Omoluabi: Self Actualization and Communal Responsibility

This lecture struck me, right off the top, as being a lecture that would require me to look deeply within myself. I greatly appreciated how the lecture started, with Ijuba ( homage). We payed homage to anything and everything that we should be grateful for. Dr. G. explained that " not paying homage will cause you to get tied up." I took that , not in it's literal meaning, but being tied up in life. We often times get caught up in our fast pace lives and forget to give thanks to where we come from. So before anything and everything we do we should stop and give homage.

This lecture discussed a topic we often do not think about, transforming knowledge. The majority of the time we think that merely gaining knowledge is what we should aim for in our lives, but why do we cut ourselves short? Dr. G. discussed in this lecture how simply acquiring knowledge is not what we should settle for. Knowledge is meant to be transformed and drawn away from the orthodoxy. He taught that in the past the Africans were seen to have no history because there was no writing history when in actuality there was history all along. "History must be lived before it can be written." He stated that there was thought to be "no black philosophy" when originally all knowledge and philosophy began in Africa with Africans. As a generation in today's world we are expected to go to the source of knowledge then transform it.

Dr. G. also told us the story of Iwa. he explained how Iwa was a wife who then left her husband and after her retreat his life was meaningless and everything went wrong. Although this was a story, we all have an Iwa that lives within us and when we lose our Iwa we are nothing. Our Iwa is our character and our being. Without those two things we merely are shells of human beings taking up space in the world.

In the end of the lecture Dr. G. discussed the importance of responsibility. First we have a responsibility to ourselves. That responsibility is to first remake ourselves through education. This means to gain all the knowledge we can possibly hold in our minds and use it to transform ourselves to be better, educated , and well rounded individuals. Our second responsibility is the to the community. We are to serve our community with education. What good is knowledge if it can not be shared? We must give back to the community what the community gave us and pay our homage.

Overall, I enjoyed this lecture and I am looking forward to the lectures ahead.

Jesseca Farr