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 Reprise - Closing Thoughts on Who Tells the Story
The final question: whose Hamilton gets written? Whose Nigeria gets remembered?
We know Hamilton's story because he wrote constantly. We have letters, documents, his own narratives. His story survives because he created it.
We know Nigeria's founding through what Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Bello allowed us to know. Through their memoirs, their speeches, their carefully constructed legacies.
But what about the woman who fought in Abeokuta? What about the farmer who resisted taxation? What about the worker who went on strike? Their stories aren't in official documents. They're in oral histories, in family memories, in places we never look for history.
Lin-Manuel Miranda can be credited for making Hamilton a cultural phenomenon. But he also made it THE story, crowding out other perspectives, other interpretations.
Who gets to make that choice for Nigeria's founding? Whose version becomes THE story?
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The Reprise - Closing Thoughts on Who Tells the Story