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 Unsung Ensemble - The People Who Actually Fought
In Hamilton, the ensemble sings "The Room Where It Happens" and we feel the energy. But we don't know who they are. They're collective, they're symbolic, they're erased as individuals.
Nigeria had millions: farmers, workers, women, youth. They fought colonialism through strikes, protests, marches. They made independence possible. But we don't know their names. We know the four founders because we chose to remember them.
What if we told Nigeria's founding from the perspective of:
A woman in Abeokuta fighting for taxation representation
A farmer in Yorubaland navigating colonial rules
A worker in Lagos docks organizing strikes
A student in Ibadan protesting colonial rule
A trader in the North dealing with colonial extraction
Each of them had a "shot" too. Each of them contributed. But their stories aren't songs. They're not in our founding mythology.
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The Unsung Ensemble - The People Who Actually Fought
Nigeria had millions: farmers, workers, women, youth. They fought colonialism through strikes, protests, marches. They made independence possible. But we don't know their names. We know the four founders because we chose to remember them.
What if we told Nigeria's founding from the perspective of:
A trader in the North dealing with colonial extraction
Each of them had a "shot" too. Each of them contributed. But their stories aren't songs. They're not in our founding mythology.