Cloth Only Wears to Shreds: Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Ulli Beier Collection

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Lisa Aronson

Mostly, Beier's essay gives us his own perspective on the Yoruba culture he knew in the 1950s and 1960s, and a rather idealized one at that. He extols the two qualities he most admires, their extreme "tolerance" and the very special value they place on their children. For his evidence, he cites numerous examples of Yoruba oral tradition in which he sees this behavior mirrored and reinforced.

Such is the image of the Yoruba of the past. He sees the Yoruba culture of today being in a serious state of "crisis" due to outside influences (Islam, oil, political corruption), which, he argues, have tainted the purity of Yoruba culture. I find it ironic that someone once so dedicated to moving the Yoruba into the modern, postcolonial world would be so unaccepting of the results of that globalizing trajectory. Or perhaps the Oshogbo movement was less of a modernizing effort than one would have thought. Such commentary not withstanding, I applaud Cloth Only Wears to Shreds for expanding our understanding of Yoruba textiles in general and Beier's collection in particular, while at the same time providing an interesting, indeed somewhat provocative, profile of Ulli Beier himself.