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 Biafran Parallel - When the System Fails Completely
The American Civil War (1861-1865) showed that the founding system couldn't handle the slavery contradiction. America violently resolved it, and then spent 150+ years not actually addressing systemic racism.
Nigeria's civil war (1967-1970): Biafran War. The founding system couldn't handle ethnic nationalism and regional dominance. Millions died. Famine. Defeat. And then Nigeria spent 50+ years trying to build unity while never addressing the structural inequalities that caused the war.
In Hamilton, the Civil War is basically absent. The founding is about the revolution, not about what comes after.
In Nigeria, the civil war IS the proof that the founding failed. But we don't often treat it that way. We treat it as a tragedy that happened to the nation, not as evidence that the nation was never actually unified.
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The Biafran Parallel - When the System Fails Completely