Entering Migila House, there is a sense of stepping into another world. The rich earthy tones of African and Papua New Guinean art objects merge, and vibrant, intensely coloured oil paintings contrast against the off-white walls.
Migila House in Sydney is the home of English-born artist, Georgina Beier, and her German-born husband, Ulli Beier—writer, editor and professor of literature. They are a couple whose international literary and artistic achievements are extensive, but it is their life-long commitment to fostering Indigenous writers, artists and musicians—which began in Nigeria, a decade prior to Independence—that is just as impressive.
In 1950, when Ulli first arrived in Nigeria to lecture in phonetics and English literature, he was shocked to discover that across the university there was ‘no reference to anything African’.
‘We are here to impose British standards’, he was informed matter-of-factly by the Vice-Chancellor. Ulli however, felt that he wasn’t there to impose anything on anybody. ‘I was willing to be totally surprised’, he says.
And surprised he was, when only weeks later, during a lesson on Hamlet, a student raised his hand to ask: ‘Excuse me sir, I’m somewhat confused. Is that a true story?’
It was only then that Ulli realised he had not spoken to his students about theatre, about the kind of performance they were accustomed to, and that no-one from the university had bothered to study their culture and backgrounds.
That innocent question prompted a change in Ulli’s courses as he incorporated the world his students inhabited. This also marked the beginning of Ulli’s own immersion into Yoruba culture. (A transfer between university departments, into adult education, allowed him to develop courses unimpeded by regular academic constraints.)
If the university was hardly impressed when Ulli’s first course on West-African culture began, the local king was. He attended regularly, for an entire year. That example encouraged others to follow, and royal consultation soon became integral to course planning.
But it was the summer schools that allowed Ulli the curricular and cultural freedom he desperately sought. Exploratory by nature, the summer schools embraced topics such as kingship, music, art, oral tradition and women, from the perspective of Ashanti, Yoruba, Dahomey and Benin kingdoms. These courses provided students with an opportunity to rediscover aspects of their own culture which ‘they had been educated away from’. Other courses of a more political dimension were offered in journalism, local government and democracy in West Africa.
Poetry, Ulli says, had