g Beier 
Wole 
Ogundele 
was well-known in the English-speaking and German-speak- The name Ulli Beier 
ing worlds from the 1950s to the 1970s. Especially in the 
1950s and'60s. It was invariably linked with that of Susanne 
Wenger, the Austrian artist who was his first wife. So famous 
was this man who had been working and residing in one West 
African corner of the British empire that when he left Nigeria 
in 1966 December for Papua New Guinea, no less a magazine 
than the TLS announced it. Among the Yoruba of western 
Nigeria, his name and Susanne's have entered folklore while 
he himself has been transformed into a fictional character in 
at least two African novels in English. 
Indeed, so much was he on everybody's lips in Nigeria in those days 
that his second wife, Georgina, heard about him long before she met him. 
Living in the far-away northern Nigerian town in Zaria in the early 1960s, 
she had heard so much about him and had made it a point of duty to meet 
this man whose name was on everybody's lips whenever she went down 
south. In due course, she and her first husband took a trip to Lagos. Their 
car broke down in one of the obscure streets and as they were standing 
around notknowing what to do, two white gentlemen saw them and stopped 
to offer help. So eager was Georgina to seek out this man whose activities 
were well-known even in far away Zaria that she wasted no time in asking 
if any of the gentlemen knew'Ulli Baya'. One of them smiled shyly and, 
rather apologetically, confessed that he was Ulli Beier. Georgina had been 
convinced that the man bearing that name could not be anything but a 
Nigerian! 
Another anecdote is also worth retelling. Ulli Beier left Nigeria in 
1966 December but came back for a conference in 1970 After the 
conference, he decided to pay a visit to Ede, the town inwhichhe had spent 
three of the happiest years of his life, to see old friends. Ede had become 
a garrison town and soldiers were everywhere, driving recklessly. An army 
truck crowded in on him in the narrow street, brushed his tiny car and almost 
ran him into the gutter. However, Ulli was still able to drive the car to 
Ibadan, where he stopped to see Wole Soyinka. When Wole Soyinka and 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol 2/No. 3 GLENDORA .v.
Ulli Beier 
hi. w.fo saw the car, they were aghast: what happened? 
Soymka was horrified at the idea of Ulli coming all the way gomg native'and certainly without ceasing to be a European. 
from PNG to be mindlessly killed in Nigeria: what would the I want to answer this question first by saying just a little aboul 
rest of the world have thought if, God forbid, such a thing n.shfe pnor to his coming to Nigeria, and then concentrating 
had happened?'He asked. Laide, Soyinka's wife answered 
(hit hypothetical question promptly: well, if he had died 
on h,s associations, friendships and background activities in 
Nigeria from 1 950s to 1966. 
people would simply have said that he knew his time was up Ulli Beier was born in Glowitz, Germany in 1922. In 
and came ome to die!' To Laide and the citizens of Osogbo 'V25 the family moved to Berlin where they lived until 1933. 
Ede, llobu, Ulli Beier was simply one of them Ihe father wasamedical doctor, but he was alsoa musician 
I have started this paper by retelling these anecdotes to who played in orchestras, though as a hobby and not as a 
ra.se one issue that is central to my work on Ulli Beier, and that second profession. He regularly took his son Ulli to these 
• s the issue of identity. Who is Ulli Beier? What identity does performances of chamber music. He was also a lover of art 
heconceivefor himself-or who does heperceive himself »obe2 who took his son to virtually all the museums of ancient art 
How have Nigerians especially ,he Yoruba people among and exh,b,tiOns of modern art in Berlin. Ulli certainly imbibed 
whom he hved, seen him? | n these days of multiculturalism of h'S ' ° V e ° f a r t f r o m * • father and has never missed an 
hybr.d.ty.of postcolonial, multiple, and even willful erasure opportunity to mount an exhibition. Also, he has never from 
of, identities, these questions are important and Ulli Beier n.s childhood been able to sleep in a room without a painting 
answers them in a unique, salutary way. In try,ng to deal with 
th.squest.an an Australian academic and would-be biogra- TT^'1 1 " 0 1 1 ' " ' ' 1 ' 5 firStel6Ven V ™ happyand 
that changed i n , 933, when Adolf HiHefand pher formulated an answer in the early , 980s which by its 
very paradox goes to the heart of the matter: Ulli Beier he Socialist party seized power. Although Jewish, 
V W e r e n O tPr a c t i ^ n g Jews; culturally, thefather wrote, is 'a German-born Yoruba. Ulli Beier may have ' re- saw r 
P U r e l y a S a G e r m n nounced h,s German citizenship-l don't think he forrna||y d i d ' ^ t h e r e s t o f the family 
h,s-but he remains a western man, a European proud of his 
European heritage. 
I am going to try to show how Ulli Beier somehow 
0 P ° W e r ' Ullis moth- waS 
" ,6nOU9h t0 - what was coming and she 
pers aded her extremely reluctant husband to let the whole 
managed to be more Yoruba than many Yoruba peoplecertamly 
more than most western-educated Yoruba-bu. without ^Lrr°/a l e s t i n e s o f r o m i 9 3 3 '9^ui.d 
ut simply as 
of returning to Germany after Hitler 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
GLENDORA,
would have been gotten rid of. Until 1 941, life in Palestine was 
poorer, but still free. But from 1941 to 1 947, Ulliwas interned 
by the British as an 'enemy alien' - that is as a German! It was 
during this time, however, that he passed the B.A. General 
London University as an external student, at the end of 1947. 
He moved to London early in 1948 but, in December, stood 
in danger of being deported to Australia. He knew nothing 
of Australia, but did not want to go there. He had registered at 
the University of London to read for a diploma in Phonetics, 
the only course open to foreigners then. Ironically it was this 
opportunistic action that would set him on his road to Nigeria. 
From 1948 to 1950, Ulli taught in a school for handicapped 
and delinquent children. From 1 949 to 1950, he had to also 
teach German Phonetics at London University as an evening 
course. Again, this position, taken reluctantly and after much 
pressure, facilitated his coming to Nigeria. He was walking 
along a corridor one day when he saw an advertisement for 
the position of Lecturer in Phonetics at the two year-old 
University College of London in Ibadan, Nigeria. He knew 
nothing about this outpost of the empire; but that, precisely, 
was its attraction: the advert was like a door leading to, not 
colonial adventures, but mystery; and it was beckoning him 
to come in and partake of that mystery. When he made known 
his intention to apply for the position, a sympathetic senior 
colleague and mentor advised him to wait a year, when a 
better position would be opened in the more civilised Gold 
Coast (Ghana). This advice decided Ulli, for he thought that 
a more civilised Ghana could only mean one thing: the 
university there would be more colonial than the one in Nigeria. 
He applied for the job and got it, and on October 1 1 950, he 
boarded a plane to Nigeria. Thus, Ulli Beier's coming to 
Nigeria was purely by accident-he did not plan it at all, 
although, with hindsight, he now believes his life was from 
the beginning directed byEsu, theYoruba god of chance and 
•he crossroads. 
Ibadan 
But he was quickly disaffected with the general situation 
of both his job and the university college. The college was 
temporarily located in an old army barracks notfar from town. 
But as far as it was concerned, the big, chaotic but fascinating 
town of Ibadan might well have been two hundred miles away. 
There was very little town-and-gown interaction; many of the 
professors knew much about Africa, but were generally aloof 
ar>d condescending in their attitude, and did not think much 
°f African cultures. As for the students, they felt only embarrassment 
towards their heritage and thanked God for lifting 
them above the local people and their backward cultures. 
Whenever Ulli tried to make them see things differently, they 
alw'ays repeated the phrase'we can't even make pins' 
As for the course in Phonetics, he quickly saw its 
pointlessness: were the students supposed to learn how to 
speak like English men? If so, one hour of practical a week 
was too small and two hours of linguistic theories too much. 
In any case, why should they have to speak English like the 
English? Were they to just to learn the theories of linguistic? 
In that case, two hours of theory was too small and the hour 
of practical just a waste. Ulli thought of changing to literature, 
but he found the same pointlessness, so he decided, half-way 
ipto his first year, that he would serve only a one-term contract 
and be gone. 
But Ulli stayed sixteen years instead of three, thanks to 
two people. The first is Robert Gardner, a man from the then 
Gold Cost who was in charge of the Extra Mural Studies 
department. This man invited them to help give occasional 
talks to his classes in his spare time. Largely because the offer 
gave him opportunities to travel out of the campus and Ibadan, 
Ulli accepted. Very soon he started travelling to Abeokuta 
twice a week and eventually, he decided that if he was to stay, 
that department was the only one that would make it worth 
his while. By the end of 1950/51 session, he had fully 
transferred to the department. 
The second person was a black American named 
Lorenzo Turner, then at Chicago University. Lorenzo Turner 
had come to Ibadan on a sabbatical, collecting folk materials 
to compare with the ones he had already collected in black 
communities in the southern states of America. This man spoke 
so passionately about the spiritual richness of these poor 
people and the tragedy of their lives that Ulli was moved. He 
lamented that in the absence of science and technology, and 
physical monuments, the only thing the black race had was 
their spirituality, and even this was fast disappearing. Ulli by 
now knew just enough of the society to feel the truth of this, 
and he assisted Turner in anyway he could, including 
travelling with hirr. over the region. It was on one such travel 
to the neighbouring Dahomey (now Benin Republic), that Ulli 
discovered what he was truly in Nigeria for. Turner and Ulli 
parted in Meko, the one on his way to Ghana while the other 
slowly trekked across the border to Nigeria. He slept in a little 
village called llara, a village that had been bye-passed by 
colonialism and the rush to modernise- a village that was still 
in the 1 9th century. There, Ulli realised what Yoruba communities 
might have looked like even just half a century ago, 
and he realised he had found a home. His spiritual exile and 
social isolation, which started in 1933 were finally over. He 
also realised that he was just one the threshold of a quest; he 
did not know where to begin and what he might find, but he 
knew that it was there within the society and he must find it. 
Back in Ibadan, he wasted no time transferring fully to 
the Department of Extra Mural Studies. Mr. Gardner had 
reorganised and enlarged the programme to cover all the three
regions of the country, so Ulli was appointed teacher in 
charge of the whole of the then Western Region. He had a 
loan to buy a car, and, better still, he was free to live in any 
part of the region. As soon as it was practicable, he and 
Susanne moved out of the campus, not into the city, but to Ede, 
a town less than 1 00 miles north of Ibadan as the crow flies. 
He lived in Ede from 1952 to 1954, then moved to llobu, 
another town very close by, and finally to Osogbo late in 1955 
where he lived for the next eleven years. 
Osogbo 
The activities for which Ulli Beier became famous are: 
the founding of the seminal literary journal Black Orpheus and 
the club Mbari, both in Ibadan; the starting of the Osogbo Art 
Movement, his association with DuroLadipo, perhaps the most 
famous of Yoruba travelling theatre dramatists; the translations 
of Yoruba oral poetry into English and, with Gerald 
Moore, the first anthology of modern African poetry in English. 
He was also, in association with his first wife Susanne 
Wenger, famous for his support of the Osun festival in 
Osogbo 
Ulli Beier has been modestly proud of whatever 
assistance he rendered to his friend Duro Ladipo while he 
attributes the success of the Art Movement to his second wife 
Georgina (who is also a wonderful artist in her own right); as 
for his connection with Osun Osogbo, he gives all the credit 
to Susanne while assigning his own contribution to merely that 
of doing his civic duties, as an important chief in the town. But 
I was shocked to discover that while he continues to cherish 
his life-long friendship with at) the writers and artists with whom 
he worked on Black Orpheus and in Mbari Club, he does not 
think too much of both: these were things that had to be done 
and he did them while his real interest lay somewhere else. 
What were these real interest? I have to go back a little 
bit to answer this question. The magazine Black Orpheus 
started in 1 957 and the club in 1961. What was Ulli doing 
between 1951 (when he moved to Ede) and 1957? An 
account of these activities will not only explain the huge 
success of both club and magazine, as well as the direction they 
took, but in part also why they did not survive for long after he 
left. 
When Ulli started travelling around as merely an 
enthusiastic assistant to Robert Gardner, he also started 
discerning some kind of beauty, integrity and dignity in the 
culture and people around him-precisely those qualities that 
the western-educated eliteand students in the university college 
were fast losing, and which most of the expatriate staff simply 
did not see. He wanted to find out where these qualities came 
from. His first path was through the oral literature which, again, 
he stumbled on by accident. 
While teaching Macbeth in Abeokuta one evening, a 
GLENDORA 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3 
student asked if the story dramatized in the play was true. The 
question suggested to Ulli that the student perhaps could not 
distinguish between fact and fiction; if so did it mean that the 
students generally did not know of indigenous literature? A 
quick probing revealed to him that though they knew of the 
existence of songs and folktales, they did not consider these 
to be literature at all-to them, literature was only that which the 
white man had written down in his own language! Ulli's way 
of remedying this cultural injustice was to start the then difficult 
and thankless task of collecting oral poems, initially and 
primarily for use in his class. Thus began his life-long 
fascination with Yoruba oral literature, and his promotion and 
translation of them. As he collected more, he discovered that 
they revealed a cosmology whose traces in everyday life were 
difficult to discern, but there nevertheless. This was 1 951, long 
before African oral literature was known and given cultural/ 
academic respectability. Indeed, that recognition and 
respectability was in part due to his pioneering efforts, for 
when Black Orpheus started six years later, he gave it a pride 
of place in the journal. 
Ulli moved to Ede at the end of 1 951 because he had 
earlier met Timi Laoye, the Oba of Ede and been impressed 
byhim. Furthermore, when he and Susanne moved there, they 
did not live in Oke D.O. or any such isolated place, but right 
by the market square and therefore very close to the palace. 
Forthe next two years, Ulli wentto the Timi's palace everyday, 
saw and chatted with the Timi everyday. To this day, he speaks 
of Timi Laoye as one of his mentors. It was the Timi who 
introduced him through this aunt the lya Sango, to the Sango 
cult and other Yoruba religious cults. He also discovered that, 
apart from the usual carved palace posts, the Sango shrine in 
the palace housed many marvellous carvings, all hidden away 
and never displayed in public. He would later exhibit these 
images in Ibadan, Salisbury (now Harare), and Prague, with 
Timi andhispalace drummers attending. Meanwhile, the three 
discussed all aspects of Yoruba culture and society daily. 
Whenever the Timi could not answer some of Ulli's dificult 
questions, it was the lya Sango who came to their rescue. In 
this Ulli also discovered that the true position of women in 
Yoruba society was contrary to what met the eye-that they were 
neither the passive, pliant beasts that colonial administration 
wanted them to be, nor totally submissive to their men. When 
it came to what the Timi considered as sacred knowledge, he 
actually got Ulli initiated into the Ogboni cult. 
This was also the beginning of Ulli's friendship with 
several Yoruba Obas: the Ataoja, the Ooni, the Ogoga, the 
Olowo, the Orangun, the Ogiyan, the Deji, among them. He 
was very intimate with the Timi, but that oba was a mentor; 
on the other hand, his intimacy with the Olokuku was that of 
two good friends. 
The fiery-tempered lya Sango in the palace at Ede had
started him on the road to a discovery of what Yoruba religion 
was about, and he followed this up himself by first familiarising 
himself with all the cults in Ede and surrounding towns, and 
then striking a deep spiritual friendship with the priests and 
priestesses of these cults. Thus, he would worship on every Ose 
with the Erinle people in llobu, attend all the Sango ceremonies 
in lla-Orangun and Otan-Ayegbaju, or create time to be 
present at the Ogiyan ose in Ejigbo. As he himself has put it, 
these were his spiritual soulmates, people in whose company 
he felt most home and from whom he learned so much. So much 
did he find fulfillment among these people that he could still 
say, in 1995, that he was sure had he been born a Yoruba 
person, he would certainly have been a Sango devotee. 
Two of his Olorisa friends are worth mentioning: 
Bandele of Otan-Ayegbaju and Ajofoyinboof lla-Orangun. The 
two were Sango dancers of extra-ordinary prowess and 
imagination, though of contrasting styles: the one in his dances 
depicted the legendary, deified ruler in his fiery masculinity; 
the other depicted his humanity, pathos and tragedy. These 
two dancers were Ulli's bosom friends and it was partly from 
them that he got his inspiration to write his own play The 
Imprisonment of Obatala. In short, Ulli Beierwas in touch with 
the two most important institutions at the heart of Yoruba 
culture: the religious cults and the Oba institution. At the same 
time, he did not lose the common touch, for it must always be 
borne in mind that in both Ede and llobu, he lived near the 
market place while in Osogbo he lived on a street that led 
directly to the king's market. We must also remember that 
he made his rounds of extra-mural teaching, sometimes 
teaching in three different towns in one evening and not 
returning till late in the night. 
Very soon, these intimate contacts began to be 
translated into action. By 1954, he began to organise 
conferences on Yoruba society, culture and history, initially 
throughthe auspices of his department at the university. It was 
at the 1954 conference on Yoruba culture and history that the 
idea of a journal was born. Within a year, the first issue of this 
journal, appropriately called Odu, was out, with Ulli Beier as 
chief editor and Saburi Biobaku as assistant editor. There are 
three significant points I want to make about this journal. First, 
it was conceived as a journal by Yoruba people for Yoruba 
people (that is, it was not published with an eye to a foreign 
audience). Second, and as such, it published some poems, 
articles and reviews in Yoruba. Third, some oba like the Timi, 
theOoni,the Ogoga and the Ataoja actually wrote in it, just 
as they had attended the 1 954 conference. 
It was these experiences and knowledge of Yoruba 
society that dictated the cultural stance that BlackOrpheus took 
*hen he started it three years later, even though the idea 
was conceived in far away Paris and with Jahnheiz John in 
Vnl 2/No. 3 GLENDORAr 
1956. By this time, there had been a lot of wonderful writing 
coming from Francophone Africa but next to nothing from 
Anglophone West (and East) Africa. Thus although the idea 
was to stimulate the latter, Ulli believed that this literature would 
have to be built on oral literature, rather than on English 
models. This was the only way itcould have a distinctly African 
voice, and thus integrity. Of course, he could not dictate what 
people should write, but he could gently stimulate a particular 
kind of writing by the kind of materials published in the early 
issues. And since, luckily, there were no writers on the ground, 
this was easy. Secondly, the kind of critical reviews published 
would also gently nudge the writers in this direction. As this 
was truly a new beginning, these aims were relatively easy 
to achieve. Thus, the early issues were filled with a lot of 
traditional oral literature and translations of Francophone 
(Negritude) writing. And when the new writings began to 
appear, the critical reviews stressed their debt to oral literature, 
praising them for their originality on this account. It is no 
exaggeration to say that African Literature in English today 
would not only have started later than it did without Black 
Orpheus, it would also have been very different-certainly, the 
maturity and distinctiveness it achieved so early would have 
been delayed. 
As famous and seminal as the magazine was the club, 
Mbari Club, when it came later in 1961. Also started by Ulli, 
it had the same philosophy as the journal, giving exactly the 
same kind of respect and recognition that it gave to westerneducated 
artists to local artists and performers. For example, 
the Yoruba novelist D. O. Fagunwa, and the much despised 
Amos Tutuola were invited to be honorary members. What I 
wish to stress about the club here, however, is one of its often 
neglected, or forgotten, activities. Mbari Club was as much an 
artists'club as it was a writers'. It exhibited popular and elitist 
artists, artists from Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Sudan, 
Germany, Australia, and the U.S.A. Artists from U.S.A., British 
Guyana also came there to work. I stress this because the art 
scene of the club was exclusively Ulli's and in many respects 
it was the most vibrant. Also, this aspect of Ulli's life is often not 
recognised, partly because of the international fame that 
some of the Mbari writers quickly achieved. But to conclude, 
I make the point that both journal and club were so successful 
simply because, unlike even his Nigerian colleagues who 
thought that traditional Africa was a dead past, Ulli believed 
otherwise. He believed that traditional Africa was a living 
present to be proud of, and capable of showing the way to the 
future. He lived it, knew its worth, and tried to make his westerneducated 
friends and colleagues see its values and beauty.GR 
African Quarterlv 
on the Arts