Arise O compatriots
Nigeria's call obey

To serve our father's Land
With love and strength and faith
The Labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain.

          I was with my father a few days ago at a convocation ceremony. In the midst of the vestigial protocols and repetition of rites of passage. The ebullience in the atmosphere was as strong as the aroma of breakfast in a small village with every woman trying to outdo her neighbour with sumptuous meals to hold on to their husbands who can, at any time choose to replace her with a younger blood or worse; one of those women who were too beautiful at youth, too beautiful to marry till they became ineligible for the somewhat eligible and young men.. Emotions like excitement, mixed feelings were rampant.
          I digress. At the end of the ceremony; the band delivered an impeccable rendition of the national anthem. But as the fanfare got underway, I got caught in a sentence on the anthem "The Labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain",it begs the question, who are our heroes past? This question threw me off, how come I have never read any piece on this? We sing the National Anthem every time and we have not once spoken about it? Did we fight for independence? Did we fight to become colonized? Only fight we actually applied ourselves into wasn't really a fight, it was the pogrom and massacre of the Igbos during the civil war. These questions plagued me, So let us date back into the history of Nigeria.
          A mass of land in the dark continent "discovered" in 1868 by the Britons. A bunch of tribes thought by the white man to be from culture-less roots, so why would they care about the difference? It didn't take much for toubob (Toubob is Gambian for white man) to join the two protectorates together and have his high nosed wife name us as "Nigeria", a name we continue to carry with pride. We have been bedizened by the name and we chose to adopt it.
         Governors came and went, rulers to keep the Queen's monarchy above water, they killed and jailed any native usurper and they rallied us to fight in their war, the second world war. The British were spent and exhausted after Hitler was forced to submit and they could not risk a revolt by the Native Nigerians. Noted in Chinua Achebe's "There Was A Country", He spoke about a band of writers, teaming up to press for independence but Alas, the Queen had a better plan. To step away from our country in public eyes and appoint a Leader in a well organized and doctored election (the roots of our corruption dates back to our colonial masters).
          But before I start to digress again, we started to experience turmoil and rapid exchange in power, Military men who wanted to changed the country, only to get to the top and discover Toubob was still there. We see their hands in our trades, in the civil war, The Ogoni and Shell conflicts to mention a few. A country tagged as the "Giants of Africa" but remains tainted by the smear of neo colonialism. We strive to impress Toubob, we work for the Queen, we change our policies to align with them and we roll over so that they can walk with clean feet.
So, it invokes the question, "who are our heroes past?", The bands of writers? The Mabel Seguns of their time? The Awolowos? The Ojukwus? Lord Frederick Luggard?. We have no heroes past, we have just names we choose to immortalize as equanimity to absence of people worthy of adornment. Explains the norm of giving former dictators,actors and actresses national awards. "The Labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain".... This powerful sentence denotes the persistence to keep the legacy of our Heroes that is Nigeria alive, it gives us a reason to strive to keep our Country alive but what happens when we don't have one?
           My words should not come across as provocative or critique, but rather a social commentary to invoke a sleeping beast. We might not have heroes past in the foundation on which we stand upon, but we can have heroes now,we can be immortalized heroes now, which our children shall always remember when singing that notorious line in the National anthem.