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?
Hamilton ends with the question: what comes next? And Eliza's answer is: I'll tell the story. I'll make sure people remember.
Nigeria is still asking what comes next. The founding fathers are dead. Military rule ended (officially) in 1999. We have democracy (of sorts). But the questions remain:
Do we transform the structure or just rotate who's in power?
Do we finally center the voices we marginalized?
Do we acknowledge what we got wrong?
In 2023, Nigeria has a new president (Bola Tinubu). In 2024, he faced protests and economic crisis. The cycle continues: new leader, new hope, same structural problems, eventual disappointment.
Neither America nor Nigeria has really answered the founding question: how do we build a truly representative system? Or do we just build systems that feel representative to the powerful while actually serving the same extractive, hierarchical purposes as before?
ifiokambrose
1 Comments
The Parallel Question - What Comes Next?