Yesterday, at the installation of the new Olubadan of Ibadanland, I took my time to listen to his cognomen, with studied interest. I came out of the encounter first, with laughter, then shock and trepidation. His royal majesty’s praise chants describe him as “”. Roughly translated, this means, the child of he who begs for soup and begs for sex; he says if you don’t have soup, hesitate not to give me the taste of sex because sex is sweeter than soup.
Respected British scholar, John Peel, in one of his works, said his research found out that in pre-colonial Nigeria, mortuary killings were predominant in southwest Nigeria and strangers were often killed to preserve the life of a community. Again, they ask you to cover your face in shame. Rather than the villains you say they are, the cryptocurrency generation says it is a generation of heroes and warriors. Their defence is that this is a generation that has chosen not to stand by and lament the over-a-century slave trading and despoliation of the fecund lands of Africa. According to them, they chose instead to fight your battles, battles that you were too effeminate to fight and could not have won against your taskmasters.
In Africa, such values as respect for elders, hard work, respect for seniority, the extended family system, valour, premium on children, etc reigned. Pre-colonial Africa is often held as the Golden Years of the continent. In the same manner, the values of the extended family system, valour, premium on children and others have become extinct. Those days, Europeans and Americans celebrated our virtue of communal living, our Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a South African social philosophy of culture which explains Africa’s capacity to express compassion, dignity, harmony and humanity while building and maintaining a sense of communality, justice and mutual caring.