The Hunter Thinks the Monkey Is Not Wise. .. (review)

Yoruba humour is baroque and earthy, never vicious. It is playful banter that knows about the weaknesses of human beings, but it never despises them. (144)

The above quotation nearly totally summarizes the tone that runs through this selection of essays with such varied time references and, perhaps, a measure of ambivalence. Some of the essays were written as early as 1955 and others as recently as 1998. It is not only the time sequence that is staggered; the themes and the concerns themselves reflect such a diversity of interests that factual elements dovetail into myth, fantasies, and enchantment. The essays are grouped under three broad themes, but even within one subgrouping, "Myth, Magic and Children," there appear topics dealing with the history and statistical genealogy of a Yoruba town, Okuku, as well as the magical art of Yoruba hunters.

It is this unmanageable diversity as characterized by the complex interests and genius of Ulli Beier that gives the collection its peculiar polyphony. That complexity of character derives from the unusual layering of templates in the subconscious of ancient civilizations. Many a time the weft and woof of this texturing give a touch of ambivalence, if not perplexity, to the outlook of archaic societies and their philosophies. Ulli Beier himself is obviously in his element when exploring those apparent ambiguities, those gray areas in the cultural spawns of Yoruba stories. The philosophies can be as complementary as they are seemingly contradictory. Some of the more complex philosophies and wisdom of the ancient communities explored here are reflected in the oriki of the ubiquitous godling Esu Elegbara:

When we think of you as big,
You appear as a dwarf.
When we think of you as small
You appear as a giant . . .
Lying down, your head hits the ceiling.
Standing up you cannot look into the cooking pot.

Old man
Fresh like a baby
Shimmering
Like a colourful chameleon
Elusive like smoke
You carry water in a basket. (30)

This is the same spirit phenomenon who "throws a stone today to kill a bird yesterday"!

I seek to explore this phenomenon of ambiguity to provoke introspection on the mystifying logic that history—contemporary history, conquest, and colonization—makes of the tufts and residue of "primitive" culture that it seeks to placate. As in the subtitle of this anthology ("The Monkey Is Wise but He Has His Own Logic"), peculiarities in cultural logic often prevent a façade that leads the presumptuous to perplexing humility and "apotheosis." Lest we think that this ambiguity is restricted to the more chauvinistic deities, here is the chanted quality of a water goddess, Osun:

White cowrie shells
On black buttocks
Her eyes sparkle in the forest
Like the sun on the river.
She is the wisdom of the forest
She is the wisdom of the river.
Where the doctor failed
She cures with fresh water.
Where medicine is impotent
She cures with cool water. (21)

Beier is a literary ethnologist with the eyes of an eagle and the precocity of a parrot. His vision is broad, his mind is deep, for in the colonial era when many of his contemporaries cast aspersions on religious objects, regarding them as mementos, he already felt the pull of the sacred in unfamiliar terrain. This would seem to be the élan vital for which he had been waiting all along, away from his native Germany:

Suddenly I understood what colonialism meant: arrogance based on ignorance, sniggering condescension towards people one had come to 'help', an arrogance which reduced whole cultures to the level of curios. (204)

What really produced the serendipity with which Ulli Beier accounted for his artistic and cultural discoveries across Yoruba land was the challenge evinced by his latent, Europeanized view of art. The "difference" in the levels of aesthetic perception gave rise to...