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?
The Financial System - "Alexander Hamilton" Track 2 & The Lasting Legacy
Hamilton's financial system created American power. A national bank, federal credit, a treasury. It worked. It also exploited slavery, crushed farmers, and concentrated wealth.
Nigeria's financial system was inherited from colonialism, then slowly Africanized. But the structure remained hierarchical, extractive, centered on resource control by elites.
The founding fathers didn't fundamentally rebuild Nigeria's economy they inherited the colonial extraction machine and just changed who was extracting.
That's the tragedy of both stories: revolutionary rhetoric (freedom, democracy, independence) but evolutionary structures (same hierarchies, same extraction, same power concentration).
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The Financial System - "Alexander Hamilton" Track 2 & The Lasting Legacy