Academic, editor and energetic promoter of African culture
The first Conference of Black Artists and Writers in Paris in 1956 proved an epiphany for Ulli Beier, who has died aged 88, igniting his desire to promote the world of black culture. He returned to his university post in Ibadan, Nigeria's third city, and with another German-born scholar, Janheinz Jahn, started the magazine Black Orpheus, based on Jean-Paul Sartre's 1948 manifesto of that name. It became a significant force in the golden cultural decade that followed in Ibadan, and Ulli moved from the study of phonetics to the more adventurous extramural department.
Ulli became one of a team of free-operating teachers who moved out into the countryside. Lalage Bown, who worked there in the early 1960s, says the department was "giving people a chance to develop their own cultural identity".
Ulli and his Austrian-born wife Susanne Wenger went to live first in Ede, and then, in 1960, Oshogbo, about 50 miles north-east of Ibadan. It was a typical Yoruba town attractive to both of them. The Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka wrote: "An assignment roulette in Europe brought them to Nigeria and both promptly 'went native', Susanne not just culturally, but viscerally and spiritually, holding nothing back in herself, and was inducted into the priesthood of the goddess of the Osun river."
Ibadan's burgeoning cultural life gave Ulli full rein to develop his skills as a cultural entrepreneur – his real genius – although he was also a prolific writer and over the course of 50 years produced a plethora of material on African art and literature, including The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (1963). He was one of the initiators of the Oshogbo school of artists, although Susanne played a key role, and he encouraged a number of artists such as Muraina Oyelami and Twins Seven-Seven. He was also instrumental in bringing to wider attention the Oshogbo theatre troupe of Duro Ladipo, whose work Oba Koso was performed at the Commonwealth arts festival in London in 1965.
The aluminium panel-beater Ashiru, whose works have become treasured collectors' pieces, was discovered by Susanne who, walking one day in the dusty streets of Oshogbo, said a former colleague, "in her high heels, accidentally kicked a little copper lion in the dust, and immediately insisted on finding the creator, who turned out to be a local blacksmith." But if Susanne identified, Ulli promoted.
What struck me when interviewing Ulli was his single-mindedness and his imaginative energy, seen in the way he helped found the Mbari club in Ibadan. Mbari is Igbo for "open space", in this case a venue where new writers and artists could meet and perform their work. Many celebrated names helped launch their careers there. Ulli was not its only founder (as is sometimes claimed), but his entrepreneurial skills helped make it tick. A similar club, Mbari Mbayo – a Yoruba expression for happiness – was formed in Oshogbo.
It may be that Ulli, restlessly questing for the authentic, felt that Oshogbo, now an undoubted success, no longer needed him. He developed a new fascination with the artist who went under the pseudonym of "Middle Art", one of the highly original Igbo sign-painters across the Niger, whose work he collected, representing a deeper authenticity than the Oshogbo school. He also looked to the creativity of the Nsukka school of mainly Igbo artists, based at Nsukka University, to the east.
Thus the arrival of the civil war in 1966-67 was a shattering blow, and although he left before the war, the 1966 massacres and the retreat of the Igbo to their heartland was traumatic for him. He had by now divorced Susanne and married Georgina, an artist who had been in Nigeria since 1959, first of all at the art school in Zaria, to the north, but gravitating in 1963 to join Ulli in Oshogbo, which she described as the beginning of their lifelong partnership.
In 1967 they went together to Papua New Guinea, where there was new territory to conquer. They stayed for four years and began to sow seeds of artistic development in a country whose native genius was more culturally unformed than Nigeria. The jury is still out on how much influence they were able to wield, but there was no doubt that in PNG their contribution to cultural life was greatly appreciated.
But it was never quite Nigeria, and from 1971 to 1974 they went back to the University of Ife, working with Soyinka. Ulli's creative universality and complexity – yearning for both diversity and fusion – caused the critic Keith Botsford to comment: "I've known no other man like him. No single country really deserves him; there is no traditional culture that does not need him."
A native of Glowitz in Mecklenburg, in the old Prussian heartland of Germany, Beier was the son of a doctor with a fine appreciation of the arts. The family were non-practising Jews, and in the mid-1930s they moved to British-ruled Palestine to escape Nazi rule. Although they were interned for a period during the second world war, young Ulli satisfied his thirst for education by pursuing an external degree at London University. After the war he moved to London for a second degree, in phonetics.
Visiting Paris in 1949 he met, was captivated by and married the eccentric Susanne. He had already obtained a teaching position at the newly formed University of Ibadan, where the two of them went in October 1950.
His book In a Colonial University (1993) recounts how he went to Nigeria simply foreseeing "an interesting adventure", as a refugee who had "experienced three different cultures" but had no congenial home. "I did not know who I was, what I wanted from life," but after two years in Nigeria he had begun to find an identity. Reacting negatively to the "colonial posing" he found at the university, he becoming more and more involved in the Yoruba environment around him.
In 1974, Ulli and Georgina returned to the Pacific, living mainly in Australia, although from 1989 to 1997 Ulli was invited by the University of Bayreuth to set up a cultural centre devoted to African art and its global fusion, called Iwalewa Haus (iwalewa being Yoruba for "character is beauty"). The idea of having an African shop-window in the town that is a shrine to Richard Wagner may well have appealed to Ulli's sense of cultural juxtaposition.
Despite his many passionate admirers, he was not without critics in Nigeria, which may have accounted for the refusal of authorities in 2000 to permit him to return to spend his declining years there. This generated a furious debate in Nigerian newspapers, and some of the issues came up at the 80th birthday colloquium held at Iwalewa Haus in 2002, Ulli Beier – a Passion for Difference, a title that epitomised his extraordinary career.
He is survived by Georgina and their sons, Sebastian and Tunji.
• Horst Ulrich Beier, writer and cultural entrepreneur, born 31 May 1922; died 3 April 2011