Ulli Beier

Horst Ulrich Beier, known as Ulli Beier (30 July 1922 – 3 April 2011), was a German Jewish 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. His second wife, Georgina Beier, born in London, had a similarly instrumental role in stimulating the visual arts during their residencies in both Nigeria and Papua New Guinea.

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.

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 the early 1960s.

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.

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.

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