Hamilton, Nigeria's Founding Fathers & Who Gets to Tell the Story of Revolution

by •

https://open.spotify.com/album/1kCHru7uhxBUdzkm4gzRQc?si=pKlvqzPqRhOpIqA3VQhUXQ


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?

36 Replies
Upvote · +12
Comment

Related discussions

View full discussion
[author]

Immigration & Belonging - "Yorktown" & The Colonial Question

  • "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)" celebrates American victory. But it's also about: now what? We won the war. Do we have a country? Do we have unity? Or do we have 13 former colonies that barely trust each other?
  • Nigeria's independence in 1960 was similar. We won! The colonizers are leaving! But do we have a nation? Or do we have Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa-Fulani, and dozens of other groups that the British had held together through force?
  • Hamilton was an immigrant in America. He was never quite American enough for Burr and Jefferson. There's something permanent about being "other."
  • Every founding father in Nigeria was also trying to prove they belonged, that their region mattered, that their people's voice counted. But belonging is hard when the nation itself is a colonial invention.
  • The Washington Monument celebrates Washington, a slaveholder, while enslaved people built it. Nigeria's monuments, should they celebrate the founders who led us to independence but also preserved patriarchy, corruption, and regional dominance? That's the question we haven't answered.
Reply
Upvote · +6