The Setup - "Alexander Hamilton" & The Question of Narrative Power
Hamilton opens with a question that haunts all national origin stories: "How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence impoverished get up and climb?"
This is Lin-Manuel Miranda asking: WHO GETS TO BE REMEMBERED? Who gets their story told? Whose narrative survives?
Nigeria's founding story has the same problem. We celebrate Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, and Kwame Nkrumah (the "Big Four"), but how many know about Herbert Macaulay? Samuel Ajayi Crowther? Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti fighting for women's rights while the "official" founding fathers got the credit?
In "Alexander Hamilton," we meet a young immigrant with ambition. In Nigeria's founding, we meet men shaped by colonialism, educated abroad, returning to fight for independence. But like Hamilton, the question persists: who decided these men were the heroes?
"My Shot" is THE anthem of desperate ambition. "I am not throwing away my shot" is Hamilton saying: I will NOT be forgotten. I will NOT be another immigrant that history erased.
Every founding father had this hunger. Kwame Nkrumah in Gold Coast (soon Ghana) said: "Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto you." That's his "My Shot" moment. The conviction that independence wasn't just possible it was inevitable if you claimed it hard enough.
But here's the uncomfortable truth both stories contain: this ambition often came at the cost of women, of ordinary people, of alternate visions. Hamilton's shot excluded enslaved people. Nigeria's founding shot, for decades, excluded women from political participation despite their revolutionary role.
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The Ambition - "My Shot" & The Hunger for Legacy