Former President Olusegun Obasanjo said that he allowed
people to express their views even when they insulted him because he derived
pleasure from jibes people threw at him.
Obasanjo
said this while delivering a keynote address at the first international
conference of the African Studies Association of Africa which had the theme,
‘African Studies in the 21st Century, Past, Present and Future,’ held at the
International Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan on Wednesday.
He
said, “If you visit the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta, you
will find thousands of newspaper comics and columns meant to spite and insult
my person even as a sitting president in the archive. No individual or group of
people was ever queried or jailed or repressed in expressing this freedom.
Rather, I encouraged them because I derived fun and pleasure from the humour as
I know who I am and nobody needs to tell me who and what I am not.”
He
said Africa was moving away from its past where bad governance, corruption and
human rights violations, typical of the post-colonial authoritarian regimes
ruled.
The
former president added that that over the years, African studies had developed
into a distinct field drawing on various sources ranging from social sciences
to humanities and natural sciences to agriculture.
Obasanjo
added, “The narrow vision of African studies as merely cultural studies has
started to wane. Over more than half a century, the field has evolved with
diverse interdisciplinary strands. I am delighted that the so-called great
European historians who professed that Africa has no history lived to realise that
African history and culture had impact on other parts of the world including
theirs.”
While
lamenting the backwardness associated with Africa, Obasanjo however blamed it
on “the stain and stench of slave trade, the cold war and poor governance,
which made some Africans to laud the good old days of colonialism, corruption
and problem of human rights violations.”
Obasanjo
also expressed his joy over the gradual disappearance of the vices from Africa.
He
said, “The right to free speech, the right to express a different view-point,
the right to draw personal conclusions based on self-instituted research and to
query certain cultural practices and beliefs are part of the huge liberty that
the continent of Africa now boasts of.”
Also
speaking at the event, a professor of History, Toyin Falola, said knowledge
must not be imperialised by the western world. He called on Africans to
patronise their own culture and tradition.
He
said, “To be free from western imperialism, African countries must develop the
attitude of trading with more African countries than trading with western
countries. In that way, our creativity will expand, we will keep our resources
from within and we will generate employment for our people. We should stop
using and patronising the western world, but we should promote our own culture
and traditions.”
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