Black Orpheus was founded as a literary and cultural journal in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1957, by Ulli Beier.

For nearly two decades, it published some of Africa’s early creatives. It became one of the first major platforms for publishing African and Afro-Caribbean writers during a critical moment of decolonisation and cultural self-definition.

Over its lifespan, it helped launch the careers of many writers who are now central to African literature, including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.

The book I read that led me to this Black Orpheus research was, in fact, not a copy of Black Orpheus, though at the time I thought it was. A decade ago, in my friend’s dad’s house, I found a small anthology with pieces from different issues of Black Orpheus. It didn’t have a cover. I just saw a few names on a page that caught my eye: Achebe, Aimé Césaire, and Abiola Irele (whose name still fascinates because I love how it feels on my tongue), so I picked it up. When I looked up Black Orpheus online, there was so little information about it that I felt I had really stumbled onto something special.

The curiosity stuck with me, so when I finally sat down to submit my fellowship application, I decided to dig up the story behind it. Fast-forward to November 2024, I was in Lagos as part of my research itinerary. You should have seen me. I had rehearsed how I would introduce the book to everyone there: I would reach into my bag at just the right moment and slowly pull the envelope out, containing the book, like a magician revealing his final card. “This,” I would say with a smile, “is what I have been talking about.” That was what I did. I recall another fellow’s reaction clearly: he leaned in and said, “I feel like I need to wear gloves to touch this.” At that moment, I felt ten feet tall. I found out two months later that I had been safekeeping an anthology.

Black Orpheus was edited at different times by Ulli Beier, Wole Soyinka and a retinue of others. It published early works by names that would later become canonical: Chinua Achebe, Léopold Senghor, Okot p’Bitek, etc.

Try to trace a neat narrative of the journal's existence, and BOOM: you are in trouble. Was it a pan-African journal or a platform for Nigerian modernists? One source strongly voiced his non-alliance with the former, yet another subtly implied it was. Was it driven by editorial vision or colonial funding, or vision, at least? Was it loved or resented by its contemporaries? Ask five different people and you will get five different answers. Ask one person twice and you might get six. I asked five people, ergo, five essays.

Over time, this research felt as natural as waking up. I became familiar with some of my sources’ habits: the time they ate, whether they liked spicy food or not, who picked their calls, what books had been left open on their tables for a long time, etc. I spent enough time with some to understand that they preferred talking past mid-day, just after lunch, while others preferred the morning. One didn’t want to be on tape, so I relied on a diary and attention span, and the hopes that I would catch everything—or at least nearly. One told me how my research was not going to be built on key informant interviews, but on relationships, and added, “Relate well with them.” That piece of advice wasn’t entirely new, but it changed how I saw myself for the project. In some ways, this part of the research reminded me of what it means to be Nigerian in the first place. We are storytellers, even when we don’t realise it. I mean, look at how we narrate our joys and pains and turn them into award-winning screenplays.

Halfway through the fellowship, right after one particularly spiralling interview in which almost nothing I had planned to ask was answered or even asked, I found myself alone, asking some cold set questions: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about history? Is it a record of fact, a response to memory, or a blurry mix of the two? I kept bumping into these tensions. When I began the project, I thought history was a problem to be solved, you know, things I could try to straighten out. You picture an academic sifting through an archive, pulling out a document and saying, “This is what really happened between 1957 and 1975!”

But the further I went into this project, the more allergic I became to that idea. Almost nothing I encountered matched cleanly. Some dates disagreed, some people forgot things, others remembered too much and filled up everything with lots of digressions. Some said things that were honest but completely unverifiable. At first, I was frustrated. I wanted to have a clear storyline, preferably in chronological order, with footnotes, even. I didn’t get that.

While objectivity was a near impossibility, there was one truth: Black Orpheus’ contributors were not unified by a singular literary philosophy, but they shared a desire to belong to something postcolonial, whatever that meant at the time. That shared desire sometimes led to conflict, institutional drift, and new alliances.

It would have been tempting to iron these stories flat and to edit out the discrepancies, choose a single “correct” version of events and build around that. But I resisted that temptation, partly because it would have felt dishonest, and partly because it would have betrayed the very spirit of the thing I was studying.

Black Orpheus was a publication full of contradictions: Euro-African editorial oversight and radical Black content, African writers on the inside and non-African artists on the cover. Ulli Beier was a white German man who championed African arts and also curated them (through a problematic lens, I would say). Susanne Wenger inspired many Yoruba artists and also committed at least one cultural blunder that still sparks debate today. Wole Soyinka was both an editor and a contributor (both insider and outsider).

None of these people can be easily summarised, and trying to do so would only flatten the story into something it was never meant to be. I have come to think of this project then, as a scrapbook full of stories that do not always fit neatly together. Some stories here may contradict each other, some may overlap, some may challenge the official record, and some are the official record.

So, what is this project, then?

It is, in five essays, a thank-you letter to the artists, writers, editors, thinkers, organisers, teachers, radicals, mentors, and mischief-makers who built something out of nothing in the decades after independence.

This is also a letter to young Nigerian creatives and anyone who has ever felt unsure of where they belong in this complicated, chaotic thing we call “culture.”

It is a letter to anyone trying to make something durable in a time that feels like everything is perpetually at risk of erasure. Our creative confusion is not new, and the people we now hold up as cultural icons, at some point, fumbled and doubted themselves.

I hope this reminds you that greatness often begins as a bunch of creatives in a room, figuring out how to pay rent and still produce something worthwhile. Some of the journals we quote today were born out of similar anxieties.

That history is not behind us.