: he needed to go away and test what he had gained from the Yoruba

society against another where things were

different. He did not

know which other society it would be; but he knew it would not be Europe.

Then the massacres in Northern Nigeria started. Although this did not create for Ulli a feeling of the need to get away, it did create a general feeling of helplessness. A situation had arisen in which he, a foreigner, could only fold his arms and watch, unable to play the role he would have liked to. All these thoughts and feelings were in the air when he and Georgina went on vacation to London in July of 1966. In London, Georgina saw by sheer chance an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement asking for a lecturer in New English Literatures from developing

countries

at the

newly

created

University

of Papua

New

Guinea. She drew Ulli's attention to it but Ulli was dubious. The matter was discussed with a friend who said: "If you don't take the position, who else

177

can?"

So

Ulli

wrote,

asking

for

more

information.

Frank

Johnson,

the

professor of English in the University, phoned back (Ulli and Georgina were initially amazed that Papua New Guniea had a telephone service): yes, he wanted the course very much and was excited that Ulli was interested, because Ulli's magazine Black Orpheus had stimulated the idea in the first place; but sorry, he could not offer him a sufficiently senior position. The University could not afford two professorial positions in any department. In all these years members of the University community in Ibadan had been regular visitors at MBARI Club Ibadan and also MBARI MBAYO Osogbo, but the university authority did not quite approve of Ulli's activities. Unable to stop him, it had shown its disapproval by finding one flimsy excuse after another for not promoting him. From 1950 to 1966, he remained Lecturer. Finally, earlier in the year, and after three successive attempts by Ayo Ogunseye, he had been promoted from Lecturer straight to Associate Professor. Was he now to give that up so soon, in exchange for a lower position in this distant place? The question did not agitate Ulli's mind for long though and, with Georgina's encouragement, he wrote back to Professor Frank Johnson. In the letter he said that he did not care for the rank, provided he would be free to design the course and teach it the way he wanted. Accompanying the letter was his simple proposal. After the preliminary year, the students would go home and collect oral literature of their culture which, plus oral materials from Africa and Asia, would form the basis of first year work. In the second year, new writings in English from Africa would be studied. Third year would be devoted to New English literatures from India, Papua New Guinea, and Australian writings on the Aborigines. There would also be a course on Modern Western Literature, to show what the contemporary world that Papuans and New Guineans were being pulled into was like. In the last year, each student would specialize in whatever literature he wished, and constitute a class. Frank Johnson accepted the proposal and

Ulli followed it throughout the period he spent in the Department English, University of Papua New Guinea.

of

After their vacation Ulli and Georgina returned to Nigeria and the inevitable leavetakings started. They would have liked to leave quietly, but this was impossible in Nigeria. One send-off party or ceremony followed 178

another,

all of which

made

the departure

increasingly

more

agonizing.

There was a big party at MBARI Club Ibadan, followed by an even bigger one in the town. Ayo Ogunseye also had one, at which he said: "Everybody is replaceable, but Ulli here is not." Tunji Oyelana and Segun Sofowote organized a wonderful evening of songs and drama sketches. Segun Olusola followed this up in Lagos with another of drama in which Theatre

Express performed. The most emotional of the leavetakings was with Duro Ladipo. He was on tour and Ulli and Georgina went to meet him in Ilorin. After the play at Niger Hotel, Ilorin, everybody settled down in the hotel's

restaurant, food and drinks were ordered. Nobody ate or drank, nobody

talked. Finally everybody stood up, embraced, and Ulli and Georgina drove

back to Osogbo in the night. The most peculiar was with Mr Ovia Idah. Ulli and Georgina had not told him at all that they were leaving. In these rounds of leave-takings they had

gone to Ibadan, to spend the night in Frank Speed's house. As they drove

into the compound, there was Mr Idah waiting for them. He had known, or

felt, that they were leaving and so had driven all the way from Benin, straight to Frank Speed's house in Ibadan. Nobody had told him anything,

least of all that they would be in Ibadan that night. Stranger still, he also

knew that Georgina was pregnant and so had come to pray for the baby too! In these last weeks, the emotional strains of goodbyes were becoming

almost unbearable. Georgina and Ulli went round to see all the obas who were their friends: Ooni Aderemi, Timi Laoye, the Olokuku, the Elerin, the Olufon, the Orangun of Ila, the Elejigbo, and others. Each visit was more emotional

than the one before it. Being a traditional chief, Ulli got the gifts reserved for royalty and aristocracy: segi (royal beads); efu or sanyan gowns. All the

Sango people from Ila to Ejigbo came together at Ilobu to perform an ebo for him. But the most poignant and priceless gift Ulli got came after he had left. Ulli was in faraway Papua New Guinea when one of his oba friends

died. He called his oldest son to his deathbed and whispered to him that, as soon as he was dead and his ori ritually destroyed, the ile-ori should be immediately removed and hidden, to be given to Ulli whenever he came back. The dying oba was sure that the Christians and Muslims who were already taking over his town would simply destroy that most sacred icon of the kingship institution; but he was also sure that Ulli would be back. Sure 179

enough, Ulli returned in 1971, when this most precious of gifts was handed over to him.

Georgina and Ulli left Nigeria by boat in December of 1966. As the boat was leaving the harbour, they were on deck, looking at the receding city of Lagos. Suddenly, a tiny fishing canoe appeared, the paddler rowing very hard towards them. Its passenger was standing, waving very frantically at Ulli and Georgina. When the canoe got close enough, it was Twins SevenSeven. Twins always had his own special, dramatic way of doing things. The couple spent six months in London, before making their way to Papua New Guinea in 1967. The six months were a very busy time for it was as if, in leaving Nigeria, Georgina and Ulli brought as much of the country as they could in tow. Muraina Oyelami and Twins Seven-Seven came in quick succession, with the latter having an exhibition at the University of Sussex. It was also during this period that Theatre Express came to play at the Traverse Art Theatre and Gallery in Edinburgh. There Muraina Oyelami and Akin Euba met for the first time and when both came down to London, Ulli arranged a joint performance for them in the house of a wealthy lady. The cooperation would lead to Muraina taking a job at the University of Ife to teach Yoruba percussions, and to his later writing a book on the subject. Chinua Achebe also visited. Ulli himself wrote Contemporary Art in Africa. The baby, Daniel Sebastian Tokunbo Beier, arrived. Back in Nigeria, the most horrendous round of Igbo massacres started in Northern Nigeria.

NOTES l. Odu is the collective name for the sixteen main divisions of /fa divinatory poetry. As Orunmila, the deity of this system is the god of knowledge and wisdom, the name was very appropriate. 2. Yoruba travelling theatre is the name by which the dominant form of theatre in Yoruba society from the 1940s to the 1980s is known: the numerous groups were constantly on the road. 3. James Gibbs produced The Fallto wide acclaim in Ghana, several years later. 4. "Yoruba Folk Operas", African Music vol.I no.1 (1954), pp.32-34

180

5. See especially M.J.C. Echeruo, Victorian Lagos, London: Macmillan, 1977; Joel Adedeji, The Alarinjo Theatre: A Study of Yoruba Theatrical Art from its Earliest Beginnings to the Present Times. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Ibadan; 1969; 'Biodun Jeyifo, The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria, Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1984; and Ebun Clark, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of the Nigeria Theatre, O.U.P., 1979 6. quoted in LA. Akinjogbin,

"Duro Ladipo (1931-1978):

A Tribute", Daily

Times, Nigeria (Sat., Feb. 2, 1991), p.8

7. Revd. Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, Lagos: C.S.S. Bookshops; first pub. 1921 8. I thank Mr

Akinyanju

of the Dept.

of Theatre Arts, Obafemi

Awolowo

University, Ile-Ife, who was himself a founding member of the society, for the

information contained in this paragraph and for the article referred to in footnote 6 above.

181

CHAPTER VI IWALEWA

- IFE, 1971-1974; BAYREUTH,

1981-1996

Iwalewa — character is beauty. Ulli Beier has given the city of Bayreuth more character, more beauty. Janos Riesz

Ulli returned to Nigeria in 1971, with his family, to take up the position of Director, Institute of African Studies, University of Ife. He had been away for four short years, but a very long and turbulent period in the history of

Nigeria.

So much

had happened

and so much

changed;

all obeying a

political logic of their own and all following in the wake of the January 1966 military coup that was meant to bring stability and order. A thirtymonth civil war had been fought in which about a million perished. After

it, the social character and habits of the nation suffered a sea change perhaps even more traumatic than the reconfiguration of political power

and its relocation. The old regions had been abolished and states created

instead, ostensibly to diffuse the former four monolithic centres of power;

but in reality it was the end of the federal arrangement that the country had

inherited from colonial rule. It was the beginning of a unitary order in which all civil, economic and political powers would gradually but inexorably be concentrated in one single government, held in the palms of whoever happened to be personifying it at any time since.

Long after the war, soldiers continued to be the lords of the land. While they triumphantly bestrode the land and held the people in thrall, former politicians

and

university

professors

trod

gingerly.

Everybody

tried to

secondguess or anticipate what the rulers’ response would be to any particular policy or decision being considered, or generally to please them and do their bidding. After all, the soldiers had proved their credentials by

winning the war and thereby keeping Nigeria one: 'tribalism' had been the bane of the first republic, had led the nation to the brink of fragmentation

and into the cauldron of a civil war; but for the self-sacrificing patriotism of the army, there would have been no Nigeria any more. This was the new

political wisdom and, ın gratitude, everybody and every institution believed

and practiced it. Where before the civil war Nigerians from different tribes

had

intermixed

spontaneously,

based

on

individual

merits

and personal

attractions, the unity of the nation and its peoples was now being decreed

through various kinds of social and political engineering. This would gradually lead to the creation of a huge bureaucracy which all but replaced politics as the modus vivendi and modus operandi of the nation. During their "exile" in Papua New Guinea, Ulli and Georgina had been extremely worried about the fate of their friends who were caught in the Biafran war. Now they were able to celebrate many happy reunions. They visited Onuora Nzekwu, editor of Nigeria Magazine before the civil war. This was an especially happy visit for both families. The last time Ulli and Georgina saw Onuora was in September 1966 in Lagos, when they had just arrived on a flight from Rome and gone to see him in his office. Onuora should have died later that same day. Revenge killings of Igbo army officers had started and he, though not a soldier, was on the list. The soldiers assigned to that particular task mistook the National Museum for the offices of Nigeria Magazine, where they went to ask for "the editor". K.C. Murray, director of the museum then, got a phone call through to Onuora who escaped through the backdoor, just one step ahead of the soldiers. He slept in the bush that night. So the reunion now, four years and a civil war later, was very emotional. While they were having a meal, Onuora's wife came in and Georgina commented to her: "It must have been hard for you to feed your children during the war." The reply was prompt: "Only a lazy woman could not feed her children then." She went on to describe how she and numerous other women had braved the front lines, trading with civilians on the federal side and bringing back salt to sell in the Biafran enclave. When Georgina again

wondered whether that would not have meant certain death sentence if caught, she explained that such trading was common knowledge even at the

highest levels on both sides. Chinua Achebe related an amusing anecdote. His family was constantly on the move, as one Biafran town after another fell. Each time they moved, the children would observe: "Daddy, you must be very rich: we have so many houses."

The first step towards Ulli's return was taken in March 1970, when Michael Crowder, then the Director of the Institute of African Studies at Ife 184

University, invited him for a conference. During the brief visit, Ulli borrowed his little old car from Theatre Express and drove to Nsukka to see Chinua Achebe and other Igbo friends who had survived the war. He marvelled at how quickly academic life returned to the university there. The Federal Government had not wanted it to reopen so quickly, but the

students moved in, dragging the lecturers in tow. They cleared the lecture rooms of broken glass and rubble, mended windows and doors as best they could, sat on the floors and demanded lectures. The lecturers for their part went without pay for the first few months. In the end, the enthusiasm embarrassed Lagos into quick action. Ulli saw determination and confidence on every face. "We did not lose the war," he heard everywhere he went on the campus and in town, "for now

we know our capabilities." It did not last. The civil war had been fought partly

over the vast petroleum

reserves

that Nigeria

had,

and

after its

conclusion crude oil gushed, creating fabulous wealth. Before long, the nation was drowning, literally and figuratively, in unimaginable and unmanageable affluence. Physical development replaced human development, complacency set in. Soon enough, things reverted to the old ways. Worse, within a decade after the civil war ended, the political as well as social climate was more baleful than before it. Ulli

returned

to Ile-Ife

him

at the University

and

then,

towards

the

end

of the

conference,

Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, Vice Chancellor of the University of Ife, called on Guest House.

After the pleasantries

Oluwasanmi,

never a man to beat about the bush, came straight to the purpose of his visit: "Michael Crowder is leaving, you know," he said, "and I would like you to come back and take over the Institute."

It was an awkward time for such a proposition for Ulli. At the University of Papua New Guinea the courses in New English Literatures he had started were very successful but still needed to be consolidated. He was generally in a good situation, taught what he liked and in the way he liked. He also had much free time for the other things he really wanted to do, like working

on the biographies

of some

eminent

New

Guineans,

adapting

plays for the university theatre company, and editing the Papua Pocket Poets and the literary magazine Kovave.

Even more important, Georgina

had begun an art movement with some Papua New Guineans who lived with them. She had started a workshop modestly in a shed on their own 185

premises which the University, upon seeing how successful it was becoming, had officially recognized and designated Centre for New Guinean Cultures. The University had even started setting the place up properly: bigger and very good studios were going up; more tools for the

artists were coming.

Ulli himself had been told he could become

director of the Centre if he so wished, thrown in. All these meant that he had at Ibadan and Osogbo, but now all in and more to come, how could they just

the

with the promise of a new building a chance to repeat what he had done one place. With all these going on up and leave?

Still, the temptations to consider Hezekiah Oluwasanmi's offer and return to Nigeria were strong, backed up by equally compelling reasons. First, Ulli actually had been offered the job before. When the University of Ife was started in 1961/62, Professor Ajose, its first Vice Chancellor, had come to him saying that the University wanted to start its own Institute of African Studies and would very much like him to be its first director. Ulli asked Professor Ajose to give him time to consider the kind of institute he would like to have, so that the University in turn could decide if it liked his ideas and had the resources for them. The Vice Chancellor wanted an immediate answer, however: "No, no, just tell me now you will do it," he insisted, "and when we have our first meeting all the professors will sit together and work out how to get the money." Ulli replied that that was not his style of working. He was hesitant to accept the offer for many other reasons besides. The two MBARIS then were more important to him than any Institute. His Extramural Studies job gave him much fun and plenty of free time to do other things, travel around and see his friends the olorisa and obas. An administrative job as director would obviously drastically

reduce all that free time.

Professor Ajose kept coming back and finally inadvertently gave Ulli a good reason to turn down the offer. To prompt Ulli into accepting the offer immediately, he said that Saburi Biobaku was pressing for the job, but that

the University committee did not want him; that if Ulli would not accept the offer, the committee would have no choice but to give it to him. Well,

Ulli thought he could not possibly take up the job under such circumstances: keeping out Biobaku, his co-editor of the magazine Odu, was not a good reason for offering him the position. Now almost ten years later, he was being offered the same job again; this time he felt reluctant to 186

refuse.

Moreover,

the man

offering

it was

somebody

Ulli felt strongly

tempted to work with. There were other sentimental reasons why he thought he should take up the position. Wherever he went during that visit, and especially at the University Staff Club, people kept telling him: You started African Studies

here in Nigeria, we want you back. This even though there were at least two dozen Nigerians as qualified or capable as he was. Finally, Ulli too started thinking to himself: "This opportunity may never arise again.

Another generation of Nigerians will grow up who will not know who I am

and who will feel no such sentimental ties. More important," he also added, "I want my children to know the country that had this decisive impact on my life. It would not be right if they grew up without knowing it." Ulli did not make up his mind until after he had returned to Papua New Guinea. When he went to tell the Vice Chancellor of his decision, he used

the argument Guinea

about his children. The Vice Chancellor of Papua New

University

would

of course

not

hear

of it, and

he

went

to

extraordinary lengths to make Ulli stay, including the highly irregular step of writing two letters. It could not be helped, however. Ulli himself assisted in finding a suitable replacement before he left.

In the midst of it all, while at a meeting of the Aboriginal Arts Board in Australia, Dr Battersby, the Director of the Australia Council in Sydney, advised Ulli not to return to Nigeria. When he asked why, she said she had heard from a Nigerian official that his friendship with Chinua Achebe and many other Igbo writers was well known and that might put him in trouble. She went further to say that if Ulli needed a job, she could offer him one in the Council. Ulli thanked the lady for her solicitousness but said that he felt

he owed it to himself and his children to go to Nigeria. Then, flippantly, he

added: "I will still go even if I'll end up in jail there." Several months later, when Ulli and his family were already settled in Ile-Ife, an article appeared in an Australian newspaper saying that he and his entire family had been

put in jail! Letters from worried friends in Australia and Papua New

Guinea started arriving in Lagos, all pleading for their release! Ekpo Eyo,

the Director of the National Museum in Lagos, received two telegrams and had to undertake the business of reassuring such friends that Ulli and family were free, alive and well.

187

The Beiers returned to Nigeria in September of 1971, and Ulli assumed the position of Director, Institute of African Studies, University of Ife. Unlike the University College at Ibadan that he came to twenty one years earlier, Ife was not a colonial establishment. Though many on the academic staff were inevitably Europeans, there were also many Nigerians. The Vice Chancellor himself was a very dynamic Nigerian as much respected for his academic excellence as for his personal integrity and dynamism. The dynamism, integrity and political ideology of the Action Group (under Chief Obafemi Awolowo), which had established it a decade earlier, had rubbed off on its general tone and character. Its more politically inclined or active members of faculty had also been members of the party. Although party politics had been snuffed out effectively in 1966, these academics were still around to give every major decision one kind of political coloration or another. In other words, where the University College Ibadan insulated itself from national politics, the University of Ife was from the beginning a part of the politics in and of Yoruba society, even under military rule. Ulli's own personal life too could not be a repeat of the earlier sixteen

years. He was now in an administrative position and therefore had little of the free time he had had earlier as Regional Tutor in the Extramural Studies department of the University of Ibadan. He still maintained his contact with tradition and its people, but he now had to plan and make trips in-between administrative chores in the University. Many of his old friends had died: oba Moses Oyinlola the Olokuku of Okuku, Iya Sango of Ede, Akodu the high priest of Erinle in Ilobu, the Elejigbo of Ejigbo. Those still alive were getting older and sadder. The war and all its aftermath, but especially the

'oil boom’, had accelerated the pace of change even more than any cultural

liberal or conservative could have foreseen. Already losing his community by the middle of the 1960s, an orisa priest by the 1970s had rapidly become a relic of the not-too-distant past.

The institute that Ulli came to head was more or less like any other little business set-up. It was full of graduate students fighting for research grants, quarrelling among themselves and extremely jealous of each other. It also contained its own fair share of that type of people found in all such set-ups:

those who substitute grumbling for hard work and build an entire career on it. However, on the whole Ulli had very reliable, quiet scholars like Wande 188

Abimbola, Sope Oyelaran, Rowland Abiodun and Peter Garlake to work with. They went about their business quietly and efficiently. There were also the creative people like Ola Rotimi, Frank Speed, Akin Euba, Peggy Harper ("a difficult but productive prima donna"), Ola Balogun ("who would ask for money to make several films at once") and R.I. Ibigbami. Some members of his staff became lifelong friends: Rowland Abiodun became a regular visitor at IWALEWA-Haus and Akin Euba was a staff of

the house for several years. His immediate office staff too, Olu Akomolafe

and Mrs Sampson, were wonderful and loyal all the way. They absorbed all

the little nuisances and provided a cheerful, harmonious work environment. Everybody did his own separate research or work, but there was an annual festival which involved all. Started by Michael Crowder, it became a big annual event under Ulli. The Institute's theatre company always produced a play, a dance drama, and a concert. Theatre companies and dance groups

were also invited from outside. Usually there was a group from the eastern

parts, and there would be several art exhibitions. The annual festival had

the full support of the Vice Chancellor. Following on his earlier connection

with Yoruba obas and his belief in their continuing relevance as custodians of culture, Ulli involved the Ooni of Ife in the activities of the Institute.

Ooni Adesoji Aderemi was quite old then and could not attend all the events, but he supported them wholeheartedly. He always gave money, sometimes in excess of one thousand pounds.

Ulli had always believed that creativity, especially in the arts, should never come under any form of institutionalization or bureaucracy. When first MBARI Club Ibadan and later MBARI MBAYO Osogbo came into existence,

Ulli could have sought some funding from government but refused to for two reasons: his belief that government government meddling and control; and

money is always followed by that artists need one kind of

incentive or another to be fully productive — that a salaried artist is no artist but just another complacent public servant who will sooner or later go to seed. Thus, his first major reorganization as director of the Institute was to place the theatre company on a semi-commercial basis.

He bought a bus for the company, equipped it with a generator, lighting facilities, costumes, and a float. In other words, he turned the university's

theatre company into a travelling theatre. The institute would finance any new production, thereafter, let the company take it to the road to earn its 189

salary. The private travelling theatre company he co-started in 1962 had thrived well into the 1970s, so why should not this one? Experience on the road could only help the versatility and professionalism of the actors; in any case, the institute already had full-time directors of Drama, Music and Choreography. The arrangement worked well: the Unife Theatre Company was perhaps the most vibrant and best known of all university theatre companies in Nigeria in the 1970s. However, not long after Ulli left in 1974, the actors became fully salaried and the inevitable happened. Whenever he came visiting thereafter, people would complain to him at the university staff club that nothing happened anymore in the Institute. Then, not long after his departure, there were departmental reconstitutions and the Institute was abolished. Ori Olokun was the centre of the Institute's activities; like MBARI Club at Ibadan and MBARI MBAYO at Osogbo, it too was located in the town, not on the isolated and distant university campus. The townspeople of Ile-Ife felt it was sited there for their own benefit as well, so they felt free to come in and watch — and sometimes participate in — its activities. There the university theatre company always played to a full house; other theatre companies made use of it too! Ulli also had a chance to help his friend Duro Ladipo again and it was during this time that he produced the play Oluweri. Duro and his company came to the campus for a month on a sort of artist-in-residence programme, translated Ulli's drama version of the jaw myth 'Woyengi' into Yoruba, adapted and rehearsed his play, and performed it at the fifth annual arts festival of the Institute. Then the company took it on tour of Nigeria and overseas. Again, as in MBARI Club a decade earlier, the exhibitions were Ulli's own special preserve. His connections were now worldwide and, as well as exhibiting works by Nigerian artists, he could now add those from Papua New Guinea, Australian Aboriginal culture, India, and many other parts of the non-Western world. The exhibitions were quite stimulating, people bought things and the gallery functioned well. In his choice of which artists to exhibit, Ulli deliberately emphasized the non-Western world for a

reason.

Cultural

exchange

in ‘third world’

countries

had always

been

restricted to that between a country and its former colonial rulers, hardly ever between one ex-colony and another. So by concentrating on non-

Western arts for his exhibitions at Ori Olokun, Ulli hoped to widen the 190

local cultural horizon beyond the Western world. With the help of hıs friend Pierre Hutton, the Australian Ambassador to Nigeria, Ulli was able to acquaint Nigerians for the first time with the culture of Australian

Aboriginals. He staged a three-day film festival of their arts and rituals. Ulli and the ambassador also arranged a tour of Nigerian universities by the Aboriginal didgeridoo player George Guinungitch. This ancient instrument was heard for the first time in Africa. As always, Ulli and Georgina worked together as a team, complementing

and

stimulating

Georgina's

however,

each

important

other.

In all previous

contributions

the Vice Chancellor

were

and subsequent

unofficial

insisted on employing

and

situations

unpaid.

Now,

her and actually

provided her with a grant to carry out her activities. He was a great admirer of her work both as an artist and a teacher, and wanted this to be officially recognized.

One major project Ulli and Georgina carried out jointly was the creation of a museum

of Yoruba pottery in Ile-Ife. They had both noticed that in the

famous museum of Nigerian pottery in Jos, created by Sylvia Leith-Ross,

Yoruba works were poorly represented. Now they spent many weekends travelling around Yoruba country collecting pots: black Ilorin casseroles and red ones from Ekiti; huge, big-bellied palm oil containers with very

small openings at the top; decanters for palm wine and pito from Akoko; the heavily sculptured ones made for the shrines of Sango enormous ‘frying pans' for roasting gari from Ishan Ekiti; dyeing pots; medicine pots; and more.

and Erinle; water pots;

The most spectacular ones came from Ogbomoso: big things with wide open mouths and fantastically decorated with reliefs, used by women for

keeping their trousseau. Because the cloths were almost always indigodyed, each time one was taken out or returned it rubbed against the mouth

of the pot. With such repeated rubbings, and after decades, the mouths of the pots

acquired

an incredible black sheen that was

truly beautiful to

behold. Ulli also employed Mr Ibigbami, who had specialized in pottery at University of Nigeria Nsukka, to take care of the Institute. Mr Ibigbami invited potters from different teach students in the institute. The potters (all different techniques together and worked with students to develop even new ones. Pottery became

pottery section of the parts of Yorubaland to women) brought their Mr Ibigbami and the a strong component of 19]

the Fine Arts programme of the included works by students.

Institute

then

and

the pottery

house

As the collection grew, the problem of where to house it arose. The Federal Department of Antiquities had an old "upstair" house in Ita Yemo that had served as a tool shed for the archaeologists who had been digging up the Ita Yemo grove. Now that it served little purpose, Ulli persuaded Ekpo Eyo, the Director of the Lagos Museum, to let him convert the old building into a pottery museum. With their own money Ulli and Georgina renovated and restructured the house. They took out the windows, built small verandahs in the front and back and Georgina designed new doors. The rooms were painted white and then furnished with simple tables covered with white kijipa, to display the pots on. All in all, a beautiful building with open arches was created. The building stood on an attractive piece of ground surrounded by large trees. To the left was a shed that covered a piece of ancient Ife pavement. On the right was an open space which Ulli and Georgina turned into a sitting area. They paved the area with bricks, then commissioned the Catholic mission's carpentry workshop in Inisa, run by their friend Brother George, for some heavy tables and stools that could withstand any weather. These were then placed in the open space for visitors to sit and relax. Some thirty or forty metres away, but hidden by a thick grove, was the Universal Hotel, renowned for its bush meat and pounded yam. So visitors to the pottery museum could sit outside and order delicious meals. Through the MBARI Club of a decade earlier, Ulli and Soyinka had caused a popularization of adire. Although this had given that traditional craft and trade some considerable boost then, it could not in the long run protect it from the flood of imported materials and the introduction of chemical dyes. Moreover, the taste of Yoruba society ladies had become more vulgar: the nouveau riche wanted to wear velvet and lace, not cheap cotton; the lesser

rich struggled breathlessly in constant imitation. Like many other women's crafts in Yoruba society, adire making was declining.

Georgina felt that the best way to keep the al’adire and al’aro in business would be to adapt to the changing circumstances. She trained a young girl, Rebecca Ademola, in the production of tie-dye patterns on velvet, thus producing a new marketable article. Pursuing the same line of thought,

192

Georgina designed new fashions that would keep the ancient craft of embroidery alive. The younger generation of students, clerks, public servants, teachers did not want to wear heavy hand-woven gowns: they preferred to be dressed in light, 'modern' cotton shirts. Again, Georgina

designed a new simple shirt without buttons. She got Rebecca to put adire designs on them, and from Erin Osun, who became so popular embroiderer soon had

then have them embroidered by an old craftsman was then practically out of work. This new fashion among Nigerians as well as expatriates that the to employ six apprentices!

There was a broken-down little house adjoining the pottery museum which Ulli and Georgina also secured permission from Ekpo Eyo to reconstruct.

They converted it into a fashion shop and here Rebecca's little boutique, called IYA MAPO

(after the Yoruba goddess of female crafts), was set up.

Within a few months she earned far more than Ulli's professorial salary.

She could also provide work for many dyers, tailors and embroiderers. IYA MAPO became a further attractive reason for visiting the museum.

The whole project was typical of the Beiers' way of operating: no starting theoretical consideration, just an improvised response to a practical need. They had in fact employed Rebecca Ademola as a baby nurse, to look after

their younger son Tunji. She did this job so well and conscientiously that she became Tunji's "second mother". When Georgina knew that the family would be returning to Papua New Guinea she thought it would be best to provide an independent income for Rebecca. That Rebecca had so far displayed no particular skills in sewing or any crafts did not discourage Georgina. As always, she did not judge people by any previous training,

qualification or achievement. She was always able to sense a person's iwa, and once she was at ease with that, she placed her total confidence in that person. In all cases, Georgina has never been proved wrong! IYA MAPO started very modestly and its amazing success within such a short time gave Georgina ideas for even greater things. She thought to look for the best and most conscientious weaver in town, pay her realistically and buy all she had produced. This, she reasoned, would generate competition, raise the dwindling standard and quantity of traditional Yoruba weaving, and generally encourage women to train their daughters in the craft. This could be done because a market had been established amongst the Black American community. Once it was. healthily 193

reestablished in one town, there would be enough funds to move on to another. Eventually, it would be possible to open a small shop in New York which specialized ın high quality traditional Yoruba textiles. In this way, Georgina visualized, the constant demand would save this traditional cottage industry from extinction. Surely, the government of Western State would derive many advantages and win kudos for itself in doing this kind of business? The evidence of Rebecca's success was the most persuasive argument to show that it could also be financially profitable. So Ulli organized an exhibition of Rebecca's products at Ori Olokun, inviting the Commissioner for Trade and Industries from Ibadan to open it. He told the commissioner about IYA MAPO's and Rebecca's modest beginnings, what had been achieved in so short a time, and how much more could still be achieved. He also cited the example of the Indian government, which then was doing the same thing with enormous success. Indeed, at that time, Indian 'experts' were in Nigeria advising the Federal Government on how to revive small-scale and cottage industries. The commissioner liked the textiles and designs, listened politely to Ulli, but showed little enthusiasm. This was the era of international partnerships, of grandiose projects and big spending: such a local project seemed too inconsequential to merit government attention. By the time Ulli and Georgina left Nigeria in 1966, the Osogbo art movement, which Georgina had launched, was already firmly established. Artists like Muraina Oyelami, Bisi Fabunmi, Rufus Ogundele, Twins Seven-Seven and others had acquired worldwide reputation. They had set up individual studios, even galleries, and some had also trained other artists. With international reputation came some measure of financial comfort followed, inevitably, by jealousies particularly from academic artists and by imitation from other would-be artists. Ori Olokun at Ife too had an art workshop set up by Michael Crowder, perhaps to reproduce the success of the Osogbo experiment. This could not

be, however. The first generation of Osogbo artists benefitted from what to other teachers might have appeared as a handicap: their very innocence. They worked happily without even realizing at first that what they created could be sold. If the Ori Olokun workshop was trying to create a second generation of 'Osogbo art movement’ it could not recreate the same innocence and freshness of vision. 194

For the young people who

came to Ori Olokun, the temptation was too

great to orient themselves by their successful Osogbo predecessors. Right from the start the Ori Olokun artists worked for a market, the lure of which

made them look for shortcuts and quick results. One particularly favoured shortcut was lino printing, a fairly easy medium.

With rollers, the artists

randomly applied colour to paper, printed their lino-cuts on top, and a flashy but purely arbitrary effect came out. An unfortunate fashion for easy

solutions had set in.

Seeing that the market was already flooded with imitative and often sloppy work, Georgina decided to concentrate on encouraging solid craftsmanship. As in Osogbo a decade before, and in Papua New Guinea, Georgina set about converting a part of their university house into a studio. She installed a textile printing workshop and trained two young men, 'Governor' and John

Urekpotemi,

in

textile

printing.

Georgina

established

the

print

workshop with several aims in mind: to serve the artists, who could now

transfer their images and designs onto textiles; to serve IYA MAPO designs

by supplying materials that could be transformed into shirts and dresses; to demonstrate to Nigerians that much imported materials could be replaced by home-made products. Finally, Georgina intended to help create a new awareness of Nigerian art among the Nigerian middle class. This last aim came about because, as she said, "With few exceptions Nigerians have not acquired the habit of hanging pictures on the walls. But they are highly fashion-conscious, so I am going to make them hang a Twins Seven-Seven

or an Afolabi on their backs!" She added her own designs by adapting Yoruba wall paintings, Igbo masks, and even Arabic script as textile designs. In the meantime

Tayo

and

Mary

Aiyegbusi

had

also

started

a textile

business in Yaba, Lagos. Called simply ALADIRE, it was a highly successful business and design studio. When the Beiers left in 1974 to return to Papua New Guinea, Georgina gave all her screens and designs to the Aiyegbusis, who used them for another three decades. Even from Papua New Guinea,

Georgina continued to supply ALADIRE with new designs. Both IYA MAPO

in Ife and ALADIRE in Lagos struggled against many odds. In Ife Rebecca

Ademola had to cope with many reverses. First, after Ekpo Eyo quit the directorship of the National

Museum,

an official in Lagos

got Rebecca

kicked out of the pottery museum premises. The envious lady claimed that 195

the space, ın far away Ife, was needed by the National Museum, though in actual fact she wanted it for her own trading. This in total disregard of the fact that Ulli and Georgina built the shop with their own money. Then burglars thrice raided her new shop in town, each time making away with her entire stock. Still, Rebecca Ademola struggled on. She has trained many young girls, and still exports adire and batik materials. From this modest craft left to her by Georgina, she has seen her six children through school, three of them right up to the university, and built a house for herself. As for the shop she was made to quit, it was never used by anybody and quickly went into dilapidation. In Lagos, the Aiyegbusis found that every time they trained efficient printers, they left and tried to set up in competition, sometimes making away with expensive materials and paints. The Aiyegbusis battled on, idealistically, even through the everworsening economic situation. For long the business made minimal profit, but they kept it going simply to keep their workers employed. Meanwhile, Ulli was busy on other fronts as well in those days at Ife. He still kept up his friendships with those of his olorisa friends and obas who were not yet dead, and made new ones. Being more tied down by administrative duties now, whatever time was left to him he spent writing. So finally he worked on his book on Yoruba crowns with the new Olokuku. In his capacity as director of the Institute, he also organized a conference on the literature of the Biafran war in 1972. That recently concluded war was still considered an open wound, a taboo subject which most Nigerians, academics inclusive, preferred not to talk about openly. Ulli thought that talking about the literature it produced, rather than its political rights and wrongs, would lead to a better appreciation of its human costs, which in itself would be a more beneficial kind of political education. Moreover, did intellectuals in Nigeria have to seek permission from soldiers before they could discuss literature? Or did they have to wait until outsiders started talking about it before they could feel safe to do so? In any case, would not the University of Ife be contributing to the process of healing and

reconciliation that the Federal Government itself had declared immediately after the surrender? Ulli went ahead and organized the conference, inviting people from all over the country, but especially from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. For three days writers, critics and other interested academics sat down to 196

discuss the literature as well as the war itself. Nobody interrupted it, no query came from Lagos either during or after it. Kalu Uka brought along a wonderful Igbo ballad singer, who had a vast repertoire and who could also improvise new songs on the spur of the moment. On other occasions, the

Institute also organized smaller poetry readings and brought poets like Gabriel Okara, Kalu Uka, McNeil from the USA.

Atukwei

Okai

(from

Ghana)

and even Lloyd

Ulli had practically carried Nigerian culture with him to the University of Papua New Guinea four years earlier and now, it was also right to bring Papua New Guinean culture to Nigeria. It was also part of his essentially multicultural outlook. During the 5th Ife Festival of the Arts, Muraina

Oyelami produced a dance drama, Alo Ipada, based on a New Guinean play while Peggy Harper produced another, Purakapali, based on an Australian Aboriginal myth. There were two evenings of films on Australian Aboriginals at Ife in 1972; a tour of Nigerian Universities by

Aboriginal didgeridoo players in 1973. Segun Olusola also came to Ife in

1971 to recite poetry from New Guinea. The process of cultural exchange

was indeed almost on a quid pro quo basis, for there were also exhibitions: "Contemporary Art from Papua New Guinea" at the 3rd Ife Festival of the Arts; "New Guinea Images: Traditional art from New Guinea and West Irian" during the Sth Ife Festival of the Arts; and "Two Workshops: Osogbo & Port Moresby" at the Goethe Institute, Lagos in 1973. Two

Papua New Guinean Ministers, Albert Maori Kiki (Lands) and Pita Lus (Culture), Ken Inglis, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea, and Jenny Isaacs, Secretary of the Aboriginal Arts Committee in the Australian Council, also visited Nigeria, spending their time mostly in and around Ife University. All these were arranged by Ulli ın his capacity

as the director of the Institute of mentioned that he himself gave three Guinea World View", "'Hohao' — the Art Form", and "Changing Art Forms

African lectures Uneasy in New

Studies. It should also be in the University: "The New Survival of a New Guinean Guinea".

Then Peter Brook, the famous Paris-based theatre director, came in 1972.

Brook had written earlier to Ulli that he was working on an experimental play in Paris and would like to try it out on "unsophisticated audiences who had never had any theatre experience", so he was planning a trip to Africa. After making his way through Niger Republic and Northern Nigeria he 197

would like to settle down on the Ife campus for some weeks to give his company a rest. Could Ulli please find somewhere for the party to camp? Could he also arrange performance venues for them in villages around? Ulli immediately wrote back to say that "unsophisticated audiences" did not exist in Africa — certainly not in Yoruba society where every aspect of social life was saturated in theatre. Still, Brook came soon on a reconnaissance trip with his secretary. Seeing that his reply had made no impression on Brook, Ulli took him to performances by Duro Ladipo and Kola Ogunmola. It so happened that the particular Kola Ogunmola play they attended was that actor's 'resurrection performance! after his illness and the thick cloud of rumours that he had died (see chapter V). Indeed, after his discharge from the hospital, Ogunmola went into seclusion to convalesce. So hidden away was he that when Ulli returned to Nigeria in 1971, it took him months to locate him. Then, suddenly in May 1972, the incredible news came that Kola Ogunmola had announced his return to the stage! The performance at Fakunle Major Hotel in Osogbo was the big comeback. The atmosphere around the hotel that night was unbelievable: outside, people hung on walls and trees; inside, well over a thousand people crammed into a space meant for maybe two hundred. Once you got inside and sat down, you could not stand up to go to the toilet or anywhere. There was a permanent hum of excitement that did not abate throughout the duration of the play: the actors had to resort to passing a single microphone from hand to hand to be heard above the rumble. The play was very ordinary and Ogunmola himself could not play the lead role as he still moved with difficulties. Nobody really cared for all that — what the people came to witness was the bigger, more real drama of his revival, of his being alive and physically there on the stage. This created enough excitement all of its own. Peter Brook was stunned. When he recovered afterwards, on the way home, he remarked to Ulli: "Well, if this actor had been hidden in the rafters of the ceiling, he would still have communicated with his audience."

Still, Peter Brook came with his company the following year, in search of “unsophisticated

audiences".

He

was

simply

determined

to

prove

his

theory. Camped in a grove of tall trees in the staff quarters and working on a play called "Conference of the Birds", they woke their neighbours every morning with all sorts of odd bird noises. 198

The actual performances too were weird. One theatrical device, Peter Brook claimed, had proved immensely successful when they performed it in some market place in Niger Republic. It consisted of the actors forming a circle and raising long sticks which converged high above their heads. Some Fulani cowherds who stood idly by, watching, broke out into spontaneous applause. On another occasion when they played in an Ondo village, there was absolute silence from beginning to end. Ulli himself was there and, being used to the lively and noisy participation of Yoruba audiences, told Peter Brook that apparently his performance had meant

nothing to the audience.

Brook's

explanation was

quite philosophical:

"There may be the silence of boredom, but there can also be the silence of concentration!" Whereupon Ulli informed Brook that what the oba of the village had said after the performance was: "I suppose it was nice of them

to try and entertain our children." Ulli argued with Peter Brook that his entire experiment was useless unless he appointed someone to sit in the audience and write down responses. He offered to release Chery Fowowe from other duties at Ori Olokun for that task. But Peter Brook did not really want to know. He was wary of the

comments of those who watched his rehearsals at Ori Olokun and took to rehearsing behind closed doors. Seeing finally that he could not get through to his imagined "unsophisticated audiences" in the rural areas, Peter Brook condescended to try out his theory on the sophisticated one at Ori Olokun. Some

desperately sensational things were attempted in this phase of the experiment, including scenes that bordered on the lewd and the obscene — all just to get audience reaction. At one point one of the actors, a huge Greek who offstage was a very genial, gentle giant, suddenly rushed into the audience, grabbed Tunji (who was then one and a half years old) from

Rebecca, held the tiny child high in the air and started dancing like a maniac. Finally the hitherto elusive reaction erupted: the frightened boy was screaming; Rebecca leaped at the actor like a wild leopard, hitting him with her fists! Offstage, the actors were very good people and most of them gathered at the Beiers' when not rehearsing or searching for their elusive audiences in

the villages and towns. Among them were Yoshi Oida, a traditional Noh actor who has since become famous as an experimental theatre actor and

199

producer in his own right; Miriam Goldberg, a black German-born actress;

Malik, a Malian who

had spent nine years in Rome

doing "spaghetti

westerns". Others were English, French and Americans. In other words, the troupe was not as international in composition as their director claimed, Yoshi Oida being the only one not already fully immersed in European theatre tradition of one type or another. According to Yoshi himself, when he joined the group he thought he had signed a contract for only three months only to discover, upon getting to Paris, that he had bound himself over for three years. His Japanese code of honour would not allow him to break the contract, however. "But on the other hand," Yoshi also explained to Ulli and Georgina, "there are certain things I find interesting now. I have always thought I should try and understand these strange Europeans; so now I have the opportunity to learn what they are really like." When Ulli asked him what he found particularly strange about Europeans, he replied that they were the only people who sat far away from the ground, so they invented the chair. "Everybody else sits on the ground or close to it." Twenty years later Yoshi came to Bayreuth to give a solo performance and met Ulli. When Ulli asked whether he had found out more about Europeans and their chairs, Yoshi had a good laugh and said: "I am still trying to find out." Peter Brook had employed a writer to accompany the tour, whose task it was to compile a book on the experiment. This writer told Ulli and Georgina of an incident that happened in Northern Nigeria that he himself had found extremely embarrassing. According to him, once when they put up camp on the Plateau, the chief of the Angas village on a nearby rocky hill sent down a ram as present for the unknown guests. Whereupon the

company decided to invent a ritual during which the ram was 'sacrificed'.

Not knowing how to slaughter animals, the beast suffered horribly in the phoney ritual. When they finally succeeded in killing it, they sat down to a feast which, in their own 'ritual' code, apparently did not include sharing. Nothing of the ram was sent back to the chief; no other kind of present was made either when they departed. This was not untypical of the entire tour. Peter Brook had instructed the company to take very little money with them on the trip, because they were to live poor like the Africans themselves. In practice this meant sponging on the poor, though the director did not always include himself in the Spartan way of living. While

200

his company slept in tents on the Ife campus, Mayfair Hotel.

he himself stayed in the

Peter Brook was no doubt a brilliant director and thinker. His mind was razor-sharp and Ulli and Georgina found it stimulating arguing with him. However, it seemed he had somehow theorized himself into a corner on this occasion. He aimed to penetrate to the real core of theatre, and so

required of his actors to strip themselves of all cultural accretions and get down to the naked human. This was approximately the complete opposite of Ulli's own ideas. Ulli had, and still has, always tried to bring people from different cultures together, not in order to make them deny their cultural differences and pasts, but to stimulate each other, learn from each other and arrive at some new forms of cultural expression and mutual enrichment. Peter Brook was now arguing that if you stripped a Japanese and an African of their cultures, they would share a common humanity. "But what would be left?" Ulli would ask in these arguments, "except maybe the basic

instinct to kill because even the act of sexual intercourse is determined by

cultural traditions and taboos." It so happened that Barbara Anne Teer, the Director of the Black National Theater in Harlem, was a guest of the Beiers around this time. She too engaged in these arguments and once said to Peter Brook, in exasperation: "I have only just discovered my culture and

now you want to take it away from me!" Another critic of Peter Brook's was Ming Tsow, a Chinese lecturer in the English Department at the University of Ife then. Her own mind was as keen as Peter Brook's and

between them — Ulli, Ming and Barbara — often drove Peter Brook into a tight corner in these heated but friendly arguments. The interaction with the actors was always lively and rewarding. Many of

them were in two minds about the entire experimental tour, though they found it hard to argue against a powerful, domineering character like Peter Brook who was, after all, their director and employer. Yoshi Oida described to Ulli how Peter Brook, without ever raising his voice, made the actors do exactly what he wanted them to do. "If he wants you to walk on

the ceiling,” Yoshi said, "he will find a way of making you do it!" But it was not difficult to rattle the actors' faith in their play "Conference of the

Birds". The plan was that after Ife they would travel to Ghana and then to Mali, to perform in Malik's village. When Georgina asked Malik if he 201

really would want his mother to see him performing reconsidered and went to Peter Brook to say he did not village anymore. No wonder Peter Brook found the subversive. However, such tensions were always bridged interactions.

the lewd play, he want to go to his Beiers' influence by friendly social

In terms of Ulli's own beliefs about interculturalism, there was a positive development, however. Peter Brook also brought along a young American composer called Swados. She played the Spanish guitar very well and liked to entertain. When the Beiers gave a party for the company at their house, Ulli told Muraina Oyelami to bring his dundun drum along. As he had secretly hoped, Muraina and Swados very soon began to make music together, thereby concretely and vigorously contradicting Peter Brook's theory. The success of the occasion also confirmed Ulli in his belief that Muraina had unusual flexibility as a musician, plus the makings of a musician of international standing. Ulli followed up on this at the next annual festival of the Institute. He invited the African-American artist, Lloyd McNeil, who was also a famous jazz flutist. In the cable Ulli sent him were added the words: "Please bring your flute along." When Louis McNeil arrived he said: "Well, I have brought my flute along, because you said so. But who am I going to play with here? I am a jazz musician and I cannot imagine that anyone here in Nigeria plays my kind of music." For an answer, Ulli took him down to Ori Olokun and introduced him to Muraina. He left them there to do some other business. Ulli returned half an hour later to find that the two musicians had already hit it off and were busy composing their programme of joint performance. Alas, there was a sad, long drawn-out conclusion to Peter Brook's visit, though. There was a famous dundun drummer, Ayansola, in Osogbo in those days. He was so good that people said of him, in admiration, that he created sculptural images with his percussive art on the dundun. He occasionally played at the Beiers' on the university campus and on one such occasion, Peter Brook was present. Towards the end of the company's stay in Ile-Ife, Peter Brook told Ulli he would like to take a dundun drummer

with him to Paris. Ulli naturally recommended Muraina, who had already demonstrated his ability to perform with Swados, had plenty of experience in theatre, and was capable of adapting to any situation. But Peter Brook 202

had heard what Ayansola could do on the drums and would not be satisfied with any one less than the master-drummer himself. Ulli argued that though a great percussionist and a more powerful musician than Muraina, Ayansola was essentially a very traditional person. He had never played outside a purely traditional context, spoke no English let alone French, and had never ventured outside his Yoruba environment. Peter Brook ignored all these persuasive facts. The great drummer himself could resist neither the money nor the glamour of travel abroad. How was he to know what else was in store for him? In Paris Ayansola was desperately lonely. He could communicate with no one — especially on issues important to him. He had no one to speak his language to. He neither understood what the play was about nor what his own contribution was meant to be. Suspended in time and space, Ayansola became thoroughly depressed and, in time, physically ill. The trip was a

total disaster all the way. Not long after his Paris assignment he went to Berlin, where home. Peter Brook

he collapsed was

on stage. He

died soon after he was

not deterred by this setback.

Having

flown

lost his African

drummer, he hired a Japanese jazz musician who built himself a special drum kit on which he could imitate the dundun drum. He was able to produce a perfect imitation of Ayansola's drumming that he had copied from a tape. With this, he performed with the Brook company all over the world, all without knowing or caring about the musician whose work he used. Years later, Georgina heard this imitation performance in Sydney but found it too painful to sit through it to the end. Not a man who worked happily for institutions and impatient of bureaucratic red tapism, Ulli nevertheless did work happily as director of the Institute, perhaps mainly because he found in the Vice Chancellor a firm support and a kindred spirit. A long-suffering man, Hezekiah Oluwasanmi seemed to have an endless capacity for enduring the tedious meetings at which professors postured endlessly and spoke just to hear their own voices. Ulli especially admired him as a man of vision and integrity; a man with a wide range of interests. He gave the University of Ife motivation and style. He turned the Vice Chancellor's lodge into a museum of African art. There were modern paintings and traditional carvings. He commissioned a large iron sculpture from Georgina. Social 203

events at his home were not boring official dinners but stimulating, even inspiring, encounters. Moreover, he was not pompous as many people in his position often are. On the contrary, he was accessible, always willing to listen, always willing to put his authority behind any reasonable idea. Although a man of infinite patience, Hezekiah Oluwasanmi knew how to demolish people with a simple, devastating sentence when that patience was finally exhausted. Whenever Ulli had to suffer the interminable Senate meetings watching professors perform their wearisome acts, he felt compensated when, finally, Oluwasanmi's sudden flash of anger came to put a stop to all the waffle and brought everybody back to business and common sense. As Vice Chancellor, he often did not hesitate to cut through the red tape of his own administration when necessary in order to get things done quickly. Ulli tried not to bother the Vice Chancellor with too many problems, but he knew where to find an ally on important issues. One such occasion arose in 1972, when labourers on a building site in IleIfe discovered a terracotta head. They reported their find to Ulli, and Peter Garlake, the institute's archaeologist, identified it as a fourteenth century piece. Ulli immediately went to the Ooni of Ife and requested him to kindly ask the landlord to suspend building until a rescue excavation had been carried out. The Ooni said that the plot actually belonged to his own son, but he himself could only give a temporary order; proper permission to dig would have to be obtained from the owner in Lagos. The next day, Ulli raced to Lagos where the prince had his private medical practice. As the prince had three clinics in different, far-flung parts of Lagos, Ulli had to trace him from one to the other until he caught up with him in the third. The desired permission secured, Ulli returned and called an emergency meeting of the Institute's Research Committee to approve the modest sum required for the excavation. The committee deliberated pompously for three hours, then decided that members would go home, sleep over the issue, and bring it up at their next regular meeting in three months’ time!

Irritated, Ulli simply told Peter Garlake to go ahead with the excavation, that if need be he would pay the labourers himself. He was not going to stand by and watch a valuable archaeological site — probably one of the last to be discovered in the rapidly expanding town — destroyed because financial considerations weighed more than archaeological discoveries. On hearing of the situation, the Vice Chancellor stepped in and made sure that 204

the money was released immediately. As it turned out, Obalara's compound has been the last important site to be excavated in Ile-Ife till now. Another issue on which the Vice Chancellor came to the rescue was the appointment of Ben Enwonwu as Research Professor in the Institute. Ulli was an old friend of Ben's and he valued some of his works very much; he nevertheless felt that Ben Enwonwu was an artist and would benefit more from another kind of appointment. He objected to having the title Research

Professor turned into all kinds of untenable up. One was that the appointed. "So," Ulli

an honorary one. The appointments committee used arguments which Ulli knocked down as they came Pro-Chancellor had expressed his wish to have Ben retorted, "is the appointment now in return for the

life-size bust of the Pro-Chancellor that Ben

did?" Then

the committee

used the ethnic argument: Ben Enwonwu was Igbo, so Ife University would be labelled a "Yoruba University" if he was denied the appointment! Ulli countered by offering to give, offhand, the names of a dozen Igbo scholars

any or all of whom he would love to have in the institute. He insisted that Ben be made artist-in-residence, a position that fitted his skills and for which he was eminently qualified.

The committee overruled and appointed Ben Enwonwu a Research Professor in the institute. Ulli went to the Vice Chancellor and threatened to resign over the issue. Again, Oluwasanmi came up with the compromise

of redesignating Ben an unattached professor in the Faculty of Arts. Ben Enwonwu got his position without any specific responsibilities; the institute preserved its integrity — for the time being.

Not quite a year later an even more controversial appointment was made,

about which the Vice Chancellor himself threw up his hands in helplessness. Against the advice of Ekpo Eyo (the Director of the National Museum),

against

the

recommendations

of Professor

Thurston

Shaw,

Angela Fagg, the Government Archaeologist in Jos, and Peter Garlake, the institute's own archaeologist, an archaeologist was appointed to the institute. Ulli argued that though he liked the candidate as a person, he could not go against the weight of so much unanimous expert opinion. The committee said that the candidate was a "son of the soil" whose rejection

would upset the Ooni. The more imagined than real fear of the Ooni weighed more than the upholding of the university's academic integrity and the appointment was forced through. 205

Ulli saw in these two events the beginning of a cynical, manipulative attitude towards the university establishment, as well as an absence of any strong commitment to the ideals and integrity of the intellectual life. The combination of both attitudes, he was sure, could only lead to the internal subversion of the university and he did not want to continue to be a part of it. What was happening at the University of Ife in the early 1970s was also happening in all the other universities in the country, though with local variations. On the local scene at Ife, the complete victory of the values of bureaucracy and politics over those of institutional autonomy, academic excellence and integrity was confirmed just a few years later: Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, the man who had given the best that he had and taken the University of Ife to such great heights, was maliciously framed on trumped-up charges and dismissed. A great era in the history of Nigerian universities had come to an end. When by the late 1970s the bureaucratic blanket of national unity, which the Federal Government had started rolling out immediately after the civil war, finally reached the universities to obliterate all distinctions and autonomies, the ground had been well softened from within. The professors, many of whom had started seeing academic luster as only the last rung on the ladder to high political office, were more than willing to cooperate. In 1972 Ulli had gone back briefly to Papua New Guinea to advise that country's government on cultural affairs. A delegation comprising its Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Culture came a year later to plead with him to return and head the Institute of Papua New Guinean Cultures that was being set up. The two ministers came with the argument that since Georgina and he had actually started a Centre for Papua New Guinean Cultures in the country and also advised on the Institute now being set up, there was no better person to start it off. They added that the country would like their imminent political independence to also be the beginning of a cultural revival. When the delegation came, Ulli had no substantial reason at all to want to leave Ife. The everyday hassles of being a director were there, but then those would only last the three years of his directorship,

after which he would be a tenured professor, relieved of administrative

nuisances and free to pursue his own programmes. On the other hand, whereas the Institute at Ife alone could boast of several brilliant researchers any of whom was qualified to head it, the entire

206

country of Papua New Guinea could not yet boast of a single first degree graduate. It was hard for Ulli to say no under those circumstances. Perhaps, too, his confidence in, and therefore commitment to, Ife was shaken a bit by the two recent appointments. When Ulli went to the Vice Chancellor

and asked to be released, Oluwasanmi was unhappy and reluctant to let him go; but being such a perspicacious man, he understood that perhaps Ulli had no choice. So again in March 1974, the family left Nigeria to return to Papua New Guinea, though not to the university. This was the second time that Ulli had exchanged the security of a pensionable job for the adventure

of an exciting but untenured position. Four weeks before the Beiers were to depart, Georgina was commissioned

to erect a ten and a half metre high iron sculpture in the courtyard of the Institute of African Studies. It was a daunting task, because the site the architect

had

designated

was

an

area

where

the

sculpture

would

be

surrounded by a winding staircase on two sides and verandahs on the third. And the sculpture was to rise above all the three floors of the building! Ulli thought that Georgina could not complete such a giant task within so short a time and suggested that he go ahead with the children, while she

remained behind to complete the job. An artist who works best under pressure, Georgina thought otherwise. The restrictions imposed by the nature, shape and size of the space, plus the

time limit, were to her just a challenge that stimulated her energy and imagination. She swung into action immediately. With the help of an Italian engineer, a ten and a half metre steel pillar was erected on the site as a central support. Then she bought sheets of iron, laid them out on the ground floor of the building and drew bold shapes on them in chalk. Next

she went to the town and hired a team of six young welders, whose only experience had been mending car bodies. With them she cut out the shapes, stabilized them with iron rods and finally welded them onto the central pole. They all worked everyday from dawn till dusk, virtually without a

break. In seventeen and a half days the huge task was completed. Named "Prayer to Masks" after Senghor's famous poem, the sculpture still stands proudly in the Institute's building.

Ulli's activities as director of the Institute of Papua New Guinean Studies at

Port Moresby from 1974 to 1978 were in many ways a continuation of what he did at the University of Ife. Papua New Guinea could not boast of 207

the quality or number of highly trained staff that Ife had but, as usual, Ulli turned this to advantage. He simply asked retired school masters or public servants, and the keener of the university students, to collect traditional poems, legends and myths which the Institute then published. Using the same local people at different levels, and giving them much freehand, he also achieved much in the documentation of all specific aspects of the people's cultures. As these were also published and widely circulated, a broad awareness on cultural issues beyond the purely academic was created. The general populace in Papua New Guinea became conscious of the relevance of culture and tradition as a stabilizing force in the rapid socio-political transformations that their country was going through. This feat was achieved sans the petty jealousies, constant bickerings and scrambling for research grants which he and the other serious-minded scholars at Ife had to struggle perpetually against, and which inevitably consumed so much time and energy that should otherwise have been devoted to more productive work.

Ulli launched and edited Gigibori: A Journal of Papua New

Guinean

Cultures, and published over thirty discussion papers that looked critically at government policies on culture, missionary activities, tourism and the artifact trade. He created a film unit that documented art and culture, and a music archive. The Institute also published a series of LPs and music cassettes on traditional and contemporary music in the country. As money was always short at the institute, Ulli was forced to constantly seek outside help. In all his years in Nigeria, and especially during the MBARI and MBARI MBAYO days, he stuck to his golden principle of keeping government at arm's length from all his activities. Now, however, in far away Papua New Guinea, he did ask for financial assistance from the Nigerian government. Ulli got the Minister of Foreign Affairs to write on his behalf to General Olusegun Obasanjo, then the military Head of State in Nigeria, to say that Papua New Guinea, a small country with very limited resources, was starting its own Institute of Cultural Studies, but did not feel like going to the usual quarters (Australia or America) to beg for money. Could Nigeria, a wealthier country that had also pioneered cultural studies, consider being of help? The Nigerian government sent a cheque for thirty thousand dollars practically by return mail! From the money, Ulli made a film, published a 208

record, and bought a bus for the institute. On the bus was boldly printed

'Donated by the Federal Government of Nigeria’ while the film and record also announced the generosity in their credits. The Nigerian High Commissioner in Canberra attended the film's premiere, after which he met and discussed future relations with his counterpart from Papua New Guinea. Mr Fowora, the High Commissioner, later the Nigerian High Commissioner in Britain, became Ulli's friend. The bringing together of the two ambassadors was only a diplomatic by-

product of the cultural linkages that Ulli had been building ever since he left Nigeria in 1966. Indeed, Ulli's first appointment at the University of Papua New Guinea was to start and teach courses in Contemporary African Literature, which at that time inevitably meant that the emphasis was on

Nigerian writers. As is typical of him, and as one would expect, his activities went beyond merely teaching literature. On the performing arts scene alone, the following happened between 1966 and 1974 (even while he was in Nigeria between 1971 and 1974): Wole Soyinka's The Trials of

Brother Jero and The Swamp Dwellers, Obotunde Ijimere's Eda and Woyengi were performed. There was 'An Evening of Yoruba Folktales’ during the First Papua New Guinea Festival of the Arts during which Segun Olusola told the tales. There were exhibitions too: 'Woodcuts by Bisi Fabunmi'; 'Eight Osogbo Artists'; "Design Workshop Ife’; 'Pottery from

Ibigbami's Workshop’; 'Onitsha Market Literature’. A documentary film on Nigerian Cultures made by the Institute of African Studies University of Ife was also shown. Segun Olusola and Wole Soyinka also came to give talks. Ulli had been working non-stop now for almost thirty years and felt he needed a rest. His two boys, Tokunbo Sebastian and Olatunji Akanmu,

were also growing older without an experience of any Western society. Tokunbo

had almost always been the only white boy in his class. So in

1978, Ulli resigned his position and the family moved to Australia with the intention of settling down for a long rest. On their first day in Sydney Tokunbo was astonished to see so many white people. "Are there really so many white people in the world?" he asked.

In Australia, neither Ulli nor Georgina had a job (they looked for none), but they lived in their own house. The family lived frugally as always but still,

everybody must eat, and the boys must go to school. So Ulli had to resort to giving guest lectures and writing reviews for the Sydney Morning 209

Herald. The lectures were fine but, unable to borrow a leaf from Sydney

Smith's urbane remark about never reading a book before reviewing it, he

found this literary activity hard: he could not just toss off one after skimming through a book. He needed to spend a few days on each book while the reward was only AUS$80, not much money even then, and certainly nowhere near enough even for his own personal needs. The pressure for money was great and it was hard making ends meet. But for Ulli personally, the total freedom he now enjoyed for the first time in almost three decades more than compensated for the limited means. One day, a cheque of one thousand pounds arrived mysteriously in his account! From where, or whom? Learning that it was from Tayo Aiyegbusi in Nigeria only deepened the mystery: what was it for? Did he want to commission some textile designs from Georgina? So Ulli rang Aiyegbusi in Lagos to ask what the money was for. Nothing, Aiyegbusi said, he just heard that they were having a difficult time in Australia and thought that little amount might help. For Ulli, that was one of the things that made life so worthwhile. Though jobless in Australia, Ulli was not idle. On their meagre resources the Beiers invited their old friend Kauage from New Guinea, who spent several months painting and exhibiting in their house. Some of the magnificent works he produced then are now in the IWALEWA-Haus collection. Muraina Oyelami was also invited to prepare an exhibition and also to give Tunji his first lessons in Yoruba percussions. Tunji picked up the gudugudu rhythms so fast that, within two weeks, teacher and student performed together in an open air concert at the Festival of Sydney. Offers followed for them to play for radio, and to give concerts at Black Wattle Studio, the University of Sydney, and at the Australian National University in Canberra. Tunji met numerous Australian musicians during these concerts, one of whom, Greg Sheehan, has become a lifelong friend. It was during their second stay in Australia, from 1984 to 1989, that the Beiers became really active. They turned their house into a cultural centre

called MIGILA House (a term from the Trobriand Islands meaning 'character' or 'expression'). They held regular exhibitions by Georgina,

Kauage, Muraina, and Kath Walker, an Aboriginal artist. They showed Yoruba textiles as well as "Outsider Art from Australia". Musicians from Uganda, Senegal, South Africa and India converged on MIGILA House and 210

interacted with Australian musicians, with Tunjı, then sixteen years old, at the hub of things. An Aboriginal didgeridoo player performed with an Austrian musician who played the Japanese koto. Since Ulli was still a member of the University of Bayreuth Research Programme on African

Identity, he was able to bring, by turns, Twins

Seven-Seven,

Muraina

Oyelami and Ademola Onibonokuta, in order to work on their biographies,

and to participate in the music

programmes

at MIGILA

House.

Twins

performed with Tunji and Australian drummers and flutists. The first seeds of a multicultural music were planted when Ademola Onibonokuta, Greg Sheehan and Tunji Beier had a joint concert. OKUTA PERCUSSION, the constantly evolving group formed by the trio, has since grown to embrace and integrate music and musicians from Africa, India, the Arab world and Europe. When Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986,

Ulli organized an evening of celebrations which included readings from his

works and those of other African writers. In no time the soirées in the Beiers' ramshackle old Victorian house became famous. Visitors paid a gate fee for the musicians but wine and snacks were free. Ulli and Georgina had no grant to support all these activities and their

means of advertising did not go beyond making a few phone calls and

slipping handbills into people's mail boxes. Even then, this was sufficient to always guarantee an audience that sometimes was too large for their

sitting-room. Then a hall in the neighbourhood would be rented. MIGILA

House

was yet another successor to MBARI

and it flourished in

spite of the modest scale on which it operated. It made an important impact on the already multicultural scene in Australia. It also helped Ulli to widen his contacts with Australian musicians and artists, which he could later draw on when he returned to run IWALEWA-Haus a second time.

Although Ulli had visited Europe occasionally, he never thought of living anywhere on that continent again, least of all Germany. Yet to Europe he was somehow destined to return, not to live permanently but to do what he had been doing so outstandingly in other parts of the world for almost thirty years: trying to make others (individuals as well as whole peoples) see and learn what he had seen and learnt in Africa, especially in Yoruba society. In a way, that he should return to Europe was right, if not inevitable. Europe was, after all, where the unmaking of the African and his culture in the modern era started; Europe was where Ulli, an individual, 211

learnt what enabled him to profit in a unique way from his experience in Africa, at a time when virtually all Europeans could not imagine, and socalled educated Africans did not believe, that there was anything worth learning from the continent. Furthermore a return to Europe would make complete the mythical dimension of Ulli's all-too-real journey round the world. Even so, his eventual return in 1981 followed the pattern of his life from the beginning: the unforeseen consequence of an action taken for other, immediate purposes. In 1979, Ulli was invited to a Janheinz Jahn symposium at the University of Mainz. From there he would go on to the biannual Horizonte Festival in Berlin, of which the focus was Africa that year. He had lent many paintings to the organizers for their exhibition and put them on to other sources. The organizers therefore invited him to open the exhibition and compere the writers' conference that was also a part of the festival. Most notable among the African writers gathered for the conference were Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Dennis Brutus. Ulli translated and read a piece from each of the authors present, for the benefit of the German audience. While he was still at Mainz, two people came with a message from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Bayreuth: if he wanted a job the university was willing to offer him one. He turned down the offer flatly, saying that he had no plans whatsoever of returning to Europe. However, he agreed to the invitation to stop by after the Berlin festival and give a public lecture. After the lecture, the Vice Chancellor, the Registrar and some other high officials of the university took him out to dinner to further

press their bid. As Ulli really could not think of what to come back to

Germany for, he said that there was nothing to reconsider. He was, however, impressed by the tall Vice Chancellor, Dr Wolff, a lawyer by training and extremely practical in his deliberations. He put on no airs of status and reminded Ulli very much of another very tall Vice Chancellor in

another place: Hezekiah Oluwasanmi at the University of Ife. All in all, he

felt that he was the kind of man he could work with. Still, Ulli could not see any worthwhile task for himself in Germany. Moreover, Bayreuth had a reputation of its own in Germany: the home of the music festival devoted to Richard Wagner, distinguished composer may be, but certainly a known anti-Semite, German chauvinist and Hitler's 212

favourite composer.

It therefore seemed an odd, even absurd, place for a

university to try to foster Afrıcan Studies. In 1980 Ulli accepted a guest professorship in the University of Mainz, to teach the first course ever in Germany on contemporary African art. His condition for accepting the position was that he would mount a large exhibition of modern African art in the State Museum of Mainz. Meanwhile the head of the university's Institute of African Studies had his own secret plans to offer Ulli a tenured professorship, partly because he wanted to keep someone else out of it. Unhappily, there was a little hitch: Ulli did not have a doctorate! The Institute solved the problem by sımply conferring an honorary one on him! Taban Lo Liyong, then at the university, read a wonderful citation (/audatio) at the ceremony. So Ulli was back in Germany for his longest stay (four months) for the first time since he and his family fled from the Nazis in 1933. One other reason why he had been so reluctant to leave Australia at all was his children: having only recently settled in Australia, was it fair to uproot them again? They would have to learn German, adjust to the culture, cultivate new

friends — would they be able to cope with all these and more? Well, the

only way to know was to bring Tokunbo along for the four months in Mainz: if the boy coped well, the move would be seriously considered; if he did not, it would be dropped totally. Ulli put him in a boarding school in Starnberg near Munich, which specialized in teaching German to foreign children. Thus his mates were from Iran, Turkey, or South America, and mostly children of diplomats. To further make him at home, Herr Grote

from the Ministry of Culture in Munich, who was also eager to recruit Ulli

to Bayreuth, took him out regularly for football and ice cream. Ulli was grateful to Herr Grote for his troubles but in the end he chose a different course. Ulli decided wisely not to send his children to a German

school. He did not want to subject them to the rigidity of the German educational system. He also thought that once they entered it, he would be

tied down in the country at least until Tokunbo finished secondary school, at which point re-adjusting once more in another place would be extremely

hard. Furthermore, ever wary of the German experiment, Ulli took care to safeguard his freedom of movement. So he enrolled Tokunbo and Tunji in

the correspondence school of New South Wales. That way, he put himself

213

in a position whereby he could pack his bags and return to Australia at a moment's notice. Meanwhile the exhibition of contemporary African art which Ulli mounted at Mainz was very successful. The University of Bayreuth brought it to its own city where it met with equal success. Dr Wolff now came up with a proposition: if the University of Bayreuth bought the whole exhibition and established it as a permanent museum, would Ulli agree to come as curator? It was a bold idea, but it did not appeal to Ulli. He had for long decried museums as mausoleums and, even though this one was not to be a museum of antiquities (of which there were far too many in Germany, all full of stolen objects), he did not like the idea. He also could never sympathize with the motives behind establishing museums of old African arts especially in Europe: after all, the same Europe is the major culprit in the destruction of the traditions and systems that produced those objects! At any rate, just displaying paintings on walls and cataloguing them was simply not his kind of job: "It's too dead," he said. He returned to Australia after his four-month stint at Mainz, but kept up a correspondence with the Vice Chancellor of the University of Bayreuth. The University persisted and, eventually, Ulli came up with an alternative concept: an institution that would be a place of encounters between cultures. He wanted a centre for people, not objects; a place where artists and musicians could be in short-term residence, not only to 'demonstrate' their own culture, but also to interact with their German counterparts and create entirely new kinds of work. Ulli also argued that Bayreuth, with a population of only 70,000, was too small to support a centre devoted only to Africa, so why not include Asia and the Pacific, in fact, the entire nonWestern world? When the University of Bayreuth agreed to this ambitious but realizable idea, Ulli began to see its ever-widening possibilities (Obafemi, 1993; 30): I saw lots of possibilities — possibilities of providing new opportunities for my artist and musician friends from all those countries. People like Obiora Udechukwu, Muraina Oyelami, Middle Art, Rufus Ogundele from Nigeria, or Kauage from Papua New Guinea — to mention a few — could find the peace here to work away

from home pressures and everyday harrassments. They could exhibit here and mostly we had the opportunity to arrange further shows for them in other cities. So IWALEWA-Haus could open up new horizons 214

in Europe, while their prolonged presence in Bayreuth gave us the opportunity to work on their biographies or to have discussions with them on their aesthetic concepts. Artists in residence have the opportunity to meet German artists here, but they also have the opportunity to meet each other: Obiora Udechukwu for example first met Muraina Oyelami in IWALEWA-Haus! IWALEWA-Haus:

encounters

Pacific, finally opened

with

the

in November

cultures

of Africa,

Asia

and

the

1981. Ulli was not only its first

director, he was also charged with defining its character, activities, and future. He directed the affairs of the house from that beginning till 1984. There were again the same little absurdities of bureaucracy which though he has always been able to handle, Ulli has never learnt to conform with. When such little absurdities become decidedly political or are on political matters, Ulli has also never been able to tolerate them. When IWALEWAHaus was set up, somebody had told the Bavarian Premier, Franz-Josef Strauss, about it and even hinted that he would be made patron. The thinking was that with the Premier as patron, the centre would never lack for money. Now the Premier's politics were extreme right wing. Worse, he

was also a business partner of African leaders like Presidents Eyadema of Togo and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire. So Ulli rejected the idea saying that he would rather IWALEWA-Haus remain poor than have that Premier as

patron. The university bureaucrats would not relent, however, for the Premier kept asking when he was going to be formally invited to the house as its patron. Embarrassed, the university in turn nagged Ulli. Finally he wrote a deadpan letter to the university pointing out that, first, he did not think that the house needed a patron at all, for whatever reason. However, he went on, if

it must have one and the university insisted on the Premier, then he would suggest a triumvirate of patrons in order to soften the Premier's controversial politics and business associations. Therefore, Ulli concluded in the letter, he was nominating Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Fidel Castro of Cuba as the other two patrons. He was ready, he assured the administrators, to put the University in touch with these two eminent

statesmen! Ulli had no way of contacting either Nyerere or Castro, but the

bluff produced the desired effect: it was the last he heard about appointing patrons.

215

The other bureaucratic faux pas that could have led to a serious diplomatic rumpus was also due to political insensitivity about Africa. The opening of IWALEWA-Haus in 1981 coincided with the sixth anniversary of the founding of the University of Bayreuth. Ulli organized a concert of Yoruba music by Muraina Oyelami and Tunji, then eleven years old. For the finale, the two were joined by Professor Bieler of the University's Music Department, a well-known composer of modern (sometimes esoteric) music and pianist. The trio performed a remarkable improvisation in which Tunji exchanged the gudugudu for jazz drums and the professor used the grand piano percussively. After the ceremonies on the campus, at which two African ambassadors and the Nigerian cultural attaché were present, everybody came over to the house to witness its formal opening and first exhibition. Everything went well. Then, two weeks later, Ulli got a copy of a letter from the South African ambassador to the Vice Chancellor of the university. In it the ambassador expressed regret at having missed the opening ceremony of IWALEWA-Haus due to other engagements, but would still like to visit the house. The ambassador went on to propose a date. So the university had actually invited the ambassador of apartheid South Africa to the house; worse, having mercifully failed to come to the ceremony, he was now to be formally received in the house! Ulli was amazed at the University's political naiveté. Did they realize what would have happened if the South African ambassador had appeared at the opening? When the University president formally welcomed the guests of honour in his opening speech at the university assembly hall, the African diplomats from Tanzania, Senegal and Nigeria would have had to leave in protest. Muraina Oyelami would have had to leave the stage. Ulli himself

would have had no choice but to walk out. Ulli told the University that he did not care if the South African ambassador visited the house as a private person; but if he were to come in an official capacity he would have no choice but to receive him with a protest demonstration.

One university official came up with the specious argument that, surely, Ulli could not involve himself in the internal politics of African countries. To which Ulli replied that he would be happy to receive the Ethiopian ambassador (Marxist) as well as the Senegalese one (ultra-rightwing), but

that the 216

ambassador

of a country

that had

racism

embedded

in its

constitution was another matter, more so in Germany! In the end the President of the University wrote to Ulli that he accepted his position, though he did not agree with ıt, and had therefore disinvited the ambassador. That was typical of Dr Wolff. He respected Ulli's independence and allowed him to run IWALEWA-Haus without a committee and without being a member of any faculty. Ulli was free to exhibit whoever he wanted, to invite musicians and artists without justifying his decisions and choices to anybody. In sum, Ulli found Dr Wolff a man easy

to work with, in spite of their differences. The President had absolute confidence in him and visibly enjoyed the events in IWALEWA-Haus.

Clearly, Dr Wolff and his friend Herr Grote in the Ministry of Culture were men of vision, also imbued with a sense of mission. To appreciate this fully, the situation in Germany even as late as 1981 has to be taken into consideration. Then, no museum or art gallery, no art critics, historians and dealers, had taken notice of the existence of contemporary African art. Bayreuth is a small provincial town in the conservative state of Bavaria. Yet the two men championed the idea of IWALEWA-Haus, and did so with a

spirit of adventure. And then, to bring a man who was not the customary

academic type to direct it, surely required extraordinary imagination. Ulli of course thrived on the pioneering nature of the venture: as always, he was flexible and quick enough to see that this was another door waiting to be fully opened. Small towns, after all, have their own advantages: one

very quickly knew in person the mayor, the bankers, the customs officers,

the school teachers, the businessmen. With good human relations everybody could be accessible and their goodwill secured. As Ulli has

always had in abundance the qualities of making friends, he soon built a small, mixed and intensely loyal community of patrons for the house: students, university professors, bankers, housewives, businessmen, Turkish

immigrants, and more. In Udo Schmidt and Sissy Thammer especially, Ulli found two very interesting and formidable allies. Udo Schmidt is the owner

of the Steingraeber Piano factory (the smallest piano factory in Europe, but one of the best), whose magnificent rococo house is always at Ulli's disposal for staging small concerts. The co-operation of Sissy Thammer, Director of the International Youth Festival, has made all kinds of activities possible.

217

Ulli's leaving after three years in 1984 was only in a minor part due to petty bureaucracy which, while unable to interfere with the broader scheme of things in the house, could nevertheless rig up an endless stream of petty hassles. His primary reason for leaving was to give Tokunbo the chance of being a regular student in the last year of his secondary school education. Ulli left with a bang. On the last evening he staged a concert in the famous baroque Opera House of Bayreuth (arguably the most beautiful theatre in Europe), entitled "Classical African and Indian Percussion". On the African side Muraina Oyelami and Lamidi Ayankunle led a Yoruba dundun and bata ensemble; on the Indian side the great singer Ramamani and her husband, the brilliant percussionist T.A.S. Mani, led the South Indian karnatik music. Tunji Beier played on both sides. The event was significant in many ways: Ulli had penetrated the inner sanctum of German culture in conservative Bayreuth, a venue so sacred that only the great European classics like Bach, Mozart and Beethoven had ever been performed there. Ulli's act was at first considered a sacrilege. The bold act was necessary to make IWALEWA-Haus an integral part of the cultural life of Bayreuth. The concert was also significant in that it marked the beginning of Ulli's great series of experiments with multicultural music, which he continued upon his return in 1989. Dr Ruprecht, former Director of the Goethe Institute in Lagos, ran IWALEWA-Haus from 1984 to 1988. He organized excellent programmes and in 1986 even somehow found the money to bring Ulli and Georgina all the way from Australia for "An Evening of African Poetry". In the first half of the elaborate programme, Ulli read traditional Yoruba poems in German translation, with bata musical accompaniment by Muraina Oyelami, Rabiu Ayandokun and Lamidi Ayankunle (the last two are from a family of traditional bata drummers). The second part was for more contemporary works, in which a German actor read poems by Senghor and Soyinka, while Akin Euba accompanied him with his IWALEWA ENSEMBLE. Georgina did the backdrops to all these activities. Ulli came back again for a conference in 1988, sponsored by the Research Committee of the University of Bayreuth. On this visit, he was told that Dr

Ruprecht was leaving soon and would he like to come back? Again, there were those saying that the place had not been the same since he left. He immediately thought that if he should return, he would secure better 218

conditions

for

the

centre,

like

more

staff for

instance.

The

major

temptation, however, and which decided him eventually, was that here was another opportunity to do more for Nigerians and Nigerian culture; certainly more than he could ever do on his own in Australia. In March of 1989 Ulli, Georgina and Tunji came back. Tokunbo stayed back in Australia to pursue his electronic-engineering career while Tunji, already an accomplished percussionist trained on Yoruba and South Indian drums, embarked on his own music career in Europe. Running IWALEWAHaus and its activities was more than any single director and an assistant could do. Thus, Georgina remained the unofficial, unpaid full-time colleague. Whatever little time was left for her she spent quietly pursuing her own artistic career. Ulli resumed his practice of publishing monographs and books on music, and inviting musicologists from Africa as well as all over the world to stay and work in the house. One of such African musicologists was Akin Euba,

with whom Ulli has been working since 1971. Akin Euba had a busy and very productive time when he came as artist-in-residence and guest professor

in the University.

He

enlargened

and

enriched

the institute's

music archive that had been set up by Dr Wolfgang Bender, did a number of compositions and put together a multicultural group (of students playing

various African instruments) called IWALEWA ENSEMBLE. Akin Euba also wrote monographs and an academic book on traditional and contemporary African music while in the House.

The sparse publication resources available in IWALEWA-Haus have also been made available to that other category of artists whose voice has been neglected since the hegemonic hold of the West on the world's cultures through colonialism and Western education. Who, in Nigeria for instance, would ever think that artists like Twins

Seven-Seven, Muraina Oyelami,

Ademola Onibonokuta, Sangodare Ajala, Segun Faleye, to name just a few, have something deserving of scholarly attention and worth documenting in

books to say about themselves and their art? Or that their life stories deserve being told? In the little bookstore in IWALEWA-Haus, interviews with these and other artists from Africa, India and the Pacific, who carry

their traditional heritage from the past well into the present, are as privileged as those with the likes of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. There is not only the encouragement or promotion of African and other 219

third world arts and cultures here, there is also a strong politico-cultural statement being made. The most visible, and certainly the most famous aspect of the house's music activities is the concerts. Through IWALEWA-Haus, the Alarinjo theatre tradition in Yoruba society has been given a new lease of life and become a regular feature of the cultural scene in Europe. Started in Australia originally, the multicultural group OKUTA PERCUSSION has found a home in the House, performed regularly in the Opera House as well as in other equally prestigious shrines of European high culture. The creation of a new type of music has been of especial interest to Ulli: to its constant realization in practice, he has been bending all the personal and institutional resources at his disposal. Again, he himself has put the principle behind it most succinctly (Obafemi, 1993; 30): From a certain point of view I find our work in music even more important. Because an artist works in isolation. He can show his completed work to others and discuss it with them. But while he is creating he must lock himself in. Music on the other hand is a social art form. It's a joint effort of several people. Therefore it allows you all kinds of possibilities for intercultural experimentation. Its now famous annual festival Grenzüberschreitungen ("Border Crossings") is constantly exploring how musicians from Africa, India, the Pacific regions and Europe can bring together all the different traditions that they are masters of, and combine to produce one single yet multicultural music. As in the kinds of music or categories of musicians that IWALEWA-Haus under Ulli engages and promotes, so in the kinds of other arts and literature. In Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Australia, Ulli has always sought out those whom the invasion of Western civilization had pushed to the low fringes of their own societies, but whose arts and thinking were in truth central to those societies. His search was not so much for the "authentic" for its own sake as some critics mistakenly or mischievously thought, but for that which is vital and continuous from the pre-colonial past through the colonial period itself, to the present. It is only these, Ulli believes, that can rescue these societies from the stifling fascination of the West. Ulli's thinking on this matter is quite simple: the West should exist on the margin of Africa (and other third world societies), not at its centre.

220

To continue aiming to be culturally indistinguishable from the West does neither Africa nor the West itself any good. The all-too-real damages of slavery and colonialism cannot be undone, but Africa can reshape its present so as to ensure that in future it stays at the centre of its own world, not at its periphery, or the fringe of another's. To seek to be like the West is

merely to be perpetually imitating the West, and therefore to continue to be inauthentic. meaning.

Only

at this

level

of equality

does

multiculturalism

have

In IWALEWA-Haus, Ulli carried on this campaign in a reverse yet logically continuous manner. Having spent all those years on the so-called fringes to which imperialism has confined Africa and other places, having also mostly been on the margins of those precarious centres of Western cultures, it was time to carry on the fight in the centre itself. He did this at both literal and symbolic levels. The battle at the literal level was joined — and won — on the threshold moment of IWALEWA-Haus being born. When Ulli arrived to start it, he was

shown a small palace far outside town — a place on the far fringe of the

Bayreuth community. It was fine and spacious, Ulli agreed, but no, he did

not want it. He wanted a place of easy access, possibly right in the heart of the city, where the house's activities would become a part of the daily life of the community. He chose the present site instead, close to the market square, to the Bayreuth Opera House and to a synagogue. The university

said it would take some time to evacuate its administrative staff then occupying the building, so would he take temporary accommodation somewhere else meanwhile? Again Ulli said no, he was in no hurry, would

go back to Australia, but was available whenever the place was ready, be it in a year or two, or even three. That did the trick. Ulli's strategic location for IWALEWA-Haus was also symbolic. The house is meant to bring African and third world cultures to Germany; existing close by the Opera House and a synagogue therefore means that it is on an equal footing in the inner space which the two traditions represented by the Opera House and the synagogue have historically and culturally occupied

in European civilization. The annual concert which Ulli organized in the Opera House, the monument par excellence to European high culture, was a further extension of that symbolic fight. Ulli remembers with amusement

221

the response that greeted his first act of 'cultural effrontery' of putting a non-European performance in the Opera House (Obafemi, 1993; 6-7 & 34): I make a point of putting on an African or Indian concert in the Bayreuth Opera house once a year ... it is the most beautiful theatre in Europe (built 1748) and it is a very prestigious venue. When I put on an annual concert of African music there, I am trying to say to the German audience: "With due respect to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, there are other classical music traditions — different but as complex and intense and rewarding as your own. And you must listen to a Dundun orchestra or to Igbo xylophones with as much concentration as you do to a Beethoven string quartet. "In the meantime," Ulli also adds, "people have accepted these concerts here as anormal annual event." If any other energetic and imaginative director, be he an African or an Africanist, could carry out the activities that Ulli, with the able and tireless Georgina by his side, did in IWALEWA-Haus, and even with equal efficiency, there are not many who could have the same abiding philosophy and principle. IWALEWA-Haus was a perpetuation of what started as MBARI Club and MBARI MBAYO so long ago. In its activities IWALEWA-Haus under Ulli drew on his immense contacts in all of Africa, India, the Pacific nations, Australia, Europe and America. Again, any other person could conceivably have, or cultivate, an equal wide range of contacts at all social levels; but only Ulli could have built such contacts on intimacy and longstanding friendships. The combination of intimate friendship and contact with artists at all levels, makes Ulli value the artist and the creative process more than the finished

product. This is why he could never have agreed to the idea of running a museum or even an art gallery. Thus, guiding the kind of activities which IWALEWA-Haus emphasized is the Igbo artistic idea and tradition of MBARI. Ulli himself has expounded on this (Obafemi, 1993; 33): This is a place that likes to stimulate creativity. We are a new kind of

MBARI. I believe very strongly, like the Owerri Igbos who build the Mbari mud monuments, that without creativity

a community is dead.

And there is another big lesson we learn from the builders of Mbari

houses: it's the process of creation that is important, not the finished

object. It is not the function of the artist to create museum pieces that last a thousand

years.

It is his function

to constantly

renew

the

creative process, to rethink the culture. To adapt, to modify, to 222

transform. And so in this ever-changing world African cultures must also transform themselves constantly by interacting with the other

cultures of the world. This interaction takes place here at IWALEWA-

Haus

and

that we

contribution.

make

such

interactions

possible

is our major

Underlying it all is the principle of iwalewa, borrowed to give the centre he has created in the heart of Europe a distinctly African name and identity. A Yoruba philosophical-ethical-religious thought, iwalewa is so abstruse in meaning and yet so pervasive in use (it is commonly vulgarized as slogans on passenger vehicles) that its importance in social behaviour is assumed to be self-evident. Only when tasked to either explain or translate it into another language does one realize that it 1s as elusive of precise definition as it is rich in meaning. Notable among scholars of Yoruba arts, religion and ethics who have grappled with the expression are Wande Abimbola, Rowland Abiodun and Ulli himself. Rowland Abiodun's discussion (1990,

66-71) of the concept, which builds on those of Wande Abimbola and others

can be briefly

summarized

here. /wa

means

both

character

and

existence; while ewa refers to the surface beauty of a thing, as well as to its "deep essence" or "intrinsic worth". The ideal state or form of existence (iwa) is immortality. As ewa is a consequence of iwa (hence "iwalewa"), so an object's ewa is what imbues it with its unique identity. Loss of that

unique identity means loss of beauty. Ulli has thrown light on another dimension of the phrase: Every being has its own innate beauty, because existence is beautiful

in itself. Our 'inner eye' can perceive this beauty, even if the iwa of

another person is uncongenial to our own being.

Therefore tolerance, ingrained in Yoruba thinking, is a practical rule of social interaction. "Yoruba tolerance arises from the concept that the creator god is responsible for all! human beings," Ulli deduces further. "We must respect the iwa of every human being because in it we honour the secret intentions of the creator."

I can only elaborate briefly on the above. First, perhaps it needs to be stressed that though iwalewa is a philosophical-aesthetic idea, it is not an abstraction but an ethical standard applied to, and embodied in, people, objects, entities and even actions. Involved in iwalewa is the recognition that ewa (beauty) is an active, dynamic principle of being, like iwa (existence of a thing, its character and social behaviour) itself. Indeed, the 223

phonetic closeness of the two words, plus their being brought together in the expression iwalewa, show how the one is constantly transforming itself into the other. Character is not only beauty; character creates beauty. A thing must be alive, active and vital before it can have both iwa and ewa. Neither iwa nor ewa is a passive state — both must be socially functional. This therefore means that a dead/dying culture has lost/is losing both its iwa and ewa. Consequently, the notion of iwalewa radically interrogates the practices of anthropology and ethnology: they have neither ewa nor iwa since they are more forms of knowledge, or contemplation, and less programmes of action. They cannot do much, if anything, about the beleaguered societies and cultures that they describe and analyze so painstakingly, and sometimes so lovingly. To put it another way, both their iwa and ewa are non-functional to their subjects. Ulli's lifework, from MBARI Club Ibadan and MBARI MBAYO Osogbo, through his activities in Papua New Guinea and Australia, to IWALEWA-Haus in Bayreuth, Germany, has been a recognition and practice of the twofold quiddity and dynamism entailed in iwalewa. The arts and cultures of the various peoples he has been involved with are not only recognized in their quickness and therefore uniqueness, he has made his own contributions to see that they remain vitally so. In "the success of Tunji," Ulli has said, "I see a kind of fulfillment of my own life's work." This is true. Equally true is it that all his activities from the beginning right up to and including those in IWALEWA-Haus, are also fulfillments and extensions of his own iwa and ewa. Again and as usual, Ulli himself has given the simplest, yet most fundamental, explanation for it all: When people are trying to assess my "role" in Nigeria (he has said almost in exasperation), they are forgetting that I did not go to "study" a culture. I was neither a historian nor an anthropologist. I just became part of it all, because I responded to what I saw and to what I met; and because people treated me like another human being,

not like a European or a colonialist or a scholar ... I must have made some impact (on Yoruba culture), simply because I was there, because I was enthusiastic about their culture and because I could see certain aspects of their lifestyle with completely fresh eyes, while

they were simply taking it for granted.

224

CHAPTER VII THE ANXIETY

OF IMAGE — RESPONSES AND RECEPTIONS

Even a modest survey or review of Ulli's creative and scholarly writings on Yoruba and Nigerian arts and cultures alone deserves a whole book of its own: the numerous articles on festivals and the arts in Odu, Black Orpheus, Nigeria Magazine and so many other journals around the world; the books on the same subjects; the first and very seminal anthology of modern African poetry in English; the critical articles and edited books of essays on Europhone African literature. There are also his own collections of various genres of Yoruba oral poetry and their translations (in collaboration with Bakare Gbadamosi or the Timi of Ede) into English; his translations of Négritude poetry from French to English for publication in Black Orpheus; his translations of German plays into English for Theatre Express, or with Duro Ladipo into Yoruba for the latter to adapt for his own theatre. Finally, there are his own plays, most famous of which are The Imprisonment of Obatala and Born With a Fire on His Head.

When Ulli lived in Papua New Guinea the literary productions increased still more in variety and output: radio plays, editing of poetry journals, helping the leaders of that country to write their autobiographies, and more.

In IWALEWA-Haus

Ulli has continued these activities by writing on his

early days at the University College Ibadan, on his friendship and collaboration with Duro Ladipo and on the Osogbo art movement. He has

also engaged many African writers, artists and scholars in extensive and highly reflexive conversations on the events of the "African cultural reawakening" (of the 1960s). At the same time, he has encouraged other artists who might never have thought of putting their experiences and ideas on paper to do so. He has stretched the very limited resources of IWALEWAHaus to publish most of these primary and secondary materials. For a man who deliberately refused to make a profession out of the intellectual life and who never saw — and still does not see — himself as a literary person, least of all as a writer, the output is phenomenal in scope, quality and quantity.

As hinted in the opening statement, the aim in this chapter is not to undertake a survey or review of this lifelong, extremely variegated and

intense literary activity. Rather I merely wish to present a few selected but

representative commentaries and criticisms of his works, and activities in general, and comment on them where necessary. To the positive commentaries and criticisms, nothing need be added; on the negative ones, there is a lot that need to be commented upon and clarified. Before that, however, two general comments — one on the productivity, the other on their reception — are in order. Together they both illuminate the works as well as Ulli's own attitude to their reception. Ulli's literary productions in whatever genre or form are extensions of one another, as well as being developments out of his concrete activities and social involvements. The plays on Yoruba history were a result of his knowledge of Yoruba society, history, myths and institutions, which in turn came from his participation in Yoruba rituals and festivals, as well as interactions with certain groups of individuals. More directly, they came as a result of his participation in the Duro Ladipo theatre, especially the collaboration in translating Duro's plays from Yoruba to English. The nature of the involvement in Duro's theatre was itself dictated by his much earlier and longer acquaintance with Yoruba religions and festivals. He started translating initially because he needed materials for his classes, and later because Theatre Express needed plays immediately. The same practical reasons motivated him to translate and publish Yoruba oral poetry

as well as Negritude poetry in Black Orpheus: to stimulate local literary

creativity and make people aware that there also is their own literature; to produce links between the oral and written, between African and European languages; and to build bridges between Africa and the black Diaspora. Only later would translation as a creative activity in multi- and interculturalism assume a life of its own in his mind. He became a scholar of Yoruba oral poetry because he was fascinated by the religion, the oba institution, and many other aspects of Yoruba religious and political civilization. To him at first, the poems reflected that civilization at a

deeper, unified level; then they revealed themselves to be great works of

literature in their own Poetry.

226

right. Hence

the eventual

publication

of Yoruba

For Ulli there can — and should — be no separation between a life of active

engagement and the intellectual, contemplative one. The one comes first and is supreme because the most creative in the literal sense of that word; the other should be a result of it. The art that flows from a life of active engagement may not be a ‘masterpiece’, but it is likely to have the quality of truthfulness to experience.

Sometime early in 1960, and while Nigeria was in the grip of hectic preparations for independence, the magazine Encounter sent Colin MaclInnes out to Nigeria to do an extensive report on the country and its various peoples. Colin MacInnes was a sensitive journalist with a nose for that which most people didn't see. He had lived with Africans and West Indians in London and written the first, and very seminal book, The City of Spades, on that community of exiles. He came to Nigeria, spent a part of

his six-week tour with the Beiers in Osogbo,

and included Ulli's and

Susanne's activities in his long, thoughtful report. When Ulli travelled to London shortly after Colin MacInnes's visit, he met the editor of Encounter, who showed him the article before it was

published. Ulli thought he had been misrepresented, so the editor phoned

Mr MaclInnes to arrange a meeting. The two met in a café, in an encounter that proved to be of great significance to Ulli thenceforth. When Ulli complained of the misrepresentation, Colin MacInnes thought for a

moment before responding:

"Look, if you like," he said, "I can take out what you don't like in the article, but I just want to tell you something. Whether you like it or not, you have become a public figure of some kind and people will continue to

misrepresent you. Will you spend the rest of your life challenging them?"

Ulli learned a lifelong lesson that day: it is better to turn to the next activity

than spend energy responding to adverse criticisms or misunderstandings. He thanked Colin MaclInnes and the two parted as great friends. Thus, though on the whole Ulli has received more appreciative responses or criticisms than adverse ones, he has never gone out of his way to look for either. If he came across the favourable ones, he was silently grateful; the

other he simply ignored. Starting with the unexpected public mention he got at the Paris conference in 1956, most admiring critics and commentators on Ulli's activities 227

(literary or practical) have somehow grasped their wholeness, indivisibility, and a part of their purpose. Colin MacInnes was not completely enchanted by all what Ulli was doing in and around Osogbo in 1960 but, in "Welcome, Beauty Walk", the article he wrote for his magazine, he was one of the earliest to recognize a part of that purpose and say it emphatically (p.42): What ... seems to me indisputable is that the instinct both he (UIl1) and his wife share to make us learn from Africa, and for heaven's sake stop "teaching" it, is wholly right: for the almost total absence of curiosity about, and of respect for, African cultures (I mean as something immediately valuable, and not merely as supposedly dead material for curious examination) is the greatest, and most obstinate European fault; and the vulgar contempt for its social, but nonmechanical, cultural achievements is a shallow betrayal of what, in European culture itself, has worth far above our practical schoolboy skill in gadgetry. Louis James was another. In his essay "The Protest Tradition: Black Orpheus and Transition" (1969; 109-124), he put his finger on what Black Orpheus was about from the beginning (p.110): "Writers now had the incentive of a forum for their work, and a chance to have their writing discussed widely where it mattered most — Africa." Perhaps even more perceptive was his point that the journal's editors were doing a wise thing by including traditional art, thereby also providing (pp.111-2): a perfect means of communication between traditional African cultures and the reader who knew nothing of African dialect. Louis James went on to illustrate his point with two pictures published to support Ulli's argument about 'Yoruba and Igbo art’. Bernth Lindfors's article, "A Decade of Black Orpheus" (1968; 509-516), covered the same ground as Louis James's and came to the same favourable conclusion: its seminal importance in the development of modern African

literature in English. On this, Bernth Lindfors said (p.515):

.... there is evidence to suggest that (Black Orpheus) has been a powerful source of stimulation and inspiration for a number of African authors, particularly in Nigeria. Besides encouraging writers by publishing their first works, Black Orpheus showed them what

their contemporaries

at home

and abroad were

writing.

Several

writers appear to have made use of ideas gleaned from its pages."

228

Lindfors's assessment (pp.5 15-6):

of Ulli himself is worth

quoting

at more

length

Black Orpheus owes its reputation and longevity to the industry, intelligence, and skill of editor Ulli Beier. He was its architect, coordinating engineer, mason, day laborer, and workhorse; in ten years, sometimes under pseudonyms ... he wrote twenty-two articles, fifty reviews, and forty translations ... many of them breaking new ground in unexplored regions of the arts ... Black Orpheus looms as a landmark in African literary history, a monument to Negro creativity. It is also a monument to Ulli Beier, the man who made it so. (emphasis added) The last critic to be cited here is Peter Benson, whose

length study of Black Orpheus

expanded, book-

and Transition (1986) comes

almost a

decade after Louis James's and Bernth Lindfors's articles. Peter Benson devotes a long section to Black Orpheus in his book and, even though a younger academic cut in the new intellectual mode of deconstructing books, institutions and persons, gives a full, detailed account of Ulli's activities on the journal. He thereby corroborates Bernth Lindfors's characterization of Ulli the editor as "architect, coordinating engineer, mason, day laborer, and workhorse" (1986; 57). Benson also sees an aspect

of Ulli's stewardship as editor not seen or commented on by others: his use of the journal to set high critical standards, plus

its role as arbiter of quality and analyst of the dominant trends, social

implications, and core of representation in these new works of art, many of which were not easy of access to even the most sophisticated reader. (1986; 57)

Peter

Benson's

conclusion

is

also

worth

quoting.

"Beier's

practical

success," he emphasizes on the same page,

... moreover stands in sharp contrast to Black Orpheus's fate in other hands. Beier accomplished the difficult tasks of founding the magazine, attracting a school of accomplished contributors, building its reputation and theirs, finding financial support, and expanding

distribution — all without really being able to devote more than a fraction of his attention ... Black Orpheus ... came out regularly for

ten years and its influence grew.

This painstaking historian of the magazine also notes its immediate decline, in quality, regularity of appearance, production and distribution, from the moment

Ulli

Beier

left

it.

"In

contrast,"

Benson

concludes,

"Black

229

Orpheus's consistency and regularity under Beier insured that its influence would persist." (1986; 94) That is, Ulli's influence on modern African literature did not end when he stopped editing the magazine; the period of his editorship indeed remains the most important period in the development of the literature from its beginning to the present. Political criticism and artistic correctness

Although the aim of this section is not to answer all hostile critics on behalf of Ulli, it is nevertheless necessary to re-examine certain issues raised by a few of them. While current attitudes to non-Western cultures, coupled with trends in Cultural Studies have vindicated him, those issues have not exactly been directly confronted in Africa. In this regard, two preliminary observations are necessary. The first is that most, if not all the hostile criticism and responses came mainly from members of the Westerneducated Nigerian elite class. Why this should be so is open to speculation and will probably have as many answers as any number of people asked, including some of the critics themselves. The other point is that, in the contemporary global campaign to recognize the equality and integrity of all cultures, and to ensure their survival, the modern African intellectual's role has remained feeble, where not dubious or even outrightly hostile. Thus, new disciplines like Multiculturalism, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture, Gender Studies, or even PostColoniality, are more to be found in Western than African universities. To cite another evidence, when Ngugi wa Thiong'o declared his stand on the language issue, he received more attacks and jeers from fellow African writers and scholars than from non-African colleagues. These alone would have made a full and comprehensive review of Ulli's writings apposite here, for Ulli's activities in Nigeria were dedicated to proving the points that Ngugi would come round to seeing and making so momentous (yet so natural, right and reasonable) about three decades later. But such a review cannot be done here for reasons already given. That the new disciplines are not currently being offered in many an African university (minus South Africa) cannot be due to lack of qualified staff alone: there is another reason. In a country like Nigeria, with colonialism came the rise of a local bourgeoisie made up of two branches: the commercial branch (members of which may or may not have much 230

Western education); the clerical branch, members of which, by definition have Western education up to a middle level and higher. Included in this category

are

senior

government

bureaucrats,

writers

and

university

teachers, among others. The commercial half of the Nigerian bourgeoisie has been oriented from the beginning to the import-export of consumption goods, the counterpart of which, among the clerical-intelligentsia group, is also the import-export of cultural and intellectual products. The importexport mentality misunderstood by

constitutes the main source the intellectual cadre, including

of why Ulli some of those

was with

whom he worked closely at MBARI Club and Black Orpheus. The devious ways it operated (and still operates) need to be elaborated upon, through

examples, before going to specific criticisms. Sometime in 1954, as part of his preparations for the Ede conference on Yoruba Culture (see chapter V), Ulli went to see the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi. While they were discussing Yoruba history and other matters relating to the conference, one of the bigwigs of the Action Group party came in. After listening impatiently for a while to the discussion, this

bright and distinguished politician contributed a short, sharp dismissal of the entire project. Wearily, he turned to Ulli and declared: "You and your African culture. There is no such thing. It's just medieval culture!" In one sweeping statement, this leading light of a party that had started as a

cultural organization assimilated African history and culture into the European and dismissed the former, to make way for the appropriation of (modern)

European

civilization.

condescension as by the dismissal.

Ulli

was

struck

as

much

by

the

This burial of the African present in the graveyard of a European past was, sadly, met with silence by Oba Adesoji Aderemi, descendant of the mythical primogenitor of all Yoruba people, and their spiritual leader. It was not that the oba did not believe in the values of the traditions and culture that put him on his throne, and that he was custodian of. It was simply that in the presence of such an eminent personification of the success and power of the clerical bourgeoisie, he momentarily lost confidence in the integrity and values of his own past (as well as present) to stand up for it. Two other distinct but related episodes further confirm the prevalence of the same complex of attitudes. Ten years later, in August 1964, a Dr 231

Helfritz came to Nigeria on behalf of Nicholas Nabokov, to select a Nigerian company to perform at the Berlin Festival that year. Dr Helfritz chose Duro Ladipo and his play Oba Koso. But although the Federal Government of Nigeria was not involved in anyway, the Minister of Information would not support Duro Ladipo's application for passports for himself and his company because, in his own judgment, Oba Koso showed Yoruba people in a "primitive" light. He wanted to send his own brother's "modern" highlife band instead. That the organizers of the Berlin Festival did not want a nightclub band, no matter how "modern", did not occur to him. Duro Ladipo had to camp on the Minister's doorsteps and threaten more desperate actions before he got the passports, three days before departure date. On the day the company arrived in Berlin, an earlier performance of Oba Koso filmed by Klaus Stephan was shown on German television. The Nigerian ambassador in Bonn saw it and was horrified: the actors were not wearing shoes! He immediately despatched his First Secretary to meet the company and instruct its leader that all of them "must wear shoes on stage, because the impression might be created that Nigerians did not know how to wear shoes!" The performance went ahead the following night without the actors encumbered by that all-important index of civilization. The ambassador, who sat in the front row, scowled and growled throughout. As the play ended and he was still collecting his diplomatic shame and anger in his hands, preparatory to perhaps ordering the company back to the airport straight from the theatre, the audience broke into thunderous applause. It took him only a few seconds to recover, however, whereupon he bounded onto the stage to get his own share of the glory and bask in the limelight that followed. The ambassador was proud and elated, because the foreign audience gave its total approval. Still, the ambassador could not see the play as an artistic success in its own right. While the rest of the audience saw a great drama fantastically realized on stage that night, the ambassador saw only a national imageboosting and promotion package that had, somehow, unexpectedly succeeded. As the prolonged applause died down, he turned to Duro Ladipo and beamed: "And now, let us sing the Nigerian national anthem!"

232

It may be said that an ambassador is, after all, there to take care of the image of his country, and that this in any case is a trivial episode. Except that, in their bare bones, the ambassador's changing responses and attempted ‘instant’ (mis)appropriation of art for propaganda purposes are paradigmatic of the responses to, and criticisms of, Ulli's cultural, artistic, and intellectual activities in Nigeria, especially among the new elite class. Colin MacInnes had witnessed it first-hand in 1960. In the Encounter article already referred to, he noted the following chain of reactions to

Black Orpheus and Odu (p. 41):

The colonial, and then Western Regional governments, which provided publishing facilities without perhaps quite realising yet what they were publishing, passed, in their reactions to these

periodicals, through the phases of indifference, alarm, and then, as their world-wide possessive pride.

reputations

became

apparent,

an

attitude

of

A street-level version of that response played again and again in Osogbo in the early days of Duro Ladipo's MBARI MBAYO Club and theatre. Hawkers,

mechanics, apprentices, teachers — all passers-by — would look at Duro and his actors and taunt them with the abusive words "ajebo! aborisa!" When Duro Ladipo took his plays abroad and became famous, the same people

became possessively proud: he became their illustrious son, worthy hero and cultural ambassador. Hitherto traditional figures and subjects had either been neglected or ridiculed on the stage; but now his successes abroad gave many other theatre groups the confidence to start dramatizing them with

respect and seriousness, and in the inherited theatrical idioms. As with the

ambassador, the intrinsic value of what he was doing was lost on them, or at least less important than the image it projected.

More refined versions of this kind of criticism of Ulli were taking place among the writers, critics and academics themselves, though coated with pretensions to intellectual and creative universalism. It was all an eloquent

witness to the loss of confidence in the self, which required a perpetual seeking for approval from outside — specifically from the West.

Loss of confidence in one's self, culture and traditions; appropriation of one aspect or another of Western culture and traditions; and/or search for Western approval that, when given, leads to return of confidence and possessive pride. Although in the actual encounters narrated above each

233

was exhibited by a different person in a different form, together they constitute three stages of a single mental process, or psychological profile. Its expression took different forms among either the artisan class in the cities, or among the commercial and clerical branches of the emerging middle class, but it was the same psycho-social profile. The profile was no less present in the university-educated writers just emerging in the period. It might have led to the critical practice of singling out only one aspect of Ulli's activities and isolating that for hostile commentary. This is a common feature of all the critics — and all are Nigerians — as varied as they are in other aspects. It has been necessary to trace and dwell on it at this length because it was the main thing that Ulli was up against, more than any personal quarrels or antipathies. The hostile critics I will briefly look at here, in the context of all that have been said above, are: Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark on Black Orpheus and MBARI Club; Babatunde Lawal on the Osogbo art movement; Oyekan Owomoyela on Ulli's play The Imprisonment of Obatala; Ebun Clark, Demas Nwoko and David Kerr (not a Nigerian) on Ulli's influence on Duro Ladipo's theatre. All are representative of the different yet common types of negative criticism of Ulli's activities and works. Asked by Dennis Duerden, in 1963 (Duerden and Pieterse, 1972; 139-143) to comment on "the separate roles of Black Orpheus and Transition", Christopher Okigbo replied that the former was too insistent on "the black mystique — blackness for its own sake." The latter magazine, he was proud to say, "publishes anybody who cares to write ... black or white. We do not discriminate." Pressed further on these and other equally astounding claims, Okigbo said what he found "basically wrong with Black Orpheus" was that "it would publish an American negro but it would not publish a white American." Even in those heady days of independence everywhere in Africa, this was carrying romantic universalism a little too far. The 'dream' of Okigbo's poetry had substituted for the urgent realities of Africa in 1963; how otherwise explain what he aimed to turn Transition into? It seemed (as expressed in the same interview) that pleasing the magazine's "English, French and Japanese subscribers" was more important to him than making it available for Africans (for whom Rajat Neogy founded it) to write in and

read. Christopher Okigbo's other accusation of ‘black parochialism' against 234

Black Orpheus was completely baseless, even in 1963. It would have been easy, of course, for anybody who cared, to burst these (and other) bubbles that Christopher Okigbo seemed to have been given to blowing in interviews. As Bernth Lindfors showed in the article already referred to (1968; 515), within its first ten years of existence Black Orpheus had published "works by 224 writers and artists from twenty-six African nations, fourteen West Indian and Latin American states, England, Germany, Sweden, India, Persia, Indonesia, and the United States." But as the journal remained resolutely African and Afro-American in outlook and aim, this international character was not enough for Okigbo: very much like his own poetry, it had to be bleached white. Further evidence, and the most persuasive of all, is of course to be found in that poetry. In several interviews, Christopher Okigbo always proudly announced the pedigree of his poems: Western literary and musical traditions, never an indigenous African one. Already inordinately influenced by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and other modernists, and by essays like T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and Individual Talent", he saw himself as equally an inheritor of the venerable European literary traditions, from

Virgil through the French Symbolistes to the modernists themselves. From

the modernists, Okigbo learnt his extreme form of modernist political and literary aesthetics only too well. Into the exemplary works of those masters,

and the lesson they taught, Okigbo simply assimilated poor Mother Idoto. The only specifically African poetic trope that Okigbo ever used, borrowed from the oriki of the king of Ikere, was taken from Ulli's translation which had been made available in Black Orpheus. In both his poetry and the interviews, Okigbo saw himself as a modernist who just happened to be an African whose identity as 'poet' overrode his Africanness, and who had resurrected, phoenix-like (the sunbird persona of his poems), from the ashes of traditional Africa. The opposite was exactly Ulli's belief and motivation: traditional Africa was not something that colonialism had reduced to dust but a vital, living present. And if African traditions were not dead, why bury them alive so as to find an excuse to appropriate somebody else's? There were those who, like Okigbo, had seemingly successfully assimilated themselves to European traditions, and Ulli had no quarrel with them, even appreciated their sheer mental leap. There were also those who had not, and he insisted that they too be acknowledged. 235

Cultures renew themselves by borrowing from others, not by acts of abject surrender and imitation. Another MBARI colleague who now looks down on Ulli's activities of those

days is J.P. Clark-Bekederemo

(formerly J.P. Clark), also a modernist

African poet and dramatist. In Robert M. Wren's book, Those Magical Years, published in 1991, J.P. Clark says, "His (Ulli's) idea of African art is mud. It comes from mud, and it should stay in mud" (p.111; his emphasis). Like Christopher Okigbo's insistence about thirty years earlier that traditional African sculptors were mere artisans (1972; 140-1), this reflects more on J.P. Clark-Bekederemo's attitude to his own culture than on Ulli. Like that insistence too, this attitude to traditional African art was different only in degree from that of the Europeans at the University College Ibadan, who amused themselves with the 'primitive' edan ogboni which they passed round at their dinner tables. As the art exhibitions of MBARI Club have been dealt with elsewhere in this book, it is pointless going over them here to provide factual refutation of J.P. Clark's frivolous charge. Of the first MBARI premises, of which J.P. Clark said to Robert Wren (1991; 111) that it had become too small and that it was "a mud place", Ezekiel Mphahlele, first president of the club, had this to say in his autobiographical novel The Wanderers (p.334): Takora Centre (MBARI Club) where Timi (Mphahlele) sat and talked with Buzz and then with Emil (Ulli) was a meeting place for writers and artists and people interested in the arts. It was Emil's project initially, and he roped in a few writers and artists to help him run it. It had an Africana library and reading room; a lounge, an open-air theatre that could seat two hundred and fifty people. It attracted several people: art lovers or those who wanted to sniff around and feel part of a class, intellectuals or those who wanted to talk art and literature and feel that they belonged, indigenous or jazz musicians, drummers and dancers. Adjoining the centre was a Lebanese restaurant. Here one could eat pilaf and shish kebab, humus and peeta, couscous and kishke. In a recent conversation between Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier (1996; 15), the former has also described the same premises as follows: You could never recreate that atmosphere: the combination of that

old Lebanese man and his own enclave there and then being situated in the middle of the market. It was right in the heart of throbbing

Yoruba life. They (J.P. Clark and others) did not see what they were 236

losing. The size was totally irrelevant. The very makeshift quality of the original Mbari was a challenge. And it didn't alienate anybody. Moving into the Central alienated a lot of people.

In Wole Soyinka's judgement, when the rest of the group (minus himself and Ulli) decided to move to the grandiose Central Hotel, the club became

"a committee thing", which was the first step towards its death that came

soon afterwards. Ulli's real sin — and which is a class/cultural one — was that he also gave room for the non-elite, non-Westernized, non-bourgeoisified artists in MBARI Club and insisted that they too were artists deserving of respect and serious attention. This was the class of artists that several Westerneducated Nigerian artists and writers believed they had supplanted, whose productions they would therefore first reduce to non-art, then use as raw materials for the creation of their own bourgeois, Westernized, exportoriented art. Only an attitude of cultural snobbery, of deliberate self-dissociation from

the common people and their cultural backcloth, could produce this. It is there in two of J. P. Clark's poems of the period: "Agbor Dancer" and "Girl Bathing" (1981; 8-9). In the one, Clark first sees the dancer more as an ancestral symbol, Négritude-fashion (first stanza), than as a real, living

person

engaged

in a living

art. Then

he

confesses

his cultural/class

separation from her and his inability — more like unwillingness — to bridge it: Could I, early sequestered from my tribe,

Free a lead-tethered scribe

In the second poem, J.P. Clark might as well have been the outsider Roy Campbell writing about a Zulu girl at the beginning of the century. Roy Campbell in his own poem ("Zulu Girl") at least is honest enough to recognize the insurmountable political as well as racial and cultural barriers separating him from the girl; accordingly, he tries to empathize with her on the only basis available: a common humanity. In J.P. Clark's poem on the other hand, the poetical diction and the general straining-after-effects all work to put more distance between the self-consciously ‘sophisticated’ observer and his objectified girl. In the process, she is turned into merely a

237

representation of the past, robbed Campbell's observed girl has.

of the vitality and hope

which

Roy

For whom did Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark write in those days? Here

is where the difference between the two poets on the one hand, and Ulli on

the other, shows up most clearly. Both Black Orpheus and MBARI Club were meant for a home audience: the first to stimulate a home-grown literature; the second to cater for a local clientele, which did not exclude market women and motor-park touts. On the other hand, Christopher Okigbo's and J.P. Clark's poems of this period, although perforce published locally at the start, were written with an eye to the foreign audience; they were export products fabricated according to ‘imagined’ international (equals Western) standards. In the case of J.P. Clark's two poems, not only the poems themselves, but their subjects (the dancer, the girl bathing) have been objectified, reinvented according to such imagined aesthetic-cultural specifications. Okigbo for his part simply 'internationalized' himself and his Mother Idoto, local colour and symbolism notwithstanding. That this happened was not Ulli's fault, nor even wholly that of the poets themselves, but that of the education they had received, right up to University College Ibadan. With such fundamentally different attitudes to African culture between Ulli on the one hand, and Christopher Okigbo and J.P. Clark on the other, it is a wonder that they were able to work together at all. Street vendor, ambassador, poet or scholar, it seems that an obsessive concern with international image is the primary yardstick for separating 'good' Nigerian cultural/artistic productions from 'bad': that which projects the nation and its people favourably (that is, either as already Westernized or doing so speedily) 1s good; that which does not is bad. One of the early and very few hostile critics of the Osogbo art movement was Babatunde Lawal, art historian, critic and teacher. In his article "The Search for Identity in Contemporary Nigerian Art", (1977; 145-150), it would appear, at first glance, that he was very much concerned with the quality of art being produced by the Osogbo artists. But then he, rather grotesquely,

likened the experiments that went on in Osogbo to "a similar experiment

with monkeys in America." He also characterized the results as "a psychodramatic outpour of images that invited comparison with psychotic

art." All these gave a bad image of Nigerians and Nigerian art abroad

(p.145):

238

Whether by design or accident, the type of identity which Osogbo art has tried to give Nigeria abroad and Africa is that of the innocent Afrıcan child at the crossroads of modernization ...

and "hence a perversion of Nigeria's artistic image." The Osogbo artists are so bad because they are "mostly illiterate", because they lacked "initial preparation" and "the necessary discipline". Of the whole lot, only Jimoh Buraimoh is worth bothering about because he has "since undergone a more serious art training at the University." It is the same Tutuola argument (1) all over again: Western — and preferably university — training establishes an artist's or writer's credentials as "modern"; traditional training alone equals no training at all, or worse, means "primitive" and

therefore an embarrassment to the "modern" nation.

Turning to criticism of Ulli's activities in drama and theatre, we find the same inordinate concern with image. In his book of essays Visions and Revisions (1991; 123-135), Oyekan Owomoyela takes strong objections to Obotunde Ijimere's play The Imprisonment of Obatala. While about it, he also takes on Wole Soyinka for writing glowingly about the play in his own

Myth, Literature and the African World. Oyekan Owomoyela's purpose in

denouncing the play is to demonstrate that, contrary to Wole Soyınka's, Joel Adedeji's and Adrian Roscoe's views that Obotunde Ijimere is an

authentic interpreter of the Yoruba world view, "the author's real identity

differs so much

from the mask as to render invalid the cultural uses to

which he is being put" (1991; 134). At first, it would appear that this critic is not at all concerned with image, but he also ıs. Oyekan

Owomoyela

sets about his task on two premises: that Obotunde

Ijimere is none other than Ulli who, though "was actively involved with Nigerian and especially Yoruba culture from 1950 until 1967" (sic), is a German (1991; 123); that "Beier-Ijimere's representation of the Yoruba ethos is too often distorted and even slanderous" (1991; 130). His main

point for this, for which he cites several examples, is "Beier-Ijimere's explicit references to genitals and sexual acts in his translation of Duro Ladipo's plays as well as in his own." Owomoyela

did not have to go to great pedantic lengths to prove the

identity of Obotunde Ijimere, even to his American audience. Primary and

secondary school kids in and around Osogbo in those days knew who the bearer of such an implausible name was. If a mask it was, then it 239

functioned like a typical Yoruba mask: it revealed more than it hid. The man behind the mask was known to all friends and associates, as well as to all members of the Duro Ladipo theatre and Osogbo art movement. In other

words, Ulli made no attempt to hide it, for the very choice of such a name

was a deliberate, provocative act of disclosure. Owomoyela might also have considered the matter in the context of Ulli's other known names: Sangodare Akanjı (his Sango name) and Omidiji Aragbabalu (bestowed on him by Erinle worshippers). That Ulli published his own plays and several other works under these names had nothing to do with cultural imposture at all — which exists only in Owomoyela's imagination. Ulli lived in Osogbo and engaged in all those activities as a Yoruba, not as a German cultural missionary. Having been so suffused with the Yoruba imagination and language that resulted from translating Duro Ladipo's plays (with Duro Ladipo himself), Ulli sent the manuscripts under that spell. And may be it was a lucky thing, for had they arrived on the publishers’ desk in London under the very well — known name Ulli, they surely would have been rejected. Political correctness did not start in the 1980s, only it did not have that name in earlier days. There are deeper, more culturally significant reasons for the name, however, and which provide another angle to the 'mystery'. The primates and the simian family generally hold a pride of place in Yoruba mythology, from their association with twins and the origins of the egungun and oro cults — all respectively documented in the oriki of twins and in iwi egungun — to the folk belief that chimpanzees and monkeys are deceptively wise creatures who know their own minds. Indeed, such is the Yoruba admiration for the patient, meditative ijimere (the red Patas monkey) that he is often called babalawo inu'gbo (the babalawo of the forest). It would take somebody deeply steeped in Yoruba mythology and folklore to come up with the names Obotunde and Ijimere. At the same time, it would take somebody equally steeped in Yoruba ethos and practice of naming to coin them, fully knowing that no person would seriously bear such names. Not even the desperate mother of an abiku would give them. And here is the joke: Ulli knew all these and still gave himself the names! In other words, he was, in the technical term of Henry Louis Gates Jr., "signifying" on them — like "the signifying monkey".

240

The

other

matter

that

raises

Owomoyela's

ire

in.

Ijimere's

play

and

translations with Duro Ladipo is the explicit references to genital organs and the acts of sex. However, in dealing with it, his anxiety to cleanse the image of Yoruba ethos of any sexual impurities gets the better of his very enviable knowledge of literature ın general, and Yoruba oral literature in particular: "(T)he Yoruba do not regard sex with lewd and vulgar flippancy," he declares magisterially. "Any Yoruba who refers to it in disrespectful, contemptuous terms ... 1s engaged in damnable sacrilege"

(p.133).

The accusation of cultural impostor is a serious one indeed, especially in these days of difference multiculturalism (Terence Turner's term; see bibliography) when cultural boundaries are becoming thicker and the felt

need to keep out those who 'do not belong’ is getting stronger. Those who seek to keep out 'Others' do so by first establishing their own impeccable cultural (and intellectual) credentials. This Owomoyela proceeds to do by seeking to portray Yoruba people as puritans in sexual matters. But what

would he make of the following: the exaggeration of the male phallus in all icons depicting Esu; the consistent overstating of the human female breasts in virtually all Yoruba carvings where the human female is represented? What about the numerous carvings of palace gates, found all over Yorubaland, in which couples are often depicted in the act of copulation? As Owomoyela seems to provide irrefutable evidence, a few more counter-

evidence of Yoruba attitude to sex can still be cited from their religious and performance practices. In Sabe and Ketu, the baba elegun in a state of possession dances with a giant wooden penis! There is a standard item in

the Alarinjo repertoire when the fafa mat is turned into a puppet theatre. Two wooden dolls (a man and a woman) appear with prominent organs; they exchange ribald jokes and finally simulate intercourse — to the delight of children! There is also the common mask in the Gelede masquerade, showing

a man

facing

a woman.

The

dancer,

carrier

of the

mask,

manipulates strings from inside his costume in such a way that the couple performs intercourse. In oral literature, what would proverbs — of which he must know Yoruba proverbs Akii — which intercourse? And riddles? When

Oyekan Owomoyela make of several many, considering his excellent book of explicitly refer to sexual organs and in a rara chant performed to a bata 241

ensemble recently in Osogbo and around, a lady praised herself as follows: "Emi l'omo a d’oko l'oju agbara ki yanri ma'da si" (I am the daughter of the one who makes love on the dry river-bed without sand getting into it), her predominantly Yoruba audience, composed of men, women, boys and girls, did not stone her. Rather, they admired her boldness, expressed in the content as well as form of the line. There are also these songs sung annually at the Oke'Badan festival: Lojo Oke-Ibadan mo le f'oko roka Oke'Badan lanti lanti Baba da'gbada bole, oko nle O da'gbada bole, oko nle

(During the Oke-Ibadan festival, I can stir oka with a penis/Oke'Badan, hanging pendulous like testicles ... The old man covers his erect penis with voluminous gown/the penis is erect under his volumionus gown), examples of which can be multiplied from virtually every Yoruba community. All these reveal a frank acceptance of the fact of sex that is surely healthier than pretensions and repressions which came with the Victorian missionaries. Surely Ulli must know what in Yoruba society is 'sayable' within the framework of art and ritual, and what is not outside both. Perhaps if Oyekan Owomoyela would look more closely at The Imprisonment of Obatala, he might find that the explicit sexual imagery has a purpose that is integral to the play as a whole, rather than indicating "sexual fixation" (p.134) on the part of the author. He might also look at Obotunde Ijimere's other play Born With a Fire on His Head for comparison. Owomoyela's real but unspoken charge is that of cultural (mis)appropriation. And since in the current discourse of this charge, cultural appropriation often always leads to misrecognition, or even nonrecognition, and then domination, Ulli Beier, "a German", is by implication guilty of these also. Owomoyela finds the threats all the more real less because the play contains explicit sexual images but because it has gathered such a critical reputation. In the current political praxis of cultural exclusion, difference and representation, it is often overlooked that some supposed outsiders are really insiders.

242

The same concerns about who is qualified to present and represent Africa agitated Demas Nwoko's mind long ago in his paper "Search For a New African Theatre" presented at the Pan-African Cultural Festival, Algiers, July 1969, and subsequently published under the same title in Présence Africaine no 75, 1970. In that paper Demas Nwoko's specific criticism of Ulli Beier's involvement in the Duro Ladipo theatre was made within two general reservations that he (Nwoko) had about contemporary African theatre (then). One: try as much as they might, universities' schools of

drama in Africa can never be the seedbed of a truly (contemporary) African

theatre because these institutions are only outposts of Western cultural imperialism on the continent. Two (and arising from the above): Westerners ("Africanists") who often man these schools, in spite of all their love for African cultures, and with the best intentions in the world, can

never understand Africa (pp.56-57): "Thus, in their awkward love for our culture," Nwoko argued, "they have produced many deformed minds in these young artists and in possible admirers of good African art in other

countries." This is because only the "son of the soil" can create African theatre since only he can produce it "intuitively" (p.67); African societies have "classless social habits, their theatre is always an "expression of the people's soul", so any theatre that fails to do this can neither be

"successfully African" nor "very popular" (p.70).

This lazy resort to the mystique

of the ‘African soul' enabled Demas

Nwoko to find faults in Peggy Harper's efforts to develop a new choreography based on traditional dances, and to condemn Duro Ladipo's play Oba Koso because of Ulli Beier's reputed input in it (p.66):

Ulli Beier is not an artist, but he developed very clear ideas on what should constitute African art and theatre and went on to produce

them.

To

realise this theatre,

he created

by

suggestion

a theatre

troupe basically after the style of the existing Ogunmola and Ogunde

vernacular troupes. He suggested a historical theme from the legends, a subject that gave ample opportunity for the exhibition of

"tradition and African culture". Through further suggestions during production, original indigenous and appropriate dances (along with

poetry) were

used. Added

to this, for decor, were

back-cloths

of

typical modern art-school colours which were the result of the art workshops he had organised. The result was an exhibition of slices of African customs and traditional art forms, loosely linked by improvised dramatic movements and speech. Oba Koso, as the play

243

was

called, was

a very exotic presentation

Europe as a demonstration of our fine culture.

Well,

considering

how

conceited

and

egotistical

and it was some

sent round

self-acclaiming

artists in Nigeria are, it is a mercy that Ulli Beier is not an artist (and has never claimed to be one). As for the gratuitous injustice done to Duro Ladipo in this gross distortion of the facts, Yemi Ogunbiyi (1981; 333-353) has done a spirited rebuttal. In any case, it is rather pointless responding to a criticism made out of peevishness almost thırty years ago (Demas Nwoko was a member of MBARI Club; after the club broke up, he regularly invited Duro Ladipo, supposed creation and puppet of Ulli, to help fill the vast

space and empty nights that confronted them in the Central Hotel that he

and the others had moved to). However, two contradictions in Demas Nwoko's argument can still be pointed out. While for him Duro Ladipo's Oba Koso was a creation of the "Ulli Beier School" (p.66), Kola Ogunmola's The Palmwine Drinkard was not. Yet consider the facts, as presented by Nwoko himself (p.68): the novel from which Ogunmola's play emerged was suggested by Dr Collis and Geoffrey Axworthy; the script was written (in English) and "handed to Mr Ogunmola." Demas Nwoko himself then "took up the direction of the play at this point and started designing its visual images." It must be remembered, in all these, that Kola Ogunmola was sponsored to the Drama School to direct and produce his own play; that, again by Demas Nwoko's admission, that dramatist was composing and directing his own plays long before he came to the University's theatre. It must also be noted that, after the experiment at the University, Kola Ogunmola did not on his own adapt another novel for the stage. Duro Ladipo on the other hand continued to use Johnson's book as source. By the time he died in 1978, he had produced more than thirty full-length plays and more than fifty one-act sketches for radio and television, most of them long after Ulli was no longer around. The second contradiction follows from the first, placing Demas Nwoko and Babatunde Lawal on the same side in the 'sophistication-versusprimitivism' quarrel. Implied in the comparison between Kola Ogunmola

and Duro Ladipo is that the former is the better artist: Demas Nwoko and

company took him in hand in the University and "directed" him, whereas Duro Ladipo merely stayed in Osogbo, learnt and used only "African customs and traditional art forms." At the end (p.75) of his grandstanding

244

paper Demas Nwoko announced with a great flourish that he was going to start a centre where proper "talented African artists" would be nurtured. As in fact it was Ulli who had the initiative by which Kola Ogunmola got to Ibadan University's School of Drama, it ıs not too early now, almost thirty years later, to ask: How many of such "talented African artists" and dramatists have been produced in that centre? Ebun Clark also takes up the Duro Ladipo-Ulli Beier subject — with less

grand claims than Demas Nwoko, but still with the same subtext. Towards

the end of her book on Hubert Ogunde (1979) she joins issues with Owomoyela's assertion in his 1970 Ph.D. thesis that "Duro Ladipo, the youngest and newest of the three dramatists, ıs today the most popular." She also objects to the general critical opinion (prevalent then and now) that the younger dramatist 1s the more culturally profound and artistically rich. She counter-charges by claiming that Duro Ladipo's theatre 1s elitist and has a narrow range of repertoire. Duro Ladipo, she categorically asserts

(1979; 140),

(was) the most popular only in the minority theatre of the university circuit, particularly among expatriate intellectuals who were the first patrons of his theatre, and whose influence can be seen in his use of the conventional Western production pattern. In this popularity argument, Ebun Clark makes a factual observation the implications of which she, however, fails to pursue. Hubert Ogunde produced Yoruba Ronu in 1965 and, according to her (1979; 132-133),

His extensive use of oral traditions in this play marked a return to

cultural consciousness once more. With this play, Ogunde began to

remove from his theatre traces of the Western variety hall style ... From now on, Ogunde began again to base his plays on folkloric, historic, and political themes ... After how

long a departure? Why

the sudden return, and in 1965? The

answer, of course, is that by 1965 Duro Ladipo was already a great triumph

on both the local and international stage — with plays that made "extensive

use of oral traditions", showed were based on (Yoruba) myths among university intellectuals, common people. Consummate could hardly have failed to take

plenty of "cultural consciousness", and that and history. They might have been popular but they were even more so among the entrepreneur that he was, Hubert Ogunde note.

245

As for his much-vaunted cultural consciousness and commitment, it need hardly be mentioned that he, Hubert Ogunde, was the first to abandon drama for film where, with rudimentary film-tricks, he could better indulge his penchant for sensationalism and maudlin melodramatic plots with escapist happy endings; for cultural exoticism, self-display and spectacle for its own sake. Where, incidentally, there was also more money to be made more quickly. Indeed, if Hubert Ogunde is the father of the contemporary Yoruba theatre, it may also be said that he killed his own baby: his glossy and commercially successful example lighted the way to the film — and now, video — locations and studios for all the other theatre groups to follow. Although Ebun Clark does not mention any name among the "expatriate intellectuals", it is clear that she has mainly Ulli Beier in mind. So when Yemi Ogunbiyi takes up the defence of Duro Ladipo (see especially pp. 337-340) in specific response to Demas Nwoko, he has to leave out some facts in order to prove that Ulli's influence on him was minimal. Where Ebun Clark claims that "expatriate intellectuals" exerted too much influence on Duro Ladipo so that she can support her argument about Hubert Ogunde's popularity, and Yemi Ogunbiyi has to rely on personal association in order to show that such influence was indeed negligible, David Kerr in his recent book, African Popular Theatre: From Precolonial Times to the Present Day (1995) takes the position of trying to keep Ulli Beier out altogether! In a book that presumes to cover popular theatre in all of black Africa, factual errors are inevitable, but deliberate distortions are inexcusable. Enough has been written in this book to render a detailed correcting of such distortions unnecessary at this point, except that one feels that David Kerr

made them as part of his own undeclared agenda of political correctness. Statements like the following (1995; 96) are simply false, if not fraudulent:

.... Ladipo caught the attention of influential Afrophile European artists, critics and academics, including Beier, Armstrong, Axworthy

and Suzanne Wenger. It was partly through their support that Ladipo opened the multi-purpose arts centre Mbari Mbayo in Osogbo in 1961. Despite the backing from Western intellectuals, Ladipo was keen on making Mbari Mbayo a genuinely popular arts centre.

246

Duro Ladipo did not catch the attention of anybody

(least of all that of

Armstrong and Axworthy, who lived on the university campus in far away Ibadan) and the four people he mentions cannot all be lumped together as "Afrophiles". MBARI MBAYO Club did not start in 1961 but 1962. Right from its conception stage in Duro Ladipo's and Ulli's minds (both of them

resident in the then major commercial street of Osogbo), the club was nothing but a popular arts centre. There was no "industrial site" (p.97) in

Osogbo in the 1960s and, if there had been, it would have been located on the outskirts of town and therefore difficult of access to the common people; MBARI MBAYO was located in one of the main streets of the town, in Duro Ladipo's family house.

That David Kerr did not know the true identity of Obotunde Ijimere in 1995 may be forgiven as well, but that he also did not know who were the founding members of MBARI Club Ibadan (see his list on p.96) is not. Here is where it may be reasonably suspected that, as said earlier, he is trying to be on the right side of political correctness by keeping Ulli out as much as he can. When he cannot, he 'damns with faint praise’, as in the following conjectures that (1995; 97): Ulli Beier, in fact, carried the process of 'authenticization' of Yoruba Opera even further than Ladipo, in the literary operas which he wrote

in conjunction with Obotunde Ijimere ... The slightly romantic ruralism of Beier's aesthetics is perhaps betrayed by the term 'Folk Opera’ which he gave to Yoruba Opera, a term rejected by most Nigerian critics. Perhaps Ulli was the first on record to use the term Folk Opera, perhaps not, but it was generally in the air in those days. Many of the troupes identified

themselves

by the word

opera

even.

But

assuming

that Ulli

actually did originate the term "folk opera" to describe what was going on, he did so with good reasons.

In the

1950s

and

1960s,

the majority

of

Yoruba people living in urban centres were still peasant farmers for whom the only types of entertainment available were the traditional ones, which included the various forms of theatrical performances. Of the three major figures (Ogunde, Ogunmola and Ladipo) in the Yoruba travelling theatre then, only Ogunde was the city man and his theatre developed accordingly, though still designed to appeal to the ordinary 'city folks' rather than to the urban elite. E.K. Ogunmola started in Ado-Ekiti and toured all the little

Ekiti towns long before he moved to Osogbo, which in those days still 247

retained the character of a country town rather than a city. Ladipo started in

the same

Osogbo

and stayed there long after he had achieved

fame.

Furthermore, all the three — and the scores of others who came after — devoted as much time and attention to touring the rural areas as to playing in the big towns. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the bulk of the content of the theatre, the subjects ıt dramatized, plus its idioms and ideology, were truly the people's. Thus, the theatre certainly was 'folk'. And as for the term 'opera', both the traditional theatre and this new one were nothing if not full of songs, dances and music. All the plays opened and closed with a glee, sung to a rhythmic shuffle. From the opening moment to the end, no character stood still — it was dance all the way. The bulk of the action and 'dialogue' were carried on in songs and dances rather than in speeches. Indeed, when Duro Ladipo injected traditional elements into the theatre, the dances became more specialized, as each profession or religious cult among the Yoruba had its own special drums, dance and song repertoire. All three in combination became a specialized kind of communication between characters, as well as between character and audience. That Ulli should have called it Folk Opera only meant that he gave a descriptive name (in 1954) to something which up till then had none. It has nothing to do with David Kerr's imagined aesthetics of "romantic ruralism" but was an observation by somebody who knew the theatre very well and was closer to two of its major figures than any Nigerian academic critic ever was. That "most Nigerian critics" rejected the term has less to do with its accuracy or inaccuracy, but more with the feeling that anything 'folk' smacks of non-modernity — and therefore of inferiority. As for the barely veiled sneer of 'authenticization', enough has been written in this book to show how utterly smug and trite it is. In the matter of

cultural

relations

especially

between

Europe

and

Africa,

the

proper

opposite of ‘authentic’ is ‘derivative': if African artistic productions continue to be derivative (of European models), they will remain inevitably

second-rate. This was Ulli's message: that there are enough in age-old

African artistic traditions for contemporary Africans not to have to imitate

Europeans, even in the modernism game.

248

Beyond any point-by-point refutations of specific criticisms, there are two points of a general nature to be made about them. First is that certain Western-educated artists and critics have set themselves up as the knowers and arbiters of what is African art, and therefore what image of it is correct and proper to present to the outside world. In this, their judgements have been informed by their Eurocentric biases: the tendency to treat artistic productions as belonging to an autonomous cultural domain; plus the

concomitant distinctions between 'high' and 'low/popular' culture. In these

distinctions, the productions of the Western-educated class correspond to the 'modern' and 'high' while those of the nonWestern-educated are

‘primitive’ and 'low/popular'. It follows, therefore, that it is productions of the first category that should be valued, privileged and presented to the outside world. Producers of the other type, when they attract recognition from the outside world, therefore become a source of embarrassment. In

this tyranny of the privileged, Western-educated African critic, it is the traditional artists who suffer, especially as they are in no position to read papers at learned conferences or write books. Thus, Duro Ladipo for example has been presented by turns as a mere puppet of Ulli, his own man, a popular dramatist, a university-bound dramatist. Thus, too, Kola

Ogunmola is presented by Demas Nwoko

as a dramatist whom he and

others

of Drama

at the University

brought up to standard.

of Ibadan

School

took in hand

and

Secondly, as we have seen in chapter III, the Yoruba performer — even the one engaged in a sacred performance — is not a passive transmitter of his culture and arts but an active (re)creator of it, according to his own

understanding and abilities. In other words, the artist is first of all expressing himself, and then his culture through that self — all in a dynamic, dialogical relation. In traditional (and even contemporary) Yoruba society, ceremonies and rituals are the main medium and context in which the arts are produced, reproduced and presented for public approval, participation, as well as consumption. Yet, as 'sacred' or strictly structured as they may be, Yoruba ritual performances have always been opportunities for disruptive individualism and personal expression — through bold inventions, improvisations, or just ‘playing’ on the established norms and practices. In her participatory study of Yoruba rituals, Margaret Thompson Drewal discovered this fundamental element of Yoruba social ethos and

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aesthetics and has written most persuasively about it as follows (1992, 197198): Individuals inserted themselves into ritual at their whims; they elaborated and embellished, deleted, and even impeded or disrupted the action; they also recontextualized, transposed, and transformed

its elements.

In this way, the rituals accommodated

diverse and

competing interests as well as different points of view. Yoruba ritual

was

thus

a playing

field

of individual

interests,

continuously

generated, never cyclical in Eliade's sense — neither timeless nor seen as participating in primordial time.

More than Demas Nwoko, Oyekan Owomoyela, Babatunde Lawal or Ebun Clark, Ulli knew this: that Yoruba cultural productions are person-centred. On the other hand, many a Westernized and bourgeoisified Nigerian artist or academic critic starts by reifying, and then self-consciously (and oftentimes opportunistically) expressing or defending ‘his' culture. Ulli understood this also. There is no doubt that debates and controversies over Ulli in Nigeria will continue, especially if Nigerians (Yoruba people particularly) choose the path of true cultural re-awakening. Whatever form it takes, such a reawakening can only start by asking the questions that Ulli asked, by building on and continuing what he started. While writers and academics of all stripes engage in bookish arguments or try vainly to diminish his contributions, it is useful to place on record the critical opinion of the people among whom he lived and worked. These are people who never thought of Ulli as anything else but one of them, who welcomed contribution and were not afraid of acknowledging it, because they never lost confidence or belief in who they were, and because they were wise enough to recognize the value of positive contributions from anywhere. They also understood that Ulli was primarily interested in them as persons, not as mere cultural appendages or image-carriers. Not being Westerneducated critics, they suffer no image anxieties or identity crises; they express their own criticism simply but profoundly, without making any undue academic issues of it. When Ulli returned to Nigeria in 1971, MBARI MBAYO Osogbo organized a reunion party for him. Kola Ogunmola was still on his sickbed and so had to be represented by a member of his troupe. The representative presented a

250

framed address written in calligraphy, a fan and a leather bag, on behalf of his leader. Part of the address reads as follows: In our area, when a father becomes a chief, the favourite of the father

presents him a fan and a traditional leather bag, which is usually

worn by a child in front of him, whenever he makes an important outing. To show my appreciation, I am presenting to you my benefactor, these traditional fan and bag which I honestly believe you will put into the traditional use whenever occasions for such

arises.

Early in 1975, Duro Ladipo took Oba Koso on an extensive tour of Brazil, from where he would take the play to the U.S.A for five weeks. In all the seven cities (including Rio de Janeiro) where he performed in Brazil, the halls were full, the receptions stunning. In all the cities as many olorisas who could, attended the performances. The tour led indirectly to the beginning of bilateral conferences on Yoruba religion between Brazilian and Nigerian participants. At the end of the gruelling tour, Duro was so overwhelmed that he sat down and wrote the only letter he ever did to Ulli.

He found "most of the Yoruba Gods and Goddesses being worshipped and

acknowledged even much more than in the Yoruba country in Nigeria." He also informed Ulli that "Oba Koso (had) its greatest success ever in the history of the world tour of the immortal play." However, Duro's more important reason for writing the letter was to let you know how your work thrives — how your greatness 1s felt by me everyday of my life and I acknowledge you and your foresight in

building up such a wonderful theatre with me.

Duro Ladipo ended the letter on a note of reassurance: I hope you can trust me that anywhere in the world my success in theatre is probed, I tell your STORY OF SOMETHING OUT OF SOMETHING — UNKNOWN!!!

(emphasis in the original)

Long before all these, in 1963, Ulli had become the Bobagunwa of Osogbo,

not an honorary title but a traditional one that entitled him to sit with the Ataoja

in council,

and to have

a say in the affairs of the town.

With

Susanne Wenger, two of his more singular achievements have been the preservation of the Osun grove in Osogbo and the fight to keep it from being turned into a ‘modern’ tourist attraction. In 1965, oba Timi Laoye also conferred on him the title Bobarotan of Ede. He has remained, since,

251

the adviser on cultural matters in both towns and sat on the oba's council in

Osogbo for more than thirty years.

NOTES l. Amos

Tutuola, Nigerian (Yoruba)

fabulist whose

first — and most famous —

novel is The Palmwine Drinkard (1952). He did not go beyond primary school level in formal Western education but was steeped in Yoruba oral and folktales. The ungrammatical English in which he wrote, plus its "grandmother imagination" (Dylan Thomas) was a source of unending embarrassment to his more educated compatriots. They were further exasperated by Western critics who saw great literary merits in both the peculiar grammar and clearly nonmodern imagination.

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CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION ORI INU - IN SEARCH OF THE REAL ULLI Everybody who comes into this world something — only we don't know what

is

meant

to

become

Yoruba proverb

Not

surprisingly,

attempted

many

people

writing the biography

(writers,

academics,

of Ulli. There have

journalists) also been

have

shots at

personality portraits of him in public speeches, in uncountable journalistic articles that have appeared — and regularly appear — in newspapers and magazines on virtually all the continents. Not surprisingly either, none of

the biographies has ever got completed or published. The various reasons for this need not concern us here, except one: all the would-be biographers started, not at the wrong end, but at the unsuitable one. They all started by trying to know the man, to understand him and get a handle on his character; such an understanding would then, they hoped, illuminate his life and works. Unfortunately this approach, although normal and proper, puts

Ulli off. He does not like talking or reading about himself; he likes talking about friends and other people whom he has met and interacted with; above all, he loves talking about Yoruba society and culture.

Still, there is a need for a few personal impressions of Ulli, especially by some

of those

who

have

written

about

him,

and

by

others

whose

biographical projects were aborted somewhere along the way. So, in this concluding chapter, some of these views have been quoted. Finally, prefacing it with the epigraph for this chapter, Ulli talks directly and at

some length — but still too briefly — about himself and especially his early life, though more about his private, inner quest for and discovery of his own ori inu than about himself as a public figure.

Not

long

after Ezekiel

(Es'kia)

Mphahlele

came

to Nigeria

in the late

1950s, he joined the Department of Extramural Studies, University College Ibadan. By the time MBARI Club was started in 1961, Ulli had known

enough of his friend's leadership qualities and so invited him to not only join, but become the president of the club. Es'kia Mphahlele occupied this position until he left. If Ulli was impressed by Mphahlele, Mphahlele was perhaps even more impressed by Ulli, for in his fictional autobiography The Wanderers, the portrait of Ulli (as the fictional Emil) that he paints is subtle, appreciative, full of warmth and understanding (pp.213-214): Emil was not a retread in the sense in which he scornfully referred to Professor Miriam Graves. He had become part of the Iboyoru setting in a way only very few expatriates did: which did not include Miss Graves. Nor did he identify in any clumsy or neurotic way. He simply made friendships among those of his class among black and white without imposing himself on the indigenous people like one who might think he was doing them a favor. He was also studying the lore and history of the people of the Takora region of Iboyoru, the seat of an ancient culture. For this he needed to be humble; and he was basically that. Emil had a shy smile. He never rushed into things. But he always knew where to come in, and then he threw himself into the work with resolve while some of the expatriates jeered and scoffed on the sidelines "I once lived in the faculty camp," Emil said to Timi, "and I soon left in disgust ..." He shook his shaggy head as he said so and adjusted his buba. Emil dressed in Iboyoru style, whether he was in Europe or in Africa. Timi had come to know him when he frequently visited Sogali. Apart from lecturing on radio, he conducted writers' workshops, ran a writers' and artists' club and published a literary journal to stimulate Iboyoru writing. Other writers, being non-novelists, have not the licence to fictionalize Ulli as Ezekiel Mphahlele does. They have to wrestle with the complex, paradoxical facts that make up Ulli's life and activities, and which defy easy re-organization into a logical narrative. The meaning of that life, which should give such a narrative design and structure, has also remained elusive because spread over so many areas of activities, over a wide space, and not motivated by the usual things like career or creative/professional

ambition. Thus we find the Times Literary Supplement of 25 June, 1971 grappling with this problem

in its description of Ulli as "anthropologist-

poet-art historian-impressario." The irony in this hyphenated naming, of course, is that Ulli was trained in none of the professions credited to him by the TLS writer. It is nevertheless true that Ulli engages in all those 254

disciplines and occupations (and more): he raids territories that do not belong to him, disregards the borders set up between them and, in so doing, becomes a multidisciplinary scholar before its time. Taban Lo Liyong also recognizes this many-sidedness of the man foreword to the first edition of Ulli's bibliography (1975):

in his

Ulli Beier is a man of culture, a promoter of the arts, and a creative artist in his own right. His areas of cultural involvement are various: there is Ulli Beier the playwright, the fiction writer; there 1s the critic of art, literature, architecture, culture; there is the translator from five

languages; there 1s the editor of books and magazines; and then there is the collaborator. Ulli Beier is a cultural collaborator in the widest sense of the word.

To this seemingly exhaustive list may yet be added Ulli Beier the teacher — the non-academic intellectual who prefers participation to observation, who understands and teaches by enthusiasm and identification rather than analysis. Ulli's essential activity which Lo Liyong describes neatly as cultural collaboration may even be more heroically described as cultural bordercrossing, or smuggling across cultural borders — an activity now given respectability in academia by the terms multiculturalism and interculturalism. Boldly, and sometimes brazenly, Ulli 'smuggles' goods across all borders: between cultures, languages, classes, or even individuals, in a single society. He carries artistic productions from the

‘high’ culture to the 'low', and from the 'low' to the ‘high’ within and across societies. He sees connections where others see separation, and does his

best to make them come together and cross-pollinate. But if somehow, and magically, Ulli has been able to integrate all these in himself, it has been difficult for those who wish to write about him to do

so. Donald Denoon, one such early would-be biographer, has elaborated on the problem: It was

not

at

once

apparent,

what

made

Ulli

so

effective

in

discovering, and in mobilizing, the creative talents of other people ... Certainly, his conversation was interesting, and his manner encouraging: but what was it about him that enabled other people to write, to paint, to sculpt, and to make music? That evening I made a note to certain clues. There were to be many more evenings and many more clues, which seemed to contradict each other, always 255

leaving more loose ends than firm answers. Eventually we agreed to conduct a series of interviews in order to set out a coherent narrative account of the life of H.U. Beier. If the interviews went well, the tapes could be recast as autobiography ... The interviews did go well; the tapes were recorded; the transcript was reduced to a neat typescript. But the autobiography was flaccid, never inaccurate but never true ... the problem was the subject himself. His life spans continents, cultures, disciplines — and categories. It is safe to predict a few doctoral dissertations about him: yet it is almost impossible to imagine a rounded biography of so mercurial a subject, living within a whole range of categories but also between them. Again, Ulli values his mystery, reminding me often enough that "to organise is to destroy", collaborating wholeheartedly but confident that he would elude me. There is much in Ulli which defies definition, at least in the terms and categories which I can deal with. Still trying to capture the elusive magic and 'essence' of Ulli, Denoon in the same introductory chapter later describes him as a Vandal occupying Rome, "deaf to venerated traditions, pillaging accumulated treasure to create new forms." Others who have written seriously about him have also marvelled at how he works his magic, and why. Again, they have had to reach for all their oratorical powers to describe that magic. David Walters, in his journalistic piece ("Everyman in Oshogbo"), written in the early 1960s, contrasts that magic with the other 'magic' that was in vogue then: foreign aid. After reviewing all Ulli's various activities in and around Osogbo then, Walters concludes that his "brand of foreign aid" has not, admittedly, resulted in a noticeable rise of living standards, employment indices and per capita consumption levels, but something has been tendered to these eager people that is neglected by the Special Funds, the expanded Programmes of Technical Assistance and the bilateral development projects — an awareness of their own rich heritage, a will to tap in confidence the wellsprings of their native genius. If more of those who purport to help the Third World were to bring a fraction of this knowledge, understanding and love of the receivers, what marvels would be set moving in the countless thousands of possible Oshogbos in Africa, Asia and Latin America? And again Taban Lo Liyong, on the occasion of Ulli being awarded an honorary Doctorate of Johannes Gutenberg-University at Mainz, 1984:

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Ulli Beier, the Yoruba cultural expert will never find happiness elsewhere except in Yorubaland ... A man's worth is not counted in

terms of what he achieved, rather it is measured in terms of what we would not have had had he not been around, had he not done them.

In terms of what others did not do which he thought were worth doing, even if he worked amongst skeptics and opponents ... What has Ulli wrought? Ulli Beier is the world's expert on Yoruba culture. Gather all his books, monographs, articles, and plays on Yoruba culture in one volume and you will see what I mean. For that alone, he deserves an honour from the Yoruba.

He also helped modern Nigerians to see and appreciate their arts. He

drew their attention to what were in their midst. The artists had produced the works of art; they were satisfied. The patrons had accepted the works, they too were satisfied. It now was left for Nigerians from other places ... to get acquainted with the cultural richness of Nigeria and appreciate the various works of art ... Art criticism merely casts a vote of confidence or no confidence in a

work already done. All his adult life Ulli Beier has been casting a vote of confidence in Yoruba past and present culture.

The paradox of Ulli being "the Yoruba cultural expert" who

"will never

find happiness elsewhere except in Yorubaland" has also been noted by Donald Denoon, who in fact sees it as lying at the heart of the man as well as all of his activities, be it in Nigeria itself, Papua New Guinea, Australia, or Europe. "The paradox of a German-born Yoruba," says Denoon, "is

evidently central to an understanding of Ulli." It 1s a paradox that captures all, but is still in need of explanation.

It is not just that Ulli took, or was given, Yoruba names and wears nothing but Yoruba shirts, or that his two sons also have Yoruba names. Neither does it lie in the simple act of identification (without conversion); these are merely the indices which any Afrophile (or even Afrophobe) can put on.

More fundamental are his personal character traits of patience, tolerance, calmness. Ulli evidently had these character traits before coming to Nigeria, but they were fortified and expanded in him by his seeing them as the ethical ideals of the Yoruba society, in seeing them embodied in rituals

as well as in certain individuals. Patience, tolerance and equipoise, all three are present in the Yoruba concepts of suuru and ifarabale, and articulated in the saying:

257

suuru ni baba iwa agba t'o ni suuru gbogbo oun l'o ni; agba t'o ni suuru l'omo re npo Jojo (patience is the 'father' of character, the old man who has it has everything; he is the one whose children are in multitudes). These qualities are, in these respects, not Just social graces or attributes of social interaction, but spiritual endowments which come with ori. inu. When you have them, you have quiet luminescence. When Ulli says he learnt so much from the Yoruba society, these, no doubt, are a part of what he means: the morality of patience and tolerance, plus 'the aesthetic of the calm'. The Yoruba ideals of suuru and ifarabale lead to another trait in Ulli that is central to understanding him: his capacity for friendship. All those he has closely associated with, be they kings, priests, writers and dramatists, or artists, are friends first and whatever else second. Be they artists whose careers he helps to mould and launch, or those already formed, the human connection comes first. This means there has always been a moral quality to the friendship, to the help he renders (when and if there is a need for it), and to the kind of artistic productions that interest him. There is a romantic quality to this morality of friendship that has been there from the beginning, and been noticed by all who have known him intimately. Susanne Wenger noticed it immediately when they met in Paris in 1950: When we met in Paris, he was a young enthusiast, a teacher in schools for handicapped children. He was on vacation in Paris for the sake of Art Exhibitions mainly. But he too was carried off by the local atmosphere. Susanne adds that Ulli then was a striking young man with a head that inspired artists not only through the heap of untidy black locks and the roman nose and chin, but much more through the schilleresque fire, which gave him a radiance which outshone everybody in his environment — even in the streets. That Ulli's infinite capacity for friendship goes hand in hand with his love of the arts, and that both almost always fuse into creative friendship, has also been noted by Donald Denoon:

Ulli's restless pursuit of the new form, the new idea, makes him impatient with cultures and disciplines — and often people — whose

258

traditions are firmly established, whose limits are well defined, and

whose work has the polish of finality ... he is drawn to artists who are marginal between two cultures, or emerging from one tradition and striving for some quite new form of expression.

Andrew Salkey the West Indian poet (who met Ulli in London, and with whom he was friends until he died) also notes the same romantic moral

passion: Whenever I think of Ulli's choice of life's-work and his international work-sites, and whenever I think of his extraordinary cultural contributions and his exceptional moral stamina, I am constantly reminded ... of a man who has become "an exemplary traitor’ to his class and educational orientation and rewards, and a man who has found great happiness by doing so. Of Ulli's capacity for friendship, he also has this to say: Easy-going to a fault, yes! Even placid! And yet, under that rippleless exterior burns a furnace of commitment to old friends, old loves of his own cultural persuasion, Third World life and letters, and work and more work in his chosen field.

In summing up, this writer can do no better than quote the words of Keith Botsford (1968; 2): I have known no other man like him. No single country really deserves him; there is no traditional culture that does not need him.

But he himself needs

his single place;

he needs

its depth and

richness. He finds it for us and for its own people, not innocently or exotically, or ethnologically, but among people: for each his own

gifts. He makes an enclave of honesty wherever he is, where the traditional will be as safe as it can be from our importuning assaults and where the new, amalgam of the old, can be born. He brings cool fire. (emphasis added)

As recorded below, it took Ulli the first twenty-eight years of his life to reach that "single place" which has "depth and richness." To find one's identity in a Western society today is not easy. How can a young person relate to a society that is changing at such a speed, a society

that has broken up into numerous irreconcilable interest groups? Western society has become a conglomerate of subcultures. Yoruba wisdom helped the individual to find his way, by providing him with a beautiful myth that placed responsibility for his life squarely on his shoulders: 259

Before we heads.' We which we limitations fullest use

are born (the myth are then asked to take down to earth. of this head, but we of its potentials.

says), we select our We have also have

are led into a 'garden of own ori inu (inner head) to learn to live with the the obligation to make the

It took me three decades to discover what my ori inu was and how to live by it. My childhood in Berlin was a so-called 'happy' one. Protected and secure. I had a father whom I could revere: he was a highly respected doctor and a highly respected musician. Throughout my life I have never heard anybody make a negative comment on him. My father believed that creativity was the only purpose of life. When he involved himself deeply in music making — he played chamber music in our home virtually every week, and he was first oboist in various orchestras — it was never as a career or for money. He had no interest in having his performances recorded: he believed that the creative activity was important, not the preserved product. He collected paintings, not as a ‘capital investment’ but because he felt frustrated and even depressed if he could not live with works of art. My father had a formative influence on my life. The role of art and music in my life 1s due to that influence so that, when I first encountered mbari houses in Owerri, the concept was not that unfamiliar to me. As a child I absorbed the classical European music which, even now, | still need to live with. At the age of six I was familiar with the Berlin museums: I knew the famous bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, just as I knew the Blue Tiled City gate of Babylon that had been reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. I knew Rembrandt's "Man with the Gold Helmet" or van Eyck's portrait of the "Man with Carnation." I grew up with contemporary German paintings in our flat. Even now, many decades later, I cannot imagine living without pictures. When I was eleven years old my shielded existence came to an abrupt end

and I lived through the trauma of a total identity crisis. The Nazis had taken away my father's medical practice. As he had poor working-class district) he was forced to at once. The only country that had neither a refugees, nor a restriction on foreign medical

260

few savings (he worked in a emigrate and find new work long waiting list for German qaulification, was Palestine.

So we emigrated to Palestine, even though my father was anything but a Zionist. In Palestine I learnt Esu's lesson the hard way: that in life you cannot and should not take anything for granted. I could not adjust to my new surroundings, because I thought of it as a place of temporary exile. We all believed that once Hitler was removed from office (in a few years' time) we would all return happily to Berlin and pick up life where we had left it. It was a total illusion, but I did not know it then. I found Hebrew an exceedingly hard language to learn, but I finally managed to speak both Hebrew and Arabic fluently. I romanticized Arabic because much of the youth literature I had absorbed in Germany had portrayed the Bedouin as a kind of noble savage. In fact, I did spend time with Bedouins as a young boy, drinking their coffee and riding their camels. Having been deprived of my original German identity I now clung to it all the more. Having been thrown off course, my search for my ori inu was totally confused. I burst out in all directions — proving myself in all kinds of ways that did not bring me any nearer to understanding myself. First I

became a prodigy on the horse. My father, poor though he was in those days, paid for me to have riding lessons, because he thought it might help me to overcome my depressions.

I became a star pupil, went on tournaments and, at the age of fifteen, defeated the British Army

and even the Transjordan Frontier Force.

At

sixteen I left school to become a riding teacher. But Esu crossed my paths again. First, Arab terrorists stole all the horses from my teacher's stable. This put an end to the riding school, but I could still go on riding tournaments for about a year after, as only the horse that I rode was left behind — it was too wild for them to handle. Then my brother, who was not a professional horseman at all, went out riding on an excursion and had a fatal accident. I could never contemplate riding as a career again after that. A further confusion was created during the second world war. When Italy entered the war, the British became very nervous in Palestine. A couple of German villages (Protestant settlers who had immigrated in the middle of the 19th Century) were fenced in with barbed wires and other suspicious characters were thrown into these improvised internment camps. Having 261

been a refugee from Hitler, I was now, at the age of seventeen, declared to

be an "enemy alien" by the British and interned for the entire duration of the war. Ultimately I learned an important lesson from this: that you must never allow others to define you. Your ori inu is what you have brought down from heaven, and however others are going to categorize you, this will not really affect you, as long as you recognized what your inner head is and you live by it. But it was going to take another fifteen years for me to even hear of the concept of ori! Meanwhile I tried to find satisfaction, or at least distraction, in a variety of professions. In the camp I became by turns: a cowhand (milking twentyfour cows a day — by hand, of course); a gardener looking after 3000 rosebushes; a student studying for the Intemediate and B.A. of the University of London (I could sit for the examinations in Jerusalem with a special police permit); and a teacher (I prepared half a dozen young people for the London Matriculation). There was a short but exciting intermezzo when I began a career as an archaeologist. Professor Fischer of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem got me out of the camp on parole. I studied with him and even went on a brief excavation. But when, after nine months, the professor died of an unidentified tropical fever, the police picked me up the next day and took me back to the camp where I stayed to the end of 1947. (We were detained after the war "for our own protection"!) When I left Palestine for Britain in 1948 after a stay of fifteen years (!), I felt battered and more confused than ever before. I had learnt one important lesson when the war ended: that "going back" to Germany had been an illusion. I suddenly understood that the Germany I had left no longer existed and that the Ulli who had left Berlin in 1933 also no longer existed. That realisation set me free of the bondage I had felt. I was now free to be myself and free to define myself, neither in relation to Germany nor to Palestine. The biggest negative impact my experience in Palestine made on me was that I began to dissociate myself from Christianity. I saw the pettiness of the three great religions in Jerusalem quarrelling over historical and sacred sites — some real, but most were fake. I saw their commercialism. I saw that most of their endeavours had little to do with religion.

262

I saw the wailing wall as an interesting archaeological survival. A beautiful bit of ancient masonry no doubt, but I could not understand why the Jews felt that access to it would help them in their relationship to God. I could not understand why they coveted the site of the Temple so much, on which the Moslems had built the Mosque

of Omar. I could not understand why

the footprint of Mohammed's horse (preserved in the mosque) was of such sacred importance. If God was almighty and omnipresent, why fight over history? I was repulsed by what had been done to the beautiful Byzantine Church of

the Holy Sepulchre. This fine piece of architecture with its innumerable chapels was crowded out by many Christian sects: Greek orthodox, Armenian, Roman Catholic and Protestant of varıous shades had a corner in it, which they had overloaded with Christian symbols, many of them vulgar; most of them expensive (donations from kings and emperors) and

often pure kitsch. Wherever one turned, there were priests who asked or demanded donations, who sprinkled 'holy' water on you and told you some

piece of fiction on the historical significance of their own corner of the church. I remember a young Arab boy who had offered himself as a guide saying, when I declined, "Cursed be the cunt of your sister" on the grounds of the holy church. I came away from Palestine with the notion that it was presumptuous for any religion to claim to be in the sole possession of truth. That if God existed, he would not be so partisan as to reveal himself only to one person or one people. The experience left me rather raw and desolate

but at the same time it left me open and free for my encounter with Yoruba religion.

My second emigration, this time to England, was more of an escape than a

choice. The British had decided to evacuate all the Germans in Palestine to

Australia, because obviously German peasants with large land holdings were unacceptable to the rising nationalist (and terrorist) movement of the Jews. I had the ignorant vision of Australia as a 'cultural desert', so I avoided deportation there by obtaining a student visa to Britain. I was

hungry at this stage for European music, theatre and art. I wanted to expose myself to, to even wallow in, the culture that I had been deprived of. Again, Esu played another trick on me: since all university places were reserved for British ex-servicemen, the only course I could apply for was English Phonetics for Foreigners, a course I had no interest in whatsoever.

263

But it was this absurd circumstance that eventually led me to Nigeria and to the Yoruba people! London offered me at first a great sense of anonymity. The hugeness of the city; the international conglomerate of its people made your origin and culture, your race or religion, unimportant, at least in everyday encounters. That gave me a sense of relief and freedom. Although I had been given 300 pounds by my father to survive on for one year, I managed to see a play or an opera or a concert almost every night. One could get a seat "in the Gods" for 2s 6d and sometimes I preferred to skip dinner rather than miss out on a concert. I saw the entire Shakespeare repertoire, much of it with great actors like Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness and Ralph Richardson. I could experience the entire classical music repertoire with musicians who came from all over the world. I was like a sponge soaking it all up enthusiastically, if rather uncritically. British officialdom treated me with extreme friendliness and helpfulness. When my student visa ran out they advised me to get a teaching job which would secure me an extension. After the first year's extension, I was given permanent residence and even citizenship! I realized, however, that this special consideration was given to me not because I was a wretched refugee desperately in need of somewhere to stay, but because they identified me as a German who should be treated with the generosity of "a victor" who could respect his former enemy. I began to realize that in Britain I would not be able to be really free of categorization! I was offered a well-paid job in a posh school teaching German, but rejected it in favour of a poorly paid position teaching handicapped children in all subjects. I had no experience in this delicate job, but refused to read the literature about it. I decided by some (misguided) instinct that there was no such thing as a difficult or 'bad' child, only incompetent or boring, or uncaring teachers. My 'theory' is untenable, but it took me a long way in understanding the children and in getting responses from them. In a few cases, I think, I transformed their lives. I believed — and in this belief I still hold today — that teaching is largely a matter of faith. A teacher who has faith in his student's abilities, in the

innate value of his being, is much more likely to succeed. The school for the handicapped was an ideal teaching situation because in the special schools we had only fifteen children in the class, who could range from 9

264

to 15 (according to the number of years they had spent in hospitals) in the middle class: I could deal with each child as an individual. There was no regimentation of any kind. I learned to discover the specific qualities in each child's character. I did not know then the lovely Nigerian pidgin phrase "You pass me tall I pass you short, you pass me white I pass you black", but the children taught me this kind of tolerance, this respect for another human being, however wretched, however embittered, however unattractive (at first sight) he might be. It was, as I know now in retrospect, my first understanding of the concept

of iwa, or even of iwalewa.

The work really excited me, but it also

exhausted me. Because I gave to it all my time. School did not finish until 5.30 pm — we had breakfast, lunch and high tea with the children. On weekends I visited their parents to reassure them and plead for the children;

I also tried to take one or two children out on weekends to museums or concerts or operas. I often went to the limits of what the school system could tolerate, thus already settling into the role of a fringe dweller of institutions, but I did find many kind and sympathetic colleagues. Some of the children wrote to me in Nigeria for years.

Once again, Esu intervened and made me do something I didn't really want to do and which, at the time, I considered a real waste of time. Dr Fry, the

new Head of the Department of Phonetics at the University of London,

wanted me to come and introduce (for the first time) a full session's course

in German phonetics. He literally offered me an academic career! I was appalled by the prospect of eternal boredom. But having been very kindly treated by that department while I studied there, I also felt I owed them something. I agreed, a little grumpily, to give an evening class for one session only, on condition I would be able to train a successor. I was annoyed, I had to give up my summer holidays and sit in the British

museum library to work out the course. Ironically, it was this futile exercise that finally opened the door to Nigeria for me. But then, that is the way of the lord of thresholds and crossroads: Esu turns right into wrong Wrong into right.

Having thrown a stone today He kills a bird yesterday.

265

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abiodun, Rowland, "The Future of African Art Studies: An African perspective", The State of African Art Studies, Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art/Smithsonian Institutions, 1990, pp.63-89 Abodunrin, Femi, /conography of Order and Disorder: Conversation with Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1996 Adedeji, Joel, The Alarinjo Theatre: A Study of Yoruba Theatrical Art from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Present Times. Unpub. Ph.D. Thesis,

University of Ibadan, 1969

Akinjogbin, LA., "Duro Ladipo (1931-1978): Nigeria (Sat., Feb. 2, 1991), p.8 Beier,

Georgina,

"To

Organize

Is

to

A Tribute", Daily

Destroy",

in

Georgina

Nürnberg, Verlag für moderne Kunst 2001, pp.121-124

Times, Beier,

Beier, Ulli, "The Yoruba Folk Operas", African Music vol.1, no.1 (1954), pp.32-34

----- , "Theatre

in

Nigeria:

Origins,

Motivations

and

Organization",

Background Paper for the National Seminar on Aboriginal Australia, Australia Council for the Arts, Canberra, 1973 ----- , "E.K. Ogunmola:

Arts in

A Personal Memoir", Neo-African Literature and

Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn. Mainzer Afrika-Studien I, Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976, pp.111-118

----- , Art in Nigeria, 1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 ----- , Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1991 ----- , The Return

of Shango:

IWALEWA-Haus, ----- , Luckless Heads: 1982 ----- , The

Return

The

Theatre of Duro

Ladipo,

Bayreuth:

1994 Paintings by de-ranged Nigerians, Bremen:

of the

Gods:

The

Sacred

Art

of Susanne

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 ----- ‚In A Colonial University, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1993

CON, Wenger,

----- , The Crisis of Yoruba Culture: A Conversation Between Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1996 Benson, Peter, Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern. Cultural Awakening in Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986 Botsford, Keith, "A Note on Ulli Beier", Delos 2 (1968), pp.27-28 Caws, Peter, "Identity: Cultural, Transcultural, and Multicultural", in David Theo Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995, pp. 371-387 Clark, Ebun, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of the Nigerian Theatre, Ibadan: O.U.P., 1979 Clark, J.P., A Decade Longman, 1981

of Tongues,

Selected Poems:

1958-1968,

London:

Denoon, Donald, "Seeking A Sorcerer", First Chapter of The Conductor — A Biography of Ulli Beier, unpublished ms at the Australian National University, Canberra Drewal, Margaret Thompson, "The State of Research on Performance in Africa", African Studies Review vol.34, no.3 (Dec.1991), pp.1-64 ----- ‚

Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992

Duerden, Dennis and Cosmo Pieterse London: Heinemann, 1972

(eds.), African

Bloomington Writers

and

Talking,

Echeruo, M.J.C., Victorian Lagos, London: Macmillan, 1977 Gilmore, Micheal T., "Eulogy as Symbolic Biography: The Iconography of Revolutionary Leadesrhip, 1776-1826", ın Daniel Aaron (ed.), Studies in Biography, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, pp.131-57 James, Louis, "The Protest Tradition: Black Orpheus and Transition", in Cosmo Pieterse & Donald Munro (eds.), Protest & Conflict in African Literature, London: Heinemann, 1969, pp.109-124 Jeyifo, 'Biodun, The Yoruba Popular Magazine, 1984

Travelling Theatre, Lagos: Nigeria

Johnson, Rev. Samuel, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, Lagos: C.S.S.

Bookshops, first pub. 1921

268

Kerr, David, African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Present Day, London: James Currey, 1995

Lawal, Babatunde,

Times to the

"The Search for Identity in Contemporary Nigerian

Art", Studio International (March/April 1977), pp.145-150 Lindfors, Bernth, "A Decade of Black Orpheus", Books Abroad 5 (October 1968), pp.509-516 Liyong, Taban lo, "A Tribute to Chief Ulli Beier", On the occasion of his

receiving an honorary Doctorate of Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, 1980 MacInnes, Colin, pp.38-52

"Welcome,

Beauty

Walk",

Encounter

(October

1960),

Mphahlele, Ezekiel, The Wanderers, London: Macmillan, 1971 Nadel, Ira Bruce, Biography: Martins Press, 1984 Nwoko, Demas, "Search for 75 (1970), pp.49-75

Fiction,

Fact

and Form,

New

York:

a New African Theatre", Présence Africaine

Obafemi, Olu, Forty Years in African Art and Life: Reflections on Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1993

Ogunbiyi, Yemi,

St.

Ulli

"The Popular Theatre: A Tribute to Duro Ladipo", in

Yemi Ogunbiyi (ed.), Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: Source Book, Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1981, pp.333-353

A

Ogundele, Wole, "The Artist As Chameleon", in Georgina Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2001, pp.125-129

Critical Beier,

Okeke, Uche, Art in Development — A Nigerian Perspective, Nimo: Asele Institute, Nigeria & African-American Cultural Center, Minneapolis,

1982

Owomoyela, Oyekan, Visions and Revisions: Essays on African Literatures and Criticism, New York: Peter Lang, 1991, pp.123-135 Soyinka,

Wole,

Myth,

Literature

and

Cambridge University Press, 1976

the African

World,

Cambridge:

Tröger, Adele, "A Short Biography of Georgina Beier", in Georgina Beier, Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2001, pp.9-58

269

----- , "Yeye Olona, 'mother of the artists", in Georgina Beier, Nürnberg:

Verlag fiir moderne Kunst, 2001, pp.108-111

Turner,

Terence,

"Anthropology

and

Miulticulturalism:

Anthropology that Multiculturalists Should Be David Theo Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism:

Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1994, pp.406-425 Walters,

David,

"Everyman

in Oshogbo",

What

Is

Mindful of It?", in A Critical Reader,

published as "Jedermann

in

Oshogbo", Neue Kunst in Afrika, Sonderheft von Tendenzen, Munich, 49 (1967), pp.92-97 Wren, Robert M., Those Magical Years: The Making of Nigerian Literature at Ibadan: 1948-1966, Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1991

270

APPENDIX In this two-part appendix, the first part is a highly selective bibliography of Ulli Beier's writings (mainly on Yoruba/Nigerian culture, arts, literature and society). The second part, also highly selective, catalogues exhibitions and cultural/art shows that he has either organized, mounted on his own or been actively involved in. Again, the selection has been guided by their Yoruba/Nigerian subject. 1. BIBLIOGRAPHY Architecture: Essays

"The Palace of the Ogoga of Ikerre", Nigeria Magazine 44 (1954), pp.303314 "Zeitgenössische Architektur der Yorubaneger", Das Kunstwerk 3 (1954), pp.47-48 "Moderne Architektur pp.80-83

in Nigeria",

Baukunst

und

Werkform

2 (1957),

"Changing Face of a Yoruba Town", Nigeria Magazine 59 (1958), pp.373-

382 "Sacred Yoruba Architecture: 1. Islamic", Nigeria Magazine (1960), pp.93104 Art: Essays and Exhibition Articles "Wandmalereien der Yoruba", Das Kunstwerk 5 (1954-55), pp.37-40

"Psychotic Art: An Exhibition of Paintings by Nigerian Mental Patients", University of Ibadan Library, 1955 "Yoruba Cement Sculpture", Nigeria Magazine 46 (1955), pp.44-153 "Two Nigerian Painters", with Susanne Wenger, Bokubi (1955) "Ibibio Monuments", Nigeria Magazine 51 (1956), pp.3 18-336 "Mbari Houses", with Gerald Moore, Nigeria Magazine 49 (1956), pp.148198

"Mud Shrines of Olokun", Nigeria Magazine 50 (1956), pp.280-295 "Adire

—

Yoruba

Pattern

Dyeing",

with

Susanne

Wenger,

Nigeria

Magazine 54 (1957), pp.208-225 "Wenger: An Example of Afro-European Culture Contact", Black Orpheus 2 (1958), pp.29-3 1 "The Bochio — A little known type of African carving", Black Orpheus 3 (1958), pp.28-31 "Shango Shrine of the Timi of Ede", Black Orpheus 4 (1958), pp.30-35 "Gebrauchsgraphik für Afrika", (on Susanne Wenger), Gebrauchsgraphik 7

(1958), pp.46-49

"Two Yoruba Painters", Black Orpheus 6 (1959), pp.29-3 1 "Carvers in Modern Architecture", Nigeria Magazine 60 (1959), pp.60-75 "The

Art of Susanne Wenger", (written under the name Aragbabalu), Africa South vol.4, no.3 (1960), pp.99-101

Omidiji

"Zwei Yoruba Maler", Bilder und Blätter (May/June 1960), pp.47-53 "Complicated Carver", (on Lamidi Fakeye), pp.30-31

West African Review (1960),

"Demas Nwoko — A Young Nigerian Artist", Black Orpheus pp.10-11, with 8 pp. of illustrations

8 (1960),

"Yoruba Wall Paintings", Odu (1960), pp.36-39, with 12 pp. of illustrations "Contemporary Nigerian Art", Nigeria Magazine 68 (1961), pp.27-51 "Shrine at Oshogbo — New Screens for Oshun Shrine are designed by Susanne Wenger", West African Review (Nov. 1962), pp.16-18 "Nigerian Folk Art", Nigeria Magazine 75, (Dec. 1962), pp.26-32 "A Note on the Woodcarvings of the Obi of Agbor", pp.24-25, with 12 pp. of illustrations

Odu

(Sept.1962),

"Three Igbin Drums from Igbomina", Nigeria Magazine 78 (1963), pp.154163 "Asiru — Mbari Ibadan Exhibition", Black Orpheus 12 (1963), p.45 "Experiment in Art Teaching", (on the Mbari workshop), Black Orpheus 12 (1963), pp.43-44, with 8 pp. of illustrations

"Idah — An original Bini Artist", Nigeria Magazine 80 (1964), pp.4-16

272

"A New Sanctuary at Oshogbo", Nigeria Magazine 81 (1964), pp.98-105 "Moderne Kunst in einer afrikanischen Stadt", (on Oshogbo), Tendenzen 32 (1965), pp.47-55 "Experimental Art School", Nigeria Magazine 86 (1965), pp.199-204

"Ovia Idah — Two Terracotta Reliefs", Black Orpheus 17 (1965), pp.62-63 "Naive Nigerian Painting", Black Orpheus 19 (1966), pp.31-33 "Moderne

Kunst

in

Oshogbo/Nigeria,

einer

afrıkanischen

Exhibition

Stadt",

catalogue

Neue

Moderne

Kunst

Münchner

aus

Galerie,

München, 1966 "Mbari Mbayo Club Oshogbo", (article for a calendar juxtaposing Oshogbo artists with the works of Ru van Russem), Afrika contact Nederland (1966), pp.4-7 "Seven-Seven", Black Orpheus 22 (1967), pp.45-48 "Signwriters Art pp.22-27 "The

in Nigeria",

African

Preservation and Protection special no. (1973), pp.32-35

Arts

vol.IV,

of Nigerian

no.3

Antiques",

(Spring

1971),

African Notes

"Middle Art, the Paintings of War", African Arts vol.IX, no.2 (1976), pp.61] "Market Place Artists Portray World London (Dec. 1, 1977)

of Surrealist Fantasy",

The

Times,

"The Yoruba: An Introduction", Africa and Oceania, exhibition catalogue, RMIT, Melbourne, 1978

"Yoruba Brass Casting", Africa and Oceania, pp.22-29 "Adire — Yoruba Pattern Dyeing", Africa and Oceania, pp.30-35 "Twins Seven-Seven", Kunst aus Afrika, exhibition catalogue, Horizonte Festival Berlin, 1979; also in Afrikanische Gegenwartskunst aus der

Sammlung Gunther Peus, Hamburg, 1984, pp.76-79

"Ladenschilder und Legenden", Kunst aus Afrika, pp. 99 & 106 "Middle Art", Kunst aus Afrika, pp.96-98 "Contemporary African Art", Opening speech of exhibition Moderne Kunst in Afrika, Koninklijk Institut voor de Tropen, Amsterdam, 1980

273

"Intellektuelle Kunst in Afrika", Neue Kunst in Afrika, Berlin, 1980, pp.5568 "Populäre Kunst in Afrika", Neue Kunst in Afrika, pp. 69-86 "Chief Councillor Twins Seven-Seven: Musik und Politik", Interview with Ulli Beier, Neue Kunst in Afrika, pp.93-100 "Wie ich Künstler wurde — Muraina Oyelami", Interview with Ulli Beier, Neue Kunst in Afrika, pp.101-106 "Neue Kunst in Afrika — Bildkommentare", Tendenzen 44

132 (1980), pp.34-

"Middle Art", Tendenzen 132 (1980), pp.45-49 "Mbari Houses — A Traditional Form of Community Art Amongst the Igbo People of Eastern Nigeria", Art in Education, Sydney (1981), pp.12-

17

"Yoruba Schmuck", Schmuck aus Afrika, exhibition catalogue, IWALEWAHaus and Hypobank Bayreuth, 1982 "Susanne Wenger's Paintings", Goethe Institut Lagos, 1984

Susanne

Wenger

exhibition

catalogue,

"Yoruba Malerei von heute und traditionelle Plastik — Rufus Ogundele in der Galerie Schwarz-Weiß in München", Tendenzen 146 (1984), pp.16-17 "Chief Councillor Twins Seven-Seven: A Seamless Yoruba Personality", Three Yoruba Artists, Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series, 1988, pp.5-40 "Final Decision on Syncretism. The 1986

Medicine — One Man's Struggle for Cultural Story of Ademola Onibonokuta", unpublished ms,

"Chief Twins Seven-Seven's Art", Culturen, Amsterdam (1987), pp.12-19 "Die Welt ist ein Maskentanz", Middle Art: Schilder und Gemdlde aus Nigeria, Exhibition catalogue series on Kiinstler der Welt, Berlin 1990, pp. 7-10 "No

274

Condition is Permanent", Nigeria, pp.10-13

Middle

Art:

Schilder

und

Gemdlde

aus

"Ladenschilder und Legenden", Middle Art: Schilder und Gemälde aus Nigeria, pp.14-19 "Middle Art", Middle Art: Schilder und Gemälde aus Nigeria, pp.20-24 "Middle Art — Mein Leben", from a conversation with Ulli Beier, Middle

Art: Schilder und Gemälde aus Nigeria, pp.25-30 "Nichts

erscheint

einem

Yoruba

Seven-Seven, ein wahrer (1993), pp.137-149 "Bisi

unmöglich‘:

Yoruba",

Chief

Councillor

Kunstforum

Twins

International

22

Fabunmi", Arkaden vol.3, no.1 (1994), p.90

"Oshogbo",

An

Inside

Story:

African

Art

of Our

Time,

The

Japan

Association of Art Museums, 1995, pp.175-177

"Transformations. Georgina's co-operation with Yoruba masqueraders", in Georgina Beier, Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2001, pp.68-73 Art: Books and Monographs

Sacred

Woodcarvings from

One

Small

Yoruba

Town,

Lagos:

Nigeria

Magazine, 1957

Art in Nigeria 1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 Susanne Wenger, Frankfurt: Eremiten Presses, 1960 Uche Okeke: Drawings, Ibadan: MBARI Publications, 1961 Yoruba: Plastiken eines afrikanischen Kunstverein Darmstadt, 1962

Volkes,

Exhibition

catalogue,

African Mud Sculpture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963 Yemi Bisiri: Asiru:

A Yoruba Brass Caster, Ibadan: MBARI Publications, 1963

A New Yoruba Artist, Osogbo: MBARI MBAYO Publications, 1965

Neue Kunst in Afrika, Sonderheft von Tendenzen, Munich, 1967

Contemporary Art in Africa, London/New York: Pall Mall/Praeger, 1968 Oshogbo Museum

of Antiquities, University of Ife: Institute of African

Studies, 1972

The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975

275

Contemporary Art in the Third World, Port Moresby:

Institute of PNG

Studies, 1975

The

Artist

in Society,

3

Lectures,

Port

Moresby:

Institute

of PNG

Studies, 1976

Gift Orakpo, Monograph, Port Moresby: Institute of PNG Studies, 1976 Neue Kunst in Afrika, exhibition catalogue, ed. by Ulli Beier, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1980 Textilkunst aus Afrika, 1981

exhibition

catalogue,

Bayreuth:

IWALEWA-Haus,

Obiora Udechukwu, exhibition catalogue, Bayreuth: IwALEwA-Haus, 1982 Middle Art spricht über sich selbst, conversation with Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1982 Yoruba Beaded Crowns: Sacred Regalia of the Olokuku of Okuku, London: Ethnographica/National Museum, Lagos, 1982 Glücklose Köpfe / Luckless Heads: Malerei von Ver-riickten aus Nigeria / Paintings by de-ranged Nigerians, with a postscript by Dr Alexander Boroffka and a bibliography by Wolfgang Bender, Bremen: Edition

CON, 1982

Moderne

Kunst

Olatunde,

aus

Oshogbo:

Ademola.

Tijani Mayakiri,

Onibonokuta,

Muraina.

Rufus

Ogundele,

Oyelami,

Asiru

exhibition

catalogue, Köln: Deutsche Welle, 1983 Three Yoruba Artists, Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1988 Bisi Fabunmi, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1989 Sangodare, ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1990 Susanne Wenger: Grenzüberschreitungen 1950-1990, exhibition catalogue/ Ausstellungskatalog zur Retrospektive 1950-1990, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1990 Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art, ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

1991

Textilkunst aus Nigeria: Kings Amao

and Yomi Tiamiyu, ed. by Ulli Beier,

Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1992 Eisenplastiken aus Nigeria / New Iron Sculpture from Nigeria, exhibition

catalogue, ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IwALEWA-Haus, 1992

276

Asiru Olatunde: Retrospective IWALEWA-Haus,

1961-1992,

ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth:

1992

The Relocated Artist: Olu Oguibe Talks to Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWAHaus, 1994 Osi Audu: In Search of the Inner Head, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

1994

Gift Orakpo: A Nigerian Artist, Bayreuth: IwALEWA-Haus, 1994 Segun Faleye: A Yoruba Woodcarver, Bayreuth: IwALEWA-Haus,

1994

The Patient Man Will be Crowned by God: Mufu Ahmed talks to Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1994 Grabplastiken der Ibibio/Ibibio Funeral Monuments, Bayreuth: IWALEWAHaus, 1996

A Sea of Indigo — Yoruba Textile Art, ed. by Ulli Beier, Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension, 1997 & Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1997 Culture: Essays "Spirit Children Among the Yoruba", African Affairs (1954), pp.328-331 "Festival of Images", Nigeria Magazine 45 (1954), pp.14-20

"The Talking Drums of the Yoruba", African Music vol.l, no.1 (1954), pp.29-32 "Yoruba Folk Opera", African Music vol.1, no.1 (1954), pp.32-34

"The Historical and Psychological Significance of Yoruba Myths", Odu 1 (1955), pp.17-25

"The Position of Yoruba Women", Presence Africaine 1-2 (1955), pp.3946 "Before Oduduwa", Odu 3 (1955), pp.25-32 "Quack Doctors in a Yoruba Village", Dokita 1 (19557), pp.57-58 "The Oba's Festival in Ondo", Nigeria Magazine 50 (1956), pp.238-259 "Oloku Festival", Nigeria Magazine 49 (1956), pp.168-183 "The Egungun Cult", Nigeria Magazine 51 (1956), pp.380-392 "Obatala Festival", Nigeria Magazine 52 (1956), pp.10-28 "Yoruba Vocal Music", African Music vol.1, no.3 (1956), pp.23-28 "The Sonponna Cult", Harmattan 4 (1957), pp.22-26 277

"Gelede Masks", Nigeria Magazine 53 (1957), pp.170-187 "The

Attitude of the Educated (1957), pp.162-165

African

to his Traditional

"Die Religion der Yoruba in West Africa", Kumba the Darmstadt Schülerzeitung, 1957, pp.7-10

Art", Phylon

Tam, Special Issue of

"Oshun Festival", Nigeria Magazine 53 (1957), pp.170-187

"Ori-Oke Festival in Iragbiji", Nigeria Magazine 53 (1958), pp.56-83 "Yoruba Enclave", Nigeria Magazine 58 (1958), pp.238-251 "The Egungun Cult Among the Yoruba", Presence Africaine 18/19 (1958), pp.33-36 "The Yoruba Attitude to Dogs", Odu 7 (1959), pp.31-37 "Oshogbo: Portrait of a Yoruba Town", Nigeria Magazine, Independence Issue, pp.94-102 "Les

Intellectuels Africains et le Concept Comprendre (1961), pp.1-16

de la Personalité

Africaine",

"Osezi Festival in Agbor", Nigeria Magazine 78 (1963), pp.184-195 "The Agbegijo Masquerades", Nigeria Magazine 82 (1964), pp.188-199 "Yoruba Religion", catalogue for an exhibition of photographs by Ulli Beier, Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, Calcutta, 1964 "Agbor Dancers", Nigeria Magazine 83 (1964), pp.204-248 "Les Masques Gelede", Etudes Dahomeennes (1966), pp.2-21 "Observations on the Rainbow Lizard", Nigerian Field vol.XXXIX, (1974), pp.137-140

no.3

"Dog Magic of Yoruba Hunters", Nigerian Field vol.XL, no.4 (1975), pp.179-182 "Nichts erscheint einem Yoruba Seven, ein wahrer Yoruba", pp.137-149

unmdglich': Kunstforum

Councillor Twins SevenInternational 122 (1993),

"Orisha befreit den Geist", Ein Gespräch zwischen Wole Soyinka und Ulli Beier, Kunstforum International 122 (1993), pp.150-164

"Eine Kultur, die Ambivalenz zur Tugend macht", Listen 40 (1995), pp.3033

278

"Jeder wählt sich seinen Kopf", von Mufu Ahmed, ed. by Ulli Beier, Neue Bildende Kunst, Sonderausgabe zur Configura 2, Dialog der Kulturen,

(1995), pp.6-7

"Das Gesicht der Götter", Configura 2, Dialog der Kulturen, pp.64-67 "Nsukka — Exile — Biafra", foreword to Ulli Beier (ed.), Resistance: An Anthology of Poetry (1963-1967), Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1996 Culture: Books and Monographs Sacred Festivals in One Yoruba Town, Lagos: Nigeria Magazine, 1959 The

Das

Yoruba Attitude to Death,

Port Moresby:

1976

Gesicht der Götter, photographs Bayreuth: IwALEWA-Haus,

Institute of PNG

Studies,

of Yoruba priests by Ulli Beier,

1982

Yoruba Music: Muraina Oyelami, Tunji Beier and Daniel Blatt, pamphlet accompanying IWALEWA-Haus music cassette, Bayreuth: IWALEWAHaus, 1982 Ademola. Onibonokuta's Yoruba Percussion, pamphlet accompanying IWALEWA-Haus music cassette, Bayreuth: Iwalewa-Haus, 1983 Yoruba Trommelmusik, Konzertprogramm und Einführung Trommelmusik, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1989

Chinua Achebe:

The World is a Dancing Masquerade,

talks to Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: WALEWA-Haus,

in

Yoruba

Chinua Achebe

1991

Yoruba: Das Uberleben einer Kultur, exhibition catalogue, Historisches Museum Bamberg, Bamberg, 1991

A Young Man Can Have the Embroidered Gown of an Elder... Rowland Abiodun & Ulli Beier, conversations on Yoruba Culture, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1992 Orisha Liberates the Mind — A Conversation Between

Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1992

Wole Soyinka and

Wole Soyinka on Identity, from a conversation with Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

1993

Death and the King's Horseman,

A Conversation

and Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1993

between

Wole Soyinka

279

Yoruba Textile Art, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

1993

The Crisis of Yoruba Culture, A Conversation between Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1996 In a Colonial University, Bayreuth: IwALEWA-Haus, Shango als König Haus, 1994

und Gott, exhibition

The

Making of a Philosopher, Ulli Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1994

The

Process of Rediscovery, Richard Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1994

Die Lebendigen Haus, 1994

Toten:

Ahnenmasken

catalogue, Beier

talks

Olaniyan der

Yoruba,

Wole Soyinka and

1993 Bayreuth: to

Sophie

talks

to

Bayreuth:

IWALEWAOluwole, Ulli

Beier,

IWALEWA-

Osi Audu: In Search of the Inner Head, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1994 Das Gesicht der Götter, exhibition catalogue (text not identical with 1982 version), Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1995 Iconography of Order and Disorder, Femi Abodunrin in Conversation with Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1996 "Auf dem Auge Gottes wächst kein Gras": Zur Religion, Kunst und Politik der Yoruba und Igbo in Westafrika, Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1999 The Hunter Thinks the Monkey Is Not Wise... A Selection of Essays, ed. by Wole Ogundele, Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series, 2001 Literature: Essays and Reviews "The

Conflict of Cultures (1957), pp.17-21

in West

African

Poetry",

Black

Orpheus

1

"The Lion and the Jewel/The Swamp Dwellers, by Wole Soyinka", Black Orpheus 6 (1959), pp.50-51 "One Man One Wife, by T.M. Aluko", Black Orpheus 6 (1959), pp.52-54 "In Search of an African Personality", Twentieth Century (1959), pp.343349 "Nigerian Literature", Nigeria Magazine, Independence Issue, pp.212-229 "Three Mbari pp.46-50 280

Poets:

Okigbo,

Clark, Brutus", Black Orpheus

12 (1962),

"Public Opinion on Lovers: Popular Nigerian Literature sold on Onitsha Market", Black Orpheus 14 (1964), pp.4-32 "D.O. Fagunwa: A Yoruba Novelist", Black Orpheus 17 (1965), pp.51-58 "Yoruba Theatre", in Ulli Beier, /ntroduction London: Longmans, 1967, pp.243-254

to

African

Literature,

"Poetry of the Yoruba", Delos 2 (1968), pp.5-26 "Dichtung aus dem Widerstand: Weltwoche 23 (1970) "Yoruba Opera: pp.14-24

The

Magic

Spell

Jüngste of Duro

Biafranische Ladipo",

Lyrik",

Gangan

Die

3 (1970),

"African Literature: Oral Tradition", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1971 "African Literature in English, Britannica, 1971

French

and

Portuguese",

Encyclopaedia

"Yoruba Literature", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1971 "Writing in West Africa", Times Literary Supplement (Aug. 10, 1972)

"Theatre in Nigeria: Origins, Motivations and Organization", Background Paper for the National Seminar on Aboriginal Arts in Australia, Australia Council for the Arts, Canberra, 1973 "E.K. Ogunmola: A Personal Memoir", in Ulla Schild (ed.), Neo-African Literature and Culture: Essays in Memory of Janheinz Jahn, Mainzer

Afrika-Studien 1, Wiesbaden: B. Heymann, 1976, pp.111-118

"Pamphleteers and Signwriters: Two Aspects of Popular Culture in Eastern Nigeria", SPACLALS Conference, Brisbane, 1977 "Politics and Literature in Nigeria: The Example of Duro Ladipo", in Ulla

Schild (ed.), Jaw Bones and Umbilical Cords, A Selection of papers presented at the 3rd & 4th Janheinz Jahn Symposium, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1985

1979 & 1982,

"Amos Tutuola im Gespräch mit Ulli Beier", ın Amos Tutuola: Mein Leben im Busch der Geister, Berlin: Alexander Verlag 1989, pp.161-174 "Nachwort"

in Amos

Tutuola: Mein Leben im Busch der Geister, Berlin:

Alexander Verlag 1989, pp.175-180

281

Literature: Books and Monographs

Muraina Oyelami,

My Life in the Duro Ladipo

Theatre, Duro Ladipo

Memorial Series 1, ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

Ademola Onibonokuta,

1982

The Return of Shango: In Memory of the Duro

Ladipo Theatre, Duro Ladipo Memorial Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1983

Series 2, ed. by Ulli Beier,

Abiodun Ladipo, / Only Wanted to Help Him, Duro Ladipo Series 3, ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1983

Memorial

Yoruba Theater, Band II: Zwei Theaterstiicke aus dem Repertoire des Duro Ladipo Theatre, ed. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1989 Der

König hat sich nicht erhängt — Das Werk des nigerianischen Dramatikers Duro Ladipo, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1989

The Return of Shango: Haus, 1994

The Theatre of Duro Ladipo, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-

Literature: Anthologies Modern Poetry from Africa, with Gerald Moore, London: Penguin,

1965

1955,

African Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional African Poems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 Black

Orpheus: An Anthology of African and Afro-American London: Longmans, 1964 & New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965

Prose,

The Moon Cannot Fight: Yoruba Children's Poems, transl. by Ulli Beier and Bakare Gbadamosi, Ibadan: Mbari Publications, 1964 The

Origin of Life and Heinemann, 1966

Death:

African

Creation

Myths,

London:

Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing on African and Afro-American Literature and Oral Tradition, London:

Longmans, 1967, 1979

Three Nigerian Plays, "Moremi" by Duro Ladipo, "The Scheme" by Wale Ogunyemi,

"Born with the Fire on His Head" by Obotunde Ijimere,

London: Longmans, 1967

282

Political Spider, Stories from Black Orpheus, London: Heinemann, Yokohama: Mondo Books, 1976

1969 &

Not Even God is Ripe Enough, Yoruba Stories edited and translated by Ulli Beier and Bakare Gbadamosi, London: Heinemann, 1969 Yoruba Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 Yoruba Myths, compiled and introduced Cambridge University Press, 1980

by

Ulli

Beier,

Cambridge:

Chinua Achebe: Zwölf Gedichte, transl. by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: Heinrich Bergstresser/IWALEWA-Haus, 1990

Resistance:

An

Anthology

of Poetry

Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

(1963-1967),

ed. by

Ulli Beier,

1996

Yoruba Poetry, enlarged and revised edition, Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series, 2002 Biographies Roads to Knowledge: Autobiographical Essays by Ademola Onibonokuta,

Unpublished essays and taped interviews edited by Ulli Beier

Abefe: An Autobiography by Muraina Oyelami, edited from interviews by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1993

taped

A Dreaming Life: An Autobiography of Twins Seven-Seven, edited from taped interviews by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies Series, 1999 Drama

Obotunde Ijimere, The Fall, Theatre Express Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1973

Sketches

1965,

Nendeln,

Obotunde

Ijimere,

The

Sketches

1965,

Nendeln,

Obotunde

Ijimere,

The Suitcase, adaptation from a play by S. Salazar

Bed,

Theatre

Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1973

Express

Bondi, Theatre Express Sketches 1966, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1973

Obotunde Ijimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala and Other Plays, London: Heinemann, 1966 (includes "Woyengi" and "Everyman")

283

Obotunde Ijimere, "Born with the Fire Plays, London: Longmans, 1967

on His

Head",

Three

Nigerian

Fiction The Stolen Image, a children's novel, Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1976; new edition published in Zimbabwe, 1986

University

Obotunde Ijimere, Jingling Horseman in the Heat of Day, unpublished. German translation by Albert von Haller as "Klirrender Reiter in der Hitze des Tages", Moderne Erzähler der Welt: Nigeria, Tübingen: Erdmann Verlag, 1973, pp.262-273 Translations From Yoruba:

Ulli Beier and Bakare Gbadamosi,

"The Poetry of Masquerades",

Odu 7

(1959), pp.38-40 ----- , "Independence" by Adebayo Faleti, Black Orpheus 8 (1960), pp.4-5 ----- , "The

Beginning

of Olowo

Aiye"

by D.O.

Fagunwa,

Odu

9 (1963),

pp.31-34 ----- , "Two Yoruba Tales", Black Orpheus 21 (1967), pp.24-27 ----- , "Three Yoruba Funeral Songs", Black Orpheus 22 (1967), pp.5-6 ----- , "Stories from the Ifa Oracle", Alcheringa (1970), pp.40-46 ----- , Yoruba Poetry, A Special Black Orpheus Publication (1959) ----- , The Moon

Cannot Fight:

Yoruba

Children's Poems,

Ibadan:

MBARI

Publications, 1964

----- , Not Even God is Ripe Enough, London: Heinemann, 1968 Ulli Beier and Duro Ladipo, English adaptations of /hree Yoruba Plays:

"Oba

Koso",

"Oba

Moro"

and

"Oba

Waja",

Ibadan:

MBARI

Publications, 1964 Ulli Beier and Ademola Onibonokuta, "Three Yoruba Incantations", Black Orpheus 19 (1966), pp.8-9 Ulli Beier, "Obatala: Five Myths Orpheus 8 (1960), pp.34-36

284

about the Yoruba Creator God", Black

Ulli

Beier, "Als die Schildkröte die Weisheit Geschichte", Trickster 14 (1985), p.49

stahl.

Eine

Trickster

Wole Soyinka Reads Yoruba Poetry, CD with OKUTA PERCUSSION; text of

poems translated by Ulli Beier, Bayreuth: Migila Records, 1994 From German: Three

German Poets, Günter Eich, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Lagos: Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1964

Don't Go to El Kuweid,

radio play by Günter Eich, translated for NBC

(Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation) Ibadan and produced by Segun Olusola, 1964

Festianus the Martyr, radio play by Günter Eich, Ibadan and produced by Segun Olusola, 1964

Sabeth,

radio

play

by

Günter

Eich,

translated

translated

for NBC

for NBC

Ibadan

and

produced by Segun Olusola, 1964

Evening in Late Autumn, radio play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt; translated for Theatre Express Lagos, produced by Segun Olusola in Lagos, Ibadan, Osogbo, Edinburgh, 1966 Conversation at Night, radio play by Friedrich Dürrenmatt; translated for Theatre Express Lagos, produced by Segun Olusola in Lagos, Ibadan, Osogbo, 1966 The Great Harangue on the City Wall, play by Tankred Dorst translated for

Theatre Express Lagos and produced by Ulli Beier, 1966

German Poetry after World War II, 23 poems, 19 translated by Ulli Beier, Lagos: Goethe Institute Into German:

"Moremi" by Duro Ladipo, Zeitschrift fur Kulturaustausch 4 (1980), pp. 461-483 "Der König ist tot", "Oba Waja" by Duro Ladipo, Neue Kunst in Afrika, (1980), pp.23-32 "Der Irre sprach",

12 poems by Obiora Udechukwu,

Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus, 1982, pp. 3-15

Obiora

Udechukwu,

"Oriki Orischa: Preisnamen der Götter", Gesicht der Götter, Bayreuth: IWALEWA-Haus,

1982 285

Reports "The Black Art Revolution in the United States and Its Possible Relevance

to Africa", a report for Ford Foundation, 1972 "Institute of African Studies: 1971-1972 Annual Report", University of Ife,

1972

"Institute of African Studies: 1972-1973 Annual Report", University of Ife, 1973

Proposals

for a cultural exchange programme

between Africa and the

Pacific, discussion paper commissioned by UNESCO,

1977

Film

New Images: Oshogbo, Western Nigeria, a film on the artistic and cultural life of Oshogbo in the early 1960s, by Frank Speed and Ulli Beier Mbari Mbayo Publications (1964-1966) Published by Ulli Beier Oba Laoye, Timi of Ede, Oriki ati Orile, 1963 ----- , Oriki Awon Timi Ede, 1964 E. K. Ogunmola, /fe Owo (play), 1965 Ademola Onibonokuta, /lepa Dudu Aiye, 1965

Duro Ladipo, Eda, translation of Obotunde Ijimere's Everyman, 1965 Bakare Gbadamosi, Oro Pelu Idire, 1965 Tijani L. Mayakıri, Ifa, 1966 Pierre Verger, Awon Ewe Osanyin, 1967 Ulli Beier, Asiru, 1965

286

II. EXHIBITIONS It is impossible to list all the art exhibitions that Ulli Beier has either directly organized and mounted himself, or those he has in one way or

another contributed to. This is partly because he has never kept precise records, and partly because, even if he had, the list will be too long. What is therefore presented here is very incomplete and, as said in the brief Introduction to this appendix, partial to Nigeria/Yoruba subjects. At Mbari Club and/or University College Campus 1961: Paintings by Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke 1961: Drawings by Ibrahim el Salahi 1961: Prints by Ru van Rossem 1961: Art from Makerere College, Uganda 1962: Paintings by Jimo Akolo 1962: Paintings by Jacob Lawrence 1962: Nigerian Folk Art 1962: Paintings by Valente Malangatana (Mozambique) 1962: Photographic Exhibition of Portraits of African Artists 1962: Woodcuts by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff 1963: Paintings by Colette Omogbai 1963: Paintings by Skunder (Ethiopia) 1964: Paintings by Jacob Afolabı and Rufus Ogundele 1964: Paintings and Drawings by Bruce Onobrakpeya 1964: Children's Art 1964: Paintings by Rufus Ogundele 1965: Ibo Sculpture 1965: Sculpture by Vincent Kofi (Ghana) 1965: Drawings by Georgina Betts (now Georgina Beier)

287

At Mbari Mbayo Osogbo 1962: Lino Cuts by Susanne Wenger 1962: Paintings by Valente Malangatana 1962:

Photographs Connections)

on

Salvador

(A

Brazilian

Town

and

Its

African

1962: Metal Work by Asiru 1963: African Sculpture from the Ivory Coast 1963: Osogbo Artists (at Exhibition Centre, Marina, Lagos) 1964: Yoruba Art 1964: Paintings by Georgina Betts 1965: Terracotta Reliefs by Ovia Idah 1965: Carved Doors from Ekiti Exhibitions of Yoruba/Osogbo Arts in Other Places As will be noticed from the dates of some of the exhibitions listed below, Ulli Beier was already creating links between cultures and across continents long before he left Nigeria in 1966. In Papua New Guinea (1967-71, 1974-78), Nigeria (1971-74), and Australia (1978-81; 1984-89), he ran galleries (Gambamuno in Papua New Guinea), (Ori Olokun, Oguntimehin in Nigeria), (Migila House in Australia) which constantly mounted exhibitions not only of local art, from other places and continents. IWALEWA-Haus is of course the climax of these 'cross-cultural' and ‘intercontinental’ exhibitions. 1962: Yoruba Traditional Arts, Darmstadt 1963: Yoruba Traditional Arts, Salisbury (Harare) 1965: Contemporary Yoruba Art, Prague 1966: Contemporary Yoruba Art, Musée de l'homme, Paris 1966: Neue Miinchner Galerie, Munich 1966: Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London

1966:Traverse Art Gallery and Centre, Edinburgh 1965: Goethe Institute, Lagos

288

1966: Otis Art Centre, New York 1966: Goethe Institute, Nairobi 1980:

Moderne

Kunst

in Afrika,

Koninklijk

Institut

voor

de

Tropen,

Amsterdam Exhibitions in IWALEWA-Haus, Bayreuth In the eleven years (1981-84; 1989-96) that Ulli Beier has been the director

of IWALEWA-Haus, there have been over a hundred exhibitions, majority of them on or including Nigerian/Yoruba arts and cultures. Several of these exhibitions have been taken as far away as England, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Nigeria and Fiji. Works from the house's collection have also been contributed to exhibitions in the USA and to the Biennale in Venice. IWALEWA-Haus under Ulli Beier has also organized loan exhibitions for many museums, cultural institutions, clubs, students associations and festivals throughout Germany. It is therefore almost impossible, if not actually pointless, compiling a list. Some general information will therefore have to suffice Art

Nigerian artists include: Obiora

whose works have been exhibited during this period Udechukwu, Muraina Oyelami, Rufus Ogundele, Bisi

Fabunmi and Nike Olaniyı. There

have

also been

several

innovative

and

which four major ones may be mentioned here.

ambitious

exhibitions,

of

Yoruba: Survival of a Culture, which juxtaposed traditional wood carvings with contemporary paintings. Uli,

which

also

juxtaposed

wall

paintings

by

Igbo

women

with

contemporary paintings by Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu and Taiwo Sonaike, all members of the Nsukka school and influenced by the uli tradition.

Ephemeral Art: art that is burnt, drowned, shot or buried; art that is destroyed by dancing, and art that is eaten by insects or abandoned to natural forces like wind or rain.

289

Funeral Art: funeral art from Nigeria, Ghana, Czech Republic and the Kingdom of Tonga. Textile

Major textile exhibitions from Nigeria include: Yoruba Textiles: From Kijipa and Adire to Lurex (1995) Indigo from Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand, China,

290

Japan, Germany (1996)

NOTES ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS 1. In 1957 Ulli Beier met a young man called Bakare Gbadamosi during the annual festival for Oya, the goddess of the river Niger. Bakare took Ulli to

meet his father, who was the head of the Abolubode family in Osogbo. The old man had been the baba kekere of the late Ataoja of Osogbo. He had commissioned an Ibadan builder called Kadri to build the magnificent three storey stone house in Ibokun Road. But when the Ataoja died, Bakare's father lost his position as baba kekere and was unable to complete the building. Ulli persuaded the University of Ibadan to complete it by adding shutters and installing light and water. In return they were able to rent the building at a very reduced rate. Thus 41 Ibokun Road became the

headquarters of the Extramural Department of the University of Ibadan. It served not only as Ulli's residence, but also as studio space for the Osogbo

artists. Bakare

Gbadamosi

became

Osogbo: friend, companion and translations of Yoruba poetry.

one

of Ulli's closest associates

interpreter.

Together

they

worked

in

on

2. Timi Laoye, the king of Ede, had been brought up as a Baptist, but when

he was elected as the oba of his town, he took his responsibilities seriously. Since

Sango

has been the personal

orisa of the Timis

for generations,

Laoye meticulously celebrated all Sango festivals in Ede. Through Laoye Ulli met Sango priests and dancers. The Sango priest shown here in a state of trance was Timi Laoye's favourite dancer.

3. Bandele of Otan was the most powerful Sango dancer and performer (baba elegun) in the 50s and 60s. He was a close friend of Ulli's and often stayed in his house in Osogbo. Ulli attended his performances whenever he could, because he felt that like no other Sango priest Bandele personified both the power and the playful humour of his orisa.

4. The kings of the small Yoruba town of Okuku had a unique collection of crowns.

In

a magnificent

annual

festival

the

Olokuku

would

lead

a

procession of crowns to the grave of his mother. In the late 50s and 60s Ulli had been a frequent visitor to Okuku during the reign of Oba Moses Oyinlola. During the early 1970s he became a friend of Moses' successor

Oba Olasebikan Oyewusi II. With his help he produced the book Yoruba

Beaded Crowns — Sacred Regalia Ethnographica 1982).

of the

Olokuku

of Okuku

(London:

5. Ulli first met Adegoriola, the Ogoga of Ikerre, in 1953. His first article for Nigeria Magazine, published in 1954, was about the palace of the Ogoga. Ulli frequently visited the Ogoga, who allocated a room to him, which was located above the main gate leading into the palace. Ulli could make use of this accommodation whenever he visited Ikerre. The Ogoga participated in Ulli's weekend school on Yoruba culture in Ede in 1954 and wrote an article for the magazine Odu on "The Administration of Ikerre". 6. Oba Adenle, the Ataoja of Osogbo, during an exhibition opening at MBARI MBAYO in Osogbo with Duro Ladipo and Jacob Lawrence. Ulli, who had been a great admirer of Lawrence's work, had persuaded the American Society of African Culture to finance Jacob Lawrence's trip to Nigeria. Ulli exhibited Lawrence's work at MBARI Ibadan. 7. Timi Laoye of Ede, receiving guests, lying across the threshold of his inner chamber. On private, less public occasions, Yoruba obas would not sit on the throne, but receive visitors in this informal way. Timi Laoye was Ulli's mentor during the early years in Nigeria. He introduced him to all the olorisas in Ede, shared his considerable knowledge of Yoruba culture with Ulli and interested him in Yoruba poetry. In 1966 he gave the chieftaincy title Bobarotan ("Chief Historian") to Ulli. 8. Ulli first met E.K. Ogunmola in Ikerre Ekiti in 1953. Ogunmola was performing the play "Joseph and his Brethren" outside the palace of the Ogoga. Ulli was so fascinated that he spent two weeks following Ogunmola's company on tour to watch a performance every night. Ulli invited D.W. MacRow, the editor of Nigeria Magazine, to write an article on Ogunmola ("Yoruba Folk Opera" appeared in Nigeria Magazine no. 44 in 1954). He also introduced Ogunmola to Segun Olusola, who produced several of his plays on Nigerian Television. When Ogunmola gave up his

job as a teacher to become a

full-time theatre director, Ulli persuaded

Robert July, the representative of the Rockefeller Foundation, to give Ogunmola a grant to enable him to buy a truck and lighting equipment. 9. Duro Ladipo during a performance of "Oba Koso" in Berlin in 1964. The Berlin Theatre Festival, organised by Nicolas Nabokov, was Duro's first

big

292

breakthrough.

The

festival

featured

two

other

African

stage

presentations,

from

Dahomey

and

the

Cameroons,

but

both

were

folkloristic performances strongly influenced by Keita Fodeba. "Oba Koso" was enthusiastically received by both the public and the German press. The backdrops were painted jointly by Georgina, Rufus Ogundele and Jacob

Afolabı.

10. The anthropologist John Bradbury first introduced Ulli to Ovia Idah. Idah, an eccentric Bini artist, had built himself a house onto, and into, the remains of an ancient city wall of Benin. Each room was on a different

level. Idah had furnished his house with oddities collected at auctions in

Lagos.

He had also created a little museum,

antiquities. The museum

which housed some

Benin

was built in cement and shaped like a large

elephant. The visitors walked up a ladder to enter the museum through the

elephant's anus. Ulli wrote an article about Idah, which was published in Nigeria Magazine (no. 80, 1964). The article brought numerous visitors (mainly peace corps) to Idah, who bought many of his carvings. Idah built a tiny two bedroom flat with a revolving staircase as a special guest room for Ulli and Georgina. They often stayed with Idah on their way to Eastern Nigeria. When Idah died in 1967, his son wrote to Ulli in Papua New Guinea, asking him to give his baby son Sebastian Tokunbo the additional name of Idah. 11. Babalawo's apprentice in Okuku. The babalawos (oracle priests) were the intellectuals of Yoruba society. They had to memorise a vast body of

oracle verse, which virtually helped them to interpret any situation in a man's life. The period of study usually took six years. Babalawos did not

become rich through their profession, but they carried great prestige and were influential in Yoruba society. Ulli greatly admired the calm and poise of Yoruba children, their sense of responsibility and their serious participation in adult life.

12. The Goethe Institute was originally created to spread the German language and German culture around the world. The exhibition of Osogbo artists in Lagos was their first major exhibition of Nigerian artists. It was so successful and the German ambassador was so enthusiastic that the Goethe Institute soon became a major art gallery for Nigerian art in Lagos! Ulli cooperated with a succession of Goethe Institutes in Nigeria on exhibition projects and concerts. He later extended this cooperation to institutes in India, Germany and Australia. 293

13. The MBARI MBAYO anniversary was usually a and exhibitions. Numerous visitors came to Osogbo for the occasion. Often several ambassadors Ambassador and his Cultural Attaché were regular

festival of plays, dances from Lagos and Ibadan attended. The Czech visitors. The play "Kini

Igbagbo" performed by the Duro Ladipo Theatre was an adaptation by Ulli

Beier of "Nathan der Weise", a play by the 18" century German author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The play is set in Jerusalem during the crusades

and

is a plea for mutual

tolerance

between

three religions:

Judaism,

Christianity and Islam. The argument is that none of them can claım a monopoly on absolute truth. In Ulli's adaptation the scene is Nigeria in the mid 60s and the competing religions are Osun worship of Osogbo, Christianity and Islam. With this play Duro Ladipo challenged the

prejudices

of the Yoruba

middle

class at the time. Equally bold and

controversial was Duro's play "Moremi", which deals with the war and peaceful settlement between the invading Yoruba who founded the city of Ife a millennium ago and the aboriginal population. At a time when the civil war in Nigeria looked imminent, Duro's political message could not be misunderstood. 14. In 1983 Ademola Onibonokuta, the artist in residence at IWALEWAHaus in Bayreuth, founded the music group "Onibonokuta's Yoruba Percussion". The trio consisted of Onibonokuta himself, Rufus Ogundele (also artist in residence at the time), and the 13 year old Tunji Beier. The group performed at various festivals in Germany and also at the "African Roots" festival in Holland. In 1994 Ademola Onibonokuta joined Tunji Beier's OKUTA PERCUSSION, which also included Rabiu Ayandokun (Nigeria) and Terje Isungset (Norway). (See: "Osika", CD, 1994) 15. The vigorous dance ensemble of the Western Igbo kingdom of Agbor frequently performed at MBARI Ibadan and MBARI MBAYO Osogbo. Ulli also arranged for them to be included in the film "Nigeria — Culture in Transition", which was produced by ESSO for US television with Ulli Beier as consultant and Wole Soyinka as narrator. The Agbor dancers were also incorporated into Duro Ladipo's play "Moremi". This enabled Duro to portray the conflicting cultures in the play through two different traditions of music and dancing. 16. Es'kia Mphahlele, who is here seen opening the MBARI Ibadan Club on July 20", 1961, was the club's first chairman. However, he left shortly after 294

the opening for Paris to work for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He then moved to Nairobi, where he opened the Chemchemi Cultural Centre,

which was conceived as a sister organisation to the MBARI

Club. Ulli

succeeded Mphahlele as chairman of MBARI Ibadan. The two friends continued to cooperate on various projects. Mphahlele sent the young Kenyan artist Hezbon Owiti to Osogbo, where he stayed in Ulli's house and

worked closely with Georgina. 17. Chinua Achebe was a foundation member of the MBARI Club, but since he held a senior position at Radio Nigeria in Lagos, he could not be a very active member. As an Extramural Tutor in the Western Region of Nigeria, Ulli made ample use of Chinua's writings. Immediately after the war Ulli encouraged Chinua to start a new literary journal and sent a donation towards its foundation. This was the birth of Okike. Chinua published several of Georgina's poems and drawings in the magazine. Ulli's interview

with Chinua,

"The world is a dancing masquerade", was published by

Iwalewa in 1991. Georgina edited an interview with Chinua, "Wealth is not what you own, but what you give away", which will form part of her forthcoming book, They Keep Their Fires Burning. For Chinua's 60" birthday, Ulli translated twelve poems into German and published a limited edition of fifty copies with illustrations by Obiora Udechukwu.

18. Ulli Beier with Segun Olusola at the studio of the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos. Segun Olusola was a close friend and associate of Ulli's. He was at the time Director of Programs at Nigerian Television.

Ulli

contributed

many

programs

to

Nigerian

radio.

He

translated radio plays from German, mainly by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Günther

Eich, which were produced by Segun

Olusola.

In the mid 60s

Segun and Ulli founded a theatre company called Theatre Express. The idea was that theatre in English was possible even with a small cast of two or three actors and with a minimum of lighting and stage props. Ulli translated and adapted plays by Chekhov ("The Bear" and "The Proposal") and Dürrenmatt ("Evening in Late Autumn" and "Conversation at Night").

Segun Sofote and Wale Ogunwale wrote sketches for Theatre Express. The plays were produced by Segun Olusola. Segun Olusola became Nigerian Ambassador to Ethiopia in the 1990s. Before he returned to Nigeria he invited Ulli and Georgina to Addis Ababa for his farewell celebrations. Ulli

295

gave a reading of Yoruba poetry, Georgina arranged posters she had designed for IWALEWA-Haus activities.

an exhibition

of

19. Georgina and Ulli accompanied the Duro Ladipo Theatre Company, who performed the tragedy "Oba Koso". In the foyer of the theatre Georgina arranged an exhibition of prints by the Osogbo artists. 20. President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, who was on a state visit in Bonn, flew to Mainz by helicopter to get a preview of Ulli's exhibition "Neue Kunst aus Afrika" at the State Museum in Mainz. Ulli first met Senghor in 1956 in Paris, during the Présence Africaine conference on African writers and artists. They met several times in Paris and Dakar, corresponded occasionally and exchanged books. Senghor was a great supporter of Ulli's work. His government donated $10,000 to the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, which Ulli founded ın 1974. 21. Part of the exhibition "The Face of the Gods" at the Configura festival in Erfurt. The Configura juxtaposed entries from eight different cultures: China, Egypt, Greece, India, Mexico, Nigeria, USA and Russia. Each country had to contribute art works on six different themes. One of them was "secure values". While Egypt contributed a Pharaonic sculpture, an Islamic script and a Coptic icon, Ulli Beier, who had been asked to conceive the Nigerian contribution, argued that much Nigerian art is ephemeral and that secure values live in the minds of people. He exhibited nine portraits of Yoruba people, whose faces reflected the calm and strength that Yoruba religion installs in the worshippers. (See: Ulli Beier's

article, "Das Gesicht der Götter", in Configura — Dialog der Kulturen,

Erfurt 1995). On this photo: from left, a five year old Sango worshipper from Illa Orangun, a very young girl trading on the market in Akure, and Abiodun Ladipo in the role of Oya in Duro Ladipo's play "Oba Koso". 22. Ulli first met Wole Soyinka in 1958 in London. A Nigerian friend working for the ABC showed Ulli three poems by Wole, "The Immigrant", "The Other Immigrant" and "My Next Door Neighbour". Ulli arranged to

meet Wole, who agreed to have the poems published in Black Orpheus (no. 5, 1959). When Wole returned to Nigeria they became joint founders of the MBARI Club in Ibadan. As editor of MBARI Publications, Ulli published "Three Plays" by Soyinka ("The Swamp Dwellers", "Brother Jero", "The Strong Breed") in 1963. They were co-editors of Black Orpheus from 1960

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to 1963. Emory University in Atlanta has recorded a joint talk of Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier about MBARI, Black Orpheus and other cultural events in the early 60s in Nigeria.

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GLOSSARY

OF YORUBA

PHRASES

AND WORDS

abiku: literally, a child 'born to die’; part of the Yoruba cyclic cosmology in which some children are believed to be spirit children who come into this world simply to torment their mothers by going through the cycle of birth and death (usually at a very young age) repeatedly. When such a child ıs ready to die, any flimsy excuse will do, so he/she is a permanent source of problem to the mother. agbada: big, flowing sleeveless gown worn by men only. Ajagemo: title of Obatala's chief priest. ajebo;

aborisa:

contemptuous

literally, eaters of sacrifice, idol worshippers;

terms

used

by

Christians

and

Muslims

generally,

to refer to all

adherents of traditional religion. Ake: seat and palace of the oba (Alake) of Abeokuta.

Agbegijo; apidan; alarinjo: related but distinct forms of traditional Yoruba theatre. Alaafin: title of the oba of Oyo.

aladire; alaro: batik artists; dyers. Aladura: spiritual — or 'native' — churches whose services consist mainly of long prayers, possessions, visions and speaking in tongues. Alaketu; Ogoga; Elerin; Olufon; Yorubaland.

Deji; Olowo; Ajero; Alara; Olokuku; Ataoja; Timi; Orangun: all titles of obas of different towns in

aso n'la koni enia n'la: "a big, impressive garb does not always make a

powerful person".

baba/iya magba (of Sango): one of the highest titles in the priesthood of

Sango; can be earned either by a woman or man.

baba/iya ibeji: father/mother of twins; honorific name by which parents of

twins are popularly called.

baba elegun Sango: the Sango worshipper who during the big ceremonies is possessed — mounted — by the deity.

baba kekere: a factotum in the palace; he usually has no constitutional authority but wields influence because of his closeness to the oba. babalawo: priest or diviner of /fa oracle; traditional intellectual who also often is a practitioner of traditional medicine. babalorisa: one of the highest titles in the Sango cult.

bata: Yoruba percussion ensemble favoured by Sango. Bobagunwa: a chieftaincy title difficult to translate, but generally meaning "the one who sits with the oba in court" — an adviser rather than a mere courtier. Bobarotan: chieftaincy title connoting that the holder is an advicer to the oba on history and tradition. dansiki: smaller version of agbada. dundun: Y oruba percussion ensemble, includes the talking drum. ebo: ritual or ceremony. edan ogboni: a pair of brass icons (two mysterious, highly stylized figures linked by a chain) very sacred to the ogboni cult. egungun: cult of the ancestors, the masquerades representing them. egungun elewe: the more secular, entertainment-oriented membership is more of a guild than a cult.

offshoot,

its

ere: images, icons, in Yoruba, usually carved of wood. ere ibeji (ibeji images): small wooden representations carved only if one or both die quite young.

of twins, usually

Erinle: Y oruba deity, quite close to Obatala. ese Ifa: verses of Ifa poems. Esu: god of the crossroads and mediator between man and the other deities; a mischievous, trickster deity who abhors complacency.

gelede: dancing masks of the Egbado Yoruba people of the south-western corner of Nigeria, and Benin Republic.

gudugudu: smaller twin drums in the bata ensemble. Ifa: Yoruba oracle with a vast body of poems, chants and mythical stories.

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ile ori: ritual container of an oba's symbolic head; made of cowries sewn tightly together in the typical conical shape of the Yoruba crown. ijala: a type of Yoruba poetry with its own distinct form usually performed by hunters; Ogun's favourite form of poetry.

isakole: annual token rent paid to the family that owns a piece of land on which a non-member is farming. iwa; ifarabale; suuru: character; patience, or coolness; see chapter VI for fuller explanations of these and related terms. iwi egungun: egungun chants or poems; very allusive and otherworldly. iwofa: indentured labour. Jakuta: day of worship for Sango devotees. juju: a type of contemporary Yoruba popular social and originally developed and patronized in the urban centres.

dance

music

kele: religious insignia of red and white beads worn only by Sango priests. kijipa: cheap, traditional woven textile. oba: king; politically, most Yoruba towns were governed like the Greek polis at the head of which was always an oba; each oba had his own specific title. Obatala: the deity of purity, patience and tolerance. Ogboni: Yoruba secret society of priests, titled men and elders; in precolonial times this society exercised great judicial powers and was a

check on the oba's power. Ogun: Yoruba god of iron, and therefore worshipped by all those who use

iron implements. oke D.O.: the District Officer's Rest House, usually on a hill and separated from the town. olaju:

"civilization", but generally the experience

of Westernization

and

knowledge of Western ways. Ooni: title of the oba of Ile-Ife, a reigning oba is reputedly a descendant of Oduduwa, the mythical founder of the Yoruba race.

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olorisa:

priests

and

priestesses

of various

Yoruba

divinities;

also

all

worshippers of these deities. onijo pade onilu, wewe se wewe: "when a master dancer meets a master drummer, its always a great match". opoo: money waist.

belt, usually worn

by Yoruba

market

women

around

the

ori: head, fate. ori inu: inner head; destiny or genius. oriki: praise names and poems. orisa: general name for all Yoruba divinities. oro: predominantly male cult that exercised judicial powers. orun: Yoruba heaven, not synonymous with the Christian heaven but, in the Yoruba cosmos, the abode of the ancestors and the unborn. ose: the traditional Yoruba week of five days; also the day of worship of any particular deity. Osun: river goddess worshipped in Osogbo (and other communities). Oya: Yoruba deity of the river Niger, wife of Sango. oyinbo: white man. rara: a form of poetry usually performed by women. Sango: Yoruba god of thunder and lightning; also god of retributive justice. sanyan; etu: costly and highly valued types of traditional Yoruba textile. segi: special type of beads worn by royalty. Soponna: the deity of illnesss, but generally, of suffering; mischievously blamed for, and identified with, smallpox by early Yoruba converts to Islam and Christianity.

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The Yoruba word oo NN IFyou ask a hundred Yorub a hundred definitions. It is a term of appreciation for a man who has integrity, wisdom and patience. Somebody said: "Omoluabi is a man who has two hundred friends." This book explores one omoluabi's life. "Ulli's affair with Nigeria was love at first encounter. There are not many people who breathe and live culture, and perhaps even Ulli was unaware at the time that he belonged to that minority breed — he would find this out on his first encounter with Yoruba culture ... Without being fulsome or uncritical, (Ogundele has captured for us the essence of the wanderer who came, saw,

and was conquered, whose approach to life rescued the word "expatriate" from its usual negative connotations."

Wole Soyinka

Wole Ogundele has taught African Literature in English at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ile, Nigeria, since 1980. He now does translation from English into Yoruba and is currently working on a critical history of written Yoruba history. Omoluabi is his cultural biography of Ulli Beier.

Bayreuth African Studies 66 ISBN 3927510 9 3