Africa’s pioneer female
music Professor, Mosunmola Omibiyi-Obidike, has charged parents to avoid undue interference in their children’s choice of career.
Professor Omibiyi-Obidike gave the charge recently  during a musical conference in honour of the late High Legend, cardinal Rev Jim-Lawson in the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT).
Omibiyi-Obidike, who was in the 1st Rex Jim Lawson international Highlife music conference, recalled that her success in attaining her full potentials was because “my parents gave me free hand to go into music”.
She thus adviced parents to “Support their children to actualise their talents, rather than discourage and or force them into careers that they did not originally plan to pursue”. While noting that “no parent knows God’s plan for any child, the professor of Ethnomusicology faulted some of the perceived facts about African music in the public domain.
“It is in a conference like this that we can correct wrong information about African music presented by non-Africans.
“It is our duty to make people realise that colonialists were wrong about their prejudiced projections about Africa”, she said.
She expressed hope to be back in the university in May to participate in a conference on church music being planned by the Department of Music of UNIPORT.
It would be recalled that the Association of Nigerian Musicologists (ANIM) recently unveiled a book entitled, “African Musicology past present and future – A festschrift for Mosunmola Omibiyi-Obidike,” in her honour.
The 78 year old obtained her doctorate degree in Music from the University of California, Los Angles, USA in 1972.