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 Eternal Question - "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?"
This is the actual heart of both Hamilton and Nigeria's founding.
Hamilton lived until 1804 and died famous. But enslaved people died in obscurity, their stories never told.
Azikiwe lived until 1996 and died celebrated as "father of the nation." But the woman who fought for Abeokuta's rights? Most of us don't know her name.
The question "who tells your story?" is a question about power. It's about whose voice the system allows to survive, to be remembered, to become history.
Hamilton became a musical because he wrote obsessively, because he had access to publishing, because posterity chose to remember him.
Nigeria's founding fathers became THE founding fathers because they controlled the independence narrative, because their papers were preserved, because the system they built decided to remember them.
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The Eternal Question - "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?"
This is the actual heart of both Hamilton and Nigeria's founding.
Hamilton lived until 1804 and died famous. But enslaved people died in obscurity, their stories never told.