Ulli Beier

Chief Horst Ulrich Beier, commonly known as Ulli Beier (30 July 1922 – 3 April 2011), was a German editor, writer and scholar who had a pioneering role in developing literature, drama and poetry in Nigeria, as well as literature, drama and poetry in Papua New Guinea.

Early life and education

Ulli Beier was born to a Jewish family in Glowitz, Weimar Germany (modern Główczyce, Poland), in July 1922. His father was a medical doctor and an appreciator of art, who reared his son to embrace the arts. After the Nazi party's rise to power in the 1930s, his father was forced to close his medical practice. The Beiers, who were non-practising Jews, left for Palestine.

In Palestine, while his family were briefly detained as enemy aliens by the British authorities, Ulli Beier earned a BA as an external student from the University of London. He later moved to London to earn a graduate degree in Phonetics. He found veterans were being given precedence in academic jobs and searched widely for a position.

Marriage and family

He married the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger. In 1950 they both moved to Nigeria, where Ulli Beier had been hired at the University of Ibadan to teach Phonetics. They divorced in 1966.

Beier married the artist Georgina Betts, an Englishwoman from London who was working in Nigeria. In 1966 when the civil war broke out between Biafra and the federal government, they left the country and moved to Papua New Guinea.

Career

While at the university, Beier transferred from the Phonetics department to the Extra-Mural Studies department. There he became interested in traditional Yoruba culture and arts. Though a teacher at Ibadan, he ventured beyond it, living in the cities of Ede, Ilobu and Osogbo, to learn more about the Yoruba communities. Due to his subsequent anthropological work among the members of the clans that are native to these places, he was awarded Yoruba honorary chieftaincies. In 1956, after visiting the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris organized by ''Présence Africaine'' at the Sorbonne, Ulli Beier returned to Ibadan with more ideas.

In 1957 he founded the magazine ''Black Orpheus''. Its name was inspired by "Orphée Noir", an essay by the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre. The first African literary journal in English, ''Black Orpheus'' quickly became the leading venue for publishing contemporary Nigerian authors. It became known for its innovative works and literary excellence, and was widely acclaimed. Later in 1961, Beier co-founded the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan, a place for new writers, dramatists and artists, to meet and perform their work. Among the young writers involved with it in the exciting early years of Nigerian independence were Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. In 1962, with the dramatist Duro Ladipo, he co-founded Mbari-Mbayo, Osogbo.

Ulli Beier was also known for his work in translating traditional Nigerian literary works into English. He translated the plays of such Nigerian dramatists as Duro Ladipo and published ''Modern Poetry'' (1963), an anthology of African poems. He also wrote his own plays, published under the name "Obotunde Ijimere". Writing as Obotunde Ijimere (and later as M. Lovori), Beier masqueraded as Nigerian and Papua New Guinean. While mimicking the indigenous writers of those places, Beier also criticized other white people and cultures for imitating indigenous ones. He later claimed that his Ijimere writing "just 'happened'", but Beier actively sought to write under the identities of his alter egos.

In 1966, he and his second wife, the artist Georgina Betts, left Nigeria during the civil war to work in Papua New Guinea. Beier intermittently returned to Nigeria for brief periods. While in Papua New Guinea, he fostered budding writers at the University of Papua New Guinea, and his wife Georgina Beier continued the work she had been doing in Nigeria, recognising and encouraging New Guineans in their visual art.

Beier found international venues for taking the native artwork to the world. In New Guinea, he founded the literary periodical ''Kovave: A Journal of New Guinea literature''. It also carried reproductions of works by Papua New Guinean artists, including Timothy Akis