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 Estate of Eliza Hamilton & Nigeria's Unfinished Work
Eliza Hamilton lived until 1854. She spent 50 years defending her husband's legacy, writing letters, preserving documents, making sure the world remembered him "correctly."
Nigeria's first generation of leaders passed away: Azikiwe (1996), Awolowo (1987), Bello (died 1966 in the coup). Their wives and children inherited their legacies. But unlike Eliza, they weren't given 50 years to rehabilitate the narrative.
Instead, Nigeria moved through military dictatorships (1966-1999), through coups and counter-coups, through Biafra, through oil booms and busts. The founding fathers' stories got complicated, contested, revised.
There's no unified "Hamilton legacy" in Nigeria because Nigeria itself is contested. Who was Nnamdi Azikiwe? A founding father? A man who benefited from colonialism and then ruled post-colonial elites? Both? The answer depends on who's telling the story.
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The Estate of Eliza Hamilton & Nigeria's Unfinished Work