I fly from Lagos to
Frankfurt straight into the winter breath of December in 1994. Huffing
and puffing my way across Germany for the next several months, I end up
in Bayreuth in 1996 to pursue a one-year German language intensive
preparatory classes towards full-blown studies. It is here in this
sleepy university town which speaks a drowsy and guttural low German,
that I learn from Paul Onovoh, Nigerian PhD candidate at Bayreuth
University, that there is a Yoruba man in town who lives in a residence
aptly referred to as ‘Iwalewa Haus.’ He is white and his name is Ulli
Beier. Of course Beier (also known as Obotunde Ijimere) is so
detribalised that I do not think of him as German, any more than I
consider Susanne Wenger Austrian. Wenger, a boon companion of Beier’s
earlier years, initially comes to Oshogbo with him around 1950 and
never leaves but remains in that small Western Nigerian town as an Osun
devotee and later priestess, for the rest of her life.
I find it amusing
that I think of beer when I hear the familiar name, Beier. Perhaps this
is mere phonetic and visual accidence, due to a lifelong habit of
pronouncing and reading English, even as I engage serious graduate
level German? But there is playful mischief involved. My overactive
imagination adds a truly ‘local’ colour. Everyone knows that Bayern is
notorious for its annual Oktoberfest – that gay and sunny communal
drink-fest full of beer and bratwurst where Bacchus himself would feel
completely at home. Beer. Ulli Beier. I cannot believe he lives in this
dusty, moat-eaten town; why not neighbouring glamorous Munich, or
sophisticated Frankfurt, picturesque Bonn, or world–renowned Berlin? I
am giddy while mispronouncing his name. The drunken feeling evoked does
not come from Oktoberfest beer draughts served by those rumoured
big-bosomed, Amazon German waitresses with matronly girdles. It is
rather due to Beier’s legendary exploits as an astute promoter, pioneer
and bedrock of Modern Nigerian culture from the time of dinosaurs –
when literary and arts patronage was not fashionable across Africa.
Mbari-Mbayo
In the
colonial-era-dawning of modern Nigerian literary and visual arts Beier,
himself a writer, did not only act as the usual expatriate literary
critic, educator and scholar but also as patron, facilitator, curator,
translator, anthologist, publisher and mentor to fledgling writers like
Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo or Mabel Segun; and to
a whole gallery of early Oshogbo School visual artists; and dramatists
like Duro Ladipo. His Mbari-Mbayo club, spanning 1957-1967, was an
important cultural watering hole for foundational Nigerian writers and
artists, as well as a bridgehead linking early Nigerian literary and
artistic activities to continental and metropolitan fashions and
movements. Through his cultural networking and promotional activities
he inserted modern Nigerian cultural production into twentieth century
post-war liberating and anti-colonial energies. This is within the
atmosphere of a phenomenon scholars now refer to as black
internationalism as it is exemplified and practised within the
Negritude Movement, Harlem Renaissance and Indigeneism in Paris, New
York, Latin America and the Caribbean respectively. The Mbari-Mbayo
Movement, co-founded in Ibadan by Ulli Beier, can be added to that
complex. Living in the same town with this genie and breathing the same
air is quite overpowering. I decide to seek Beier out, shake hands with
history and be done with it.
Iwalewa Haus
Iwalewa Haus is in
the ‘Stadtmitte’ – that is, at the heart of Bayreuth, and around the
outer perimeters of a busy inner-city central bus terminal, and
hospitality and shopping district. Far enough away from the madding
crowd, it sits right on the lip of windswept, narrow Münzgasse Street,
number 9, with just a narrow sidewalk separating it from the occasional
traffic. It is a nondescript, leaf-veined block of building perched on
a narrow, slightly winding incline. The façade carries the timeworn and
famous sign, IWALEWA HAUS, vertical and aslant away from the front door
with which it forms a 90-degree angle. Except for that sign, the murals
on the walls outside, and wood carved doors, the building can easily
pass for the residence of an eccentric graffiti artist. Only when you
enter is there a suggestion that this is a veritable institution built
over a half century across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and
finally housed here in a small, quiet German town.
I press the
doorbell. Georgina Beier, the woman of the house, opens the double
street doors with a smile. I am expected. She leads me into the foyer,
up a staircase and to the main level of the house and a hallway, which
appears to be an art gallery, albeit one where nothing seems to be for
sale. Creating the atmosphere of a permanent exhibition, large
paintings, adire and batik cloth adorn the walls and sculptures dot the
hallway. There is no real furnishing; it is mostly exhibition space in
the corridor and in the adjoining rooms, with the occasional office
workstation. As I later discover on subsequent visits, it is the same
on all of three floors except, perhaps, for the uppermost, which is
also living quarters for Ulli and Georgina.
I take a seat on
one of the occasional cane chairs or benches lying around the rather
empty exhibition hall, while Georgina disappears into the upper levels
of the house. While I wait for Beier, I decide to explore. I stand up
and move from room to room, a guest at an exhibition. I note that the
paintings are reminiscent of the Oshogbo School: they are replete with
traditional Yoruba motifs, religious and otherwise. Some Igbo
influences are discernible too. But it is disproportionately a
collection of Yoruba art. In short, Iwalewa Haus, from all appearances,
is a gallery of mostly Yoruba painting and artwork, interspersed with
work from Eastern Nigeria and other parts of the continent. While I am
in contemplation, I hear a voice at the door. It is Beier. We proceed
to an office off the hallway were we could sit across from each other
and have a conversation.
He is of a slight,
well-kept built, average height, and grey-headed. His seeming frailty
is that of a taut bow. I can feel the resilience and energy in his
frame. And the eyes are keen as blades and penetrating, yet with a soft
and wise film over them. We make small talk before he suddenly lets off
a sharp arrow out of his bow: “Why do Nigerians run after foreign gods
when they have traditional models aplenty – like the Orisha religion?”
It is a sobering thought, which invokes another time, another place and
a different mental space.
Pagan time capsule
We enter a pagan
time capsule and are shut out of a suffocating Christian evangelical
Bayreuth, and Germany. Without actually referring to her he has invoked
the person of Susanne Wenger, a good pagan, with his remark; and
recalled Oshogbo and their work together there in another life. It
occurs to me that he never really left Nigeria spiritually. The essence
of Oshogbo and its ambience is recreated in the paintings and artwork
collected at Iwalewa Haus; their religious undertones is a form of
communion and devotional service to the Osun Oshogbo groove where such
artworks are represented in their sacred form in stone sculptures, and
where Wenger is still artist in residence and Osun priestess, carrying
on her and his behalf, while he devotes himself to the secular,
scholarly, and the deceptively mundane – such as Iwalewa Haus.
A pagan Yoruba
religious and social worldview is captured in the compressed axiomatic
substantive, ‘Iwalewa’ – literally meaning ‘character is beauty,’ and
(in its expanded adjectival form) ‘only those who have character are
truly beautiful.’ ‘Iwa,’ character, is a necessity for any true devotee
of pagan Yoruba religion, whether it is of the Ifa or Osun variety. In
Ifa, this phenomenon is referred to as ‘Iwapele,’ synonymous with
‘iwalewa.’ At a point in our conversation, he emphasises this with an
anecdote.
When Beier arrived
Ibadan in the early 1950s to take up a teaching appointment at the
Extra Mural Studies Department of what was then the University College,
according to him, Ibadan was mostly rural. People were so pure-hearted
in their pagan devotion, honest, true and beautiful that he never
needed to remove the ignition key from his car, the doors of which he
also left open sometimes. No one would steal the car. He could leave it
at any spot in that town all day and it would be waiting when he got
back. Such is the purifying strength of Yoruba religion. The moral he
is pointing at is that those were the days of innocence, that with the
modern desertion of Yoruba religion, such purity of character, that
‘iwalewa,’ has also deserted the average Yoruba, or Nigerian by
extension.
Iwalewa Haus
itself, as cultural centre, is then a reminder of the requirements for
a true pagan devotee of Yoruba religion; a kind of religious grove, a
place of worship, with Beier as its priest if we go by the example of
his life. ‘Iwalewa’ as a Yoruba religious axiom and requirement for
worship sums up the esoteric dimension of Beier’s cultural work, which,
through the beauty of his character, transcends race, language,
geographies, gender and all other material and limiting suffocation
such as popular modern religion, politics and other kinds of shortness
of sight. I sit there as Beier’s vision of pagan ritual and liturgy
unfolds. I do not need much convincing from this detribalised, white
Yoruba man in Germany wearing a traditional tie-and-dye shirt. The
proof is in his life spread out before me like an Ifa divination chain.
Through honest, pagan vigour he founds the Mbari-Mbayo Literary and
Arts Movements, without which there will be little of modern Nigerian
culture to speak of. It is an occasion for rejoicing because Ulli Beier
is not dead but has merely joined his pagan Yoruba ancestors.
Amatoritsero Ede, a
doctoral candidate of Literature at Carleton University, Ottawa,
Canada, is editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement.
