Traveling Editors, Little Magazines and Postcolonial Modernism: Ulli Beier, Black Orpheus and Kovave

Modernist studies’ broadening engagement with the transnational has led to greater attention to mobile forms such as the little magazine. Despite difficulties (as Kate Hartke reminds us in this cluster) such as paper shortages and problems with staffing, shipping, and supply, the periodical’s ability to travel between ports separated by oceans or within cafés divided by ideological walls enabled it to give rise to an array of modernist movements, driven by writers, editors, and readers committed to diverse aesthetic and political ends. As modernist studies grows, our interest in the little magazine is growing accordingly, but so too must our scrutiny of editors who traveled with, and between, modernist periodicals. As this article shows, mapping the routes of traveling editors is of particular importance for our understanding of magazines in decolonizing nations.

Eric Bulson’s work on the little magazine draws a distinction between little magazines of familiar modernist spaces and little magazines of decolonizing regions. The little magazine, Bulson writes, “played a significant role in the realization of modernism’s larger cosmopolitan project, which involved the emphasis on a denationalized internationalism.”[1] The European and American little magazine, like many modernists, frequently traveled light, and its original and translated content—see Andrew Thacker’s article in this cluster—as well as its processes of production most usually transcended national borders. However, postcolonial little magazines, Bulson continues, most commonly focused on the generation of “national and regional literary fields, which, instead of being isolated from one another, actually fostered transnational linkages that had never existed before” (Little Magazine, 195). For Bulson, then, the typical modernist magazine of the global north tended towards a borderless cosmopolitanism, while the typical modernist magazine of the decolonizing global south tended towards the reconfiguring, or engendering, of national and regional identities. Like the modernist magazines of Europe and North America, these magazines and their authors traversed national borders, but were invested in reimagining not just their limits, but the lives contained within.

Bulson, of course, goes into further detail in his work on magazines, but in this article we disrupt the broad strokes of his definitions and ask how the distinction between the periodicals of the global north and south might change if we consider the figure of what we term the traveling editor, who voyaged between nations and magazines. Through the traveling editor we remind ourselves that the increasing weakness of modernist studies requires increasing complexity as we trace greater global connections and flows. Our analyses of postcolonial modernist magazines need to engage not only with periodicals’ and contributors’ aims, focus, and movement, but with the way in which figures within magazines’ organizational structures moved across continents and connected seemingly separate nations and literatures. What new light is cast on the connections between magazines, and the way power plays out within them, if we follow the movement of the traveling editor, and in particular one who was born in the global north but founded magazines in the global south? How does this disrupt our understanding of national and regional scenes of literature and identity? By focusing on one such traveling editor—Ulli Beier—we concur with Madhu Krishnan’s argument in this cluster that the major African periodicals were instrumental in creating a “transnational Black modernism,” and add Papua New Guinea to her mix, but also note within this black modernism the shadowy, unsettling presence of a white editor/author.[2]

In 1950 Beier, who was born in Germany in 1922 and later studied at the University of London, took a job teaching phonetics at the University of Ibadan. He found, on arrival, that the education system in Nigeria served only “to turn Nigerians into British gentlemen, able to play cricket and to quote Tennyson,” and so switched to the Extramural department, which was based on the British Workers Educational movement.[3] From there Beier started teaching courses in African rather than English literature, and subsequently founded and edited the hugely influential Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and African American Literature (1957–1975) (fig. 1). From 1957 to 1967 Beier edited twenty-two issues of Black Orpheus, whose pages gave early recognition to writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, and John Pepper Clark and presented francophone writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor in translation, often for the first time. In addition to an impressive list of publications on African art and literature, in 1961, Beier, Chinua Achebe, Soyinka, and others founded the Mbari Writers and Artists Club, and a year later Beier and Duro Ladipo opened the Mbari Mbayo club in Osogbo.

In 1967 Beier and his wife Georgina moved to Papua New Guinea, where Beier taught literature and creative writing at the University of Papua New Guinea while Georgina encouraged the art scene.[4] Beier founded the Papua Pocket Poets series, which published twenty-five volumes between 1968 and 1970, as well as Kovave: A Journal of New Guinea Literature, which released thirteen issues between 1969 and 1975. Kovave’s pages were filled predominantly by Beier’s university students, but his international connections meant that contributors included overseas poets and academics. Beier later founded and edited Gigibori: A Magazine of Papua New Guinea Cultures. As he did in Nigeria, Beier published widely while also encouraging others to write, had a huge impact on the art and theatre scene, and later became the first director of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies (fig. 2).

In keeping with Bulson’s description of the postcolonial magazine, both Black Orpheus and Kovave were invested in promoting local expression while fostering translocal or regional links. The first editorial of Black Orpheus states that the magazine’s aims include providing Africans with a greater body of work by translating writers from across the continent. Similarly, Kovave’s first editorial describes the periodical’s purpose as “encourag[ing] young Papuans and New Guineans to write and to show them what their colleagues in other parts of the country are doing.”[5] When we consider the presence of Beier, however, we are reminded that these local agendas were envisioned, and connected, by a foreign editor on the move. When Black Orpheus and Kovave are assessed together we see that not only were the original aims of both magazines near identical but that they shared very similar layouts. Their content echoed each other: their short stories tended towards realism interspersed with more experimental work, their poetry was in general slightly more complex and connected with western modernism and local oral traditions, and they mixed creative and critical pieces. The visuals were also similar, with both connected intimately to Beier—his first wife Susanne Wenger provided the cover art for much of Black Orpheus while his second wife Georgina Beier used related styles, influenced by modernist appreciation of “primitive” art, for much of Kovave (fig. 3).[6]

Awareness of the tension between local fashionings and foreign impositions within Beier’s circles is not new. In 1975, William Wyckom Jr. wrote to African Arts from Southampton, New York, to comment on the “curious sameness” of the works produced by Osogbo artists working with Ulli and Georgina Beier.[7] In a subsequent issue Michele Gilbert wrote from London to add that the Beiers, now resident in Papua New Guinea, were teaching artists there to produce work that in style and in media was “practically identical” to the works they developed in Nigeria.[8] The “style and taste of the Beiers,” she wrote, is “reflected in the work of the artists which they have chosen to promote from both these areas” to a “striking extent” (Gilbert, “Letters,” 2). Two years earlier, Peter Livingston had reviewed Beier’s edited collection The Night Warrior and Other Stories in the pages of Pacific Islands Monthly, and had made much the same complaint as Wyckom and Gilbert. Beier, Livingston claimed, had “established precisely the same assembly line in Papua New Guinea as he had previously in Africa,” with the result that despite different names and different settings, the content reflects “the same old Ulli Beier transmitted to the writers by Ulli Beier’s efficient process.”[9]

In the following issue of Pacific Islands Monthly, Kirsty Powell robustly critiqued Livingston’s inability to recognize variety and idiosyncrasy in the collection, and described Livingston as “a deaf man who hears only the confusion of sounds, or of the white man who complains that all black men look the same.”[10] Powell’s concerns regarding the narrow-mindedness and prejudice of many white responders to African and Pacific creativity are well-founded, and yet, transnational repetitions were noted by more astute and insightful appraisers than Livingston. In a review pointedly entitled “Papuan Parallels,” Abiola Irele, who had become the editor of Black Orpheus in 1968, assessed the literary output arising from Beier’s move to Papua New Guinea. Kovave, he notes, was “obviously meant as an equivalent of Black Orpheus,” and overall he finds Beier to be “repeating his efforts in Nigeria,” such that the “parallels between the new literature in English coming out of Papua New Guinea with developments we have known in this part of the world are many and striking.”[11]

Beier was an editor whose passport, background, and knowledge enabled him to establish magazines focused on national and regional fields, and thereby render postcolonial periodicals part of a wider cosmopolitan project. In considering his role as a traveling editor we add another layer to the transnational connections that magazines map, and remind ourselves of how easily Western influence can be hidden in plain sight. Although scholarship treats Kovave as a Papua New Guinean magazine, it is also a Nigerian magazine, built on Beier’s experience and replicating much in terms of tone and appearance. Of course, our awareness of the traveling editor does not diminish the innovation and creativity of the contributors to Black Orpheus or Kovave. Nevertheless, in order to understand the ways in which movements of printed literary expression in Nigeria and Niugini began, we have to consider the ways in which cosmopolitan perspectives shape the local, as editors, experts, and change agents circulate through decolonising countries.[12] We need to be able to recognize both the agency of the writers and the determining influence of context, as well as the ways an editor such as Beier enabled and restricted. Black Orpheus and Kovave are many things—storehouses of talent, sites of experimentation, places of learning, exemplars of nascent literary scenes—but they are also, importantly, examples of the global south as envisioned by a European, who fostered local scenes while also making them part of a denationalized cosmopolitanism.

Peter Benson writes that Beier’s Black Orpheus was invested in promoting a “universalism” in Nigerian writing whose “standards and themes were unconsciously predicated on contemporary Western aesthetic preoccupations.”[13] When we see pieces in Kovave exhibiting a similar tendency, we realise that we are witnessing the cross-continental repetition of editorial practises swayed by a Western-influenced understanding of Indigenous writing as raw authenticity. Thus, Beier’s magazines are Pacific and African magazines, but are also European magazines. To further complicate their local specificity, in 1961 the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) began funding Beier and Black Orpheus, offering a grant of two thousand pounds, which continued annually.[14] In 1966 it was revealed that the CCF was controlled by the CIA, and while the CCF did not have a policy of controlling content or political agenda, Black Orpheus was also in part an American magazine and a product of the Cold War. The transnational links, then, formed by Beier’s post-colonial little magazines are not just links between decolonizing countries, but transnational links whose challenge to the primacy of the nation as a guiding principle of identity are, like the concept of nationhood itself, grounded in European power and the European imaginary. These links are transnational in that they move beyond nations by obscuring belonging, allegiance and control.

There are many reasons why Black Orpheus and Kovave have similarities, and for many of these instances Beier, as the white, traveling editor, is perhaps a symptom of repetitive structures rather than a direct cause. The contributors to his magazines were responding to decolonizing modernities, and, as colonization and modernity are deeply embedded in the singular phenomenon of global capitalism, modes of influence and control are repeated across territories.[15] Colonial education systems instilled similar attitudes to literary language, expression and merit, and across large swathes of the planet institutionalized learning to delegitimize the education taking place outside school walls. More positively, decolonizing politics in many countries were also seeing an increasing interest in oral traditions and local literary techniques, as well as self-expression in first languages. Given the contexts in which the contributors to Black Orpheus and Kovave were writing, correlations are unsurprising. Perhaps we cannot, to paraphrase W. B. Yeats, separate the contributors from the context, the periodical from the power structures, nor the western editor from the wider colonial narrative, inclusive of its decolonizing throes. But we can consider the ways in which control is mediated, and be impressed by the innovation of the magazines’ writers—many of whom would become major literary and political figures—while also remaining cognizant of the ways in which an editor can channel and position innovation. If a medium such as a little magazine shapes content and form, and an editor has sizable authority over that medium, then we have to recognize the way in which the editor, as a gatekeeper, can regulate a creative arena. When viewed in tandem Black Orpheus and Kovave can be recognized as the products both of specific local scenes and of a denationalized cosmopolitanism, a transnationalism not always concealed and yet too often overlooked. By traveling with Beier between nations and regions we remind ourselves of the transnational web within which local contributors wrote and of the ways in which post-colonial magazines, which are often approached as national or regional endeavors, are embedded in large global flows.

The confusions between transnational routes and local roots caused by the traveling editor are compounded by editors’ tendencies to contribute to their periodicals. This blurring between gatekeeper and contributor is further obscured by a distasteful predilection of Beier: his adoption of Indigenous masks. The presence of reviews in little magazines, and particularly reviews of other magazines was, Bulson writes, “a way of establishing a shared postcolonial print culture, one in which the connections between regional literatures only reaffirmed their indigenous, local affiliations” (Little Magazine, 209). Yet the reviews pages were one of the sites in which Beier concealed Western interference, as he wrote many of the early reviews in Black Orpheus under the Nigerian name Sangodare Akanji. What was presented as the insights of an Indigenous critic was the molding of tastes by an expatriate perspective, and what appeared to be an internal, local conversation was a transnational one. When Beier travelled to Papua New Guinea he appears to have abandoned the practice of concealing himself within reviews, but retained the tendency in dramatic works: in Nigeria Beier wrote, had performed, and published a series of plays as Obotunde Ijimere, and in Papua New Guinea wrote, performed, and had published plays under the Niuginian name M. Lovori (fig. 4).[16] A production of Lovori’s works in Canberra was reviewed in Kovove, and Irele’s review of Five New Guinea Plays¸ a collection edited by Beier, singles out the “marvellous short play, Alive by M. Lovori” for particular praise, seeing it as “redeem[ing] the volume” in which it was published (Irele, “Papuan Parallels,” 51). We thus have the work of an experienced European writer and teacher masquerading as work by a Niuginian student writer, and by comparison making the actual student writers seem amateurish. Alive might have been written as an exemplar of and for Niuginian writers, but it does so through a lie. Its publication does not provide a record of Niuginian drama, but of what a European, versed in African drama, thought a Niuginian play should look like. A text that seems local is cosmopolitan, but with its European connections concealed. Irele’s review described Alive as a “dramatisation of a local myth which has close and immediate affinities with the African tradition, and whose appeal for us is thus obvious” (51). There are connections between African and Pacific traditions that cause each to charm practitioners of the other, but we cannot ignore the fact that Alive also appeals to Nigerian tastes because the author was long resident in Nigeria. Nor the fact that the play exhibits close and immediate affinities with the African tradition because it echoes the Yoruba plays Beier wrote under a Nigerian name. Blurring Irele’s ability to unpack the connections between Nigerian and Niuginian traditions is the figure of Ulli Beier and his masked interpretations of the dramatic conventions of both.

Recent interest in weak theory within modernist studies presents the discipline’s boundaries as leaky and rhizomatic, and playing out on “extended and locally mediated relational threads.”[17] Weak modernism is a traveling theory, and we need to follow travelers to understand how power manifests. It is telling that Beier would describe the 1960s and 1970s, the period of Black Orpheus and Kovave, as a time during which “[w]e . . . were blissfully ignorant of borders,” an ignorance “that gave me and still gives me my irrevocable sense of belonging.”[18] Far from Beier’s cosmopolitan experience of borderless belonging, for many writers in Black Orpheus and Kovave borders, nationhood and regional identity were of deep importance. This is not to claim that contributors to these magazines sought only to articulate the local or be considered solely within the confines of regional literary scenes. In Papua New Guinea, Russell Soaba was forming a Pacific existentialism that owed much to Albert Camus and Richard Wright, while the Nigerian writer Christopher Okigbo once declined a prize at the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar on the grounds that he wrote literature, not black literature (Kalliney, “Modernism,” 335–336).[19] These positions, however, arise from careful attention to the implications of borders, not blissful unawareness of them. The latter position is less the reality of contributors to Black Orpheus and Kovave and more the fantasy of a traveling editor who facilitated Indigenous scenes but who also wrote himself into them, both covertly and overtly.

As the borders of modernist studies become increasingly porous, borders are of increasing importance within modernism, as are literary forms attuned to movement across perimeters. To embrace the potential of modernist studies’ weak frontiers we need to unsettle our own thinking of borders and trace the impact of power, passports, and movement on literary scenes. To prevent modernist studies’ weakness from repeating Beier’s entitled ability to be at home where and how he wished, we need to follow the movement of power with and within little magazines, and look to figures such as the traveling editor.