Republic or Death! (14 page)

Over lunch, Babatunde talks about his memories of writing the Nigerian anthem. It's a song that raises itself above most of the other hymn-like anthems you find in Africa by virtue of, traditionally, having thunderous Afrobeat percussion beneath it, as if a troop of drummers has rudely interrupted a brass band rehearsal. Babatunde helped write it in 1977 when he was just twenty-one, a bright, optimistic and patriotic student. One day that year, he picked up a newspaper and saw early entries to a competition to be the new anthem. He was shocked at how bad they were. ‘I thought: I'm not singing that. I'd better write something quick.' Nigeria was just coming out of a civil war and so he filled his entry with hopeful phrases, believing – genuinely – that his words might push Nigerians to fulfil their country's vast potential. About 1,500 other people thought their words could too, but Babatunde's entry was somehow picked out from the pile, along with five others. Bits of each were then cherry-picked and arranged together to make two verses. ‘Do you know the expression “a camel looks like a horse stitched together by a comedian”?' Babatunde says. ‘It was a bit like that.'

Babatunde had actually left Nigeria to study in the States before the competition winners were announced, and only found out he'd won because his dad sent him a newspaper clipping. A promised cheque for 50 naira (‘A
lot
of money at the time') found its way to his parents' house, but never to him. Babatunde eventually went back to Nigeria with an American girlfriend, but decided to leave again in the late eighties after realising the only way he could make money there was by becoming a rice merchant; Nigeria apparently didn't need academics.

Babatunde starts talking about the problems Nigeria had in those days, and the fact that it still has most of them, and I get the feeling he could carry on doing so for hours. But given he is an immigrant to the US I realise it could be interesting to turn the conversation on to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner', so ask if he's become an American citizen. ‘Of course,' he says. ‘I realised that if I was going to spend my life here, I wanted to vote, so I had to.'

‘So how'd you feel about the anthem?' I ask. I'm expecting him to just say it's all right – ‘It's got nothing to do with me really. I don't sing it' – but he doesn't. Instead he says, ‘Oh boy,' and breathes out heavily, and for the first time since we met, he stumbles over his sentences, struggling to find the right words. ‘It's actually really moving. To me. Okay, the start's not great. But then it builds. And when it gets to that line, “The land of the free and the home of the brave”, that's the part that gets me. I feel it right in my throat. That line really says to me what America's about.'

I ask what he means exactly and he starts talking about the American Dream. ‘I know it's a cliché – the worst cliché – but as a concept it's flawless. If you come in and you're willing to work hard and willing to keep your nose clean, then things will happen for you. You'll have heard stories of how immigrants come here with nothing in their pockets. Well, mine was worse. I owed my in-laws fifteen hundred dollars. I kid you not. I was living here in a room with my wife and our young son. I slept on the floor. We had a second son that year who slept in a pulled-out drawer. Seriously. That's where I started. From scratch. And within a year and a half I had a house, I had a car, I was about to buy a second. Okay, I wasn't living high on the hog, but in which other country can that happen?'

I ask if he's ever experienced racism, and he says of course and gives me a story about the time he was almost shot by a policeman after being pulled over for speeding. ‘I said, “I'm very sorry, Officer, I'll happily pay the ticket.” And nobody says that! But I was in my twenties, making an obscene amount of money as far as I was concerned, so it didn't matter. But that really put his nose up and he asked me questions for, like, an hour, and then when he finally asked for my papers, I reached for the glove compartment. The only reason I'm still alive is that I heard the safety click on the back of his gun.' Another time out driving, he was almost run off the road by a racist truck driver (‘He leaned over from his cab, and said, “Get out of my way, you fucking nigger.” He had a sawn-off shotgun. All that'). ‘I could give you several more examples,' he says.

‘How can you love the US so much given all that?' I reply. But he just smiles and points out that no one here's stopped him achieving.

So I ask the obvious final question: which anthem do you like more, your own or that of your adopted country? ‘As poetry, what we wrote doesn't rise to “The Banner”'s level,' he says. ‘In part that's because it was cleaved together. You get what you pay for. But the Nigerian anthem, that's also sad for me because when we wrote it, we were being aspirational: “Let's do something about this country to move it to where it should be.” And ever since it's gone in the opposite direction. There's so much corruption. People don't want to serve Nigeria, they want to serve themselves, and that goes from the president all the way down. Sometimes I hear it today, and think: Oh come on, this shouldn't be our anthem. It's ridiculous how far the reality is from the words.

‘But with “The Star-Spangled Banner”, despite all America's problems, “the land of the free and the home of the brave” still rings true. There's the freedom to be yourself here and if you have something to contribute, people will welcome you. There's just
something
about that tune.'

He sees my sceptical eyes and laughs, instantly knowing I'm, shall we say, somewhat cynical about the idea of the American Dream, let alone the sentiment in Key's enigmatic line. From walking around America's second cities, your Baltimores, your Nashvilles, it seems clear to me they are just clichés with which people who've achieved can pat themselves on the back, and to which people who haven't can desperately cling in between drinks of sizzurp. The idea that America is the only country you can achieve in if you work hard is also something I've never been able to understand – something you could surely only believe in if you were using North Korea as the comparison.

But despite all that feeling, I have to admit that people's belief in it is genuine and not just Babatunde's – and it's partly Francis Scott Key's fault for summing it up so well in his anthem, in ways that people could still describe as ‘ringing true' two hundred years after they were written.

If only Babatunde's own Nigerian anthem – ‘living just and true, / Great lofty heights attain' – had had a similar impact in Nigeria.

*

‘The Star-Spangled Banner' didn't actually become America's anthem until 117 years after it was written, in 1931. When Key wrote it, there were already plenty of ‘national airs' – songs that people loved and sang on important dates, like the earlier-mentioned ‘Yankee Doodle' (‘Yankee Doodle went to town, / Riding on a pony, / He stuck a feather in his cap / And called it Macaroni'). But few politicians tried to get one song raised above the others.

Efforts to get a true national anthem largely came from far outside the political establishment. The legendary showman P. T. Barnum – who ran freak shows and circuses, where people could see monkeys sewn on to fish (‘A 100% genuine mermaid') – held a contest to write an anthem in the 1850s, though he refused to hand out any prize money because all the entries were so bad. Then the Civil War came along, making the chances of the whole country adopting an anthem at all almost non-existent. In the South, whose supporters included all of Francis Scott Key's family, the minstrel tune ‘Dixie' became the de facto anthem, perhaps unsurprising when you realise the song is sung from the point of view of a freed slave wishing he was back ‘in the land of cotton'. They did play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' too, but as much to parody it as straight (‘Oh say has the Star-Spangled Banner become, / The flag of the Tory and vile Northern scum?'). The North's brass bands, meanwhile, played dozens of tunes, but ‘The Banner' was among the most loved. It was a song about the flag the soldiers were marching under, after all. Sometimes the bands even played it during battles as a way to keep the exhausted, scared men going. Whether many people were actually able to hear them amid the noise of a battlefield is anyone's guess.

It was not until a couple of decades after the Civil War, in 1889, that it became almost inevitable that ‘The Banner' would become the American anthem. In that year, Benjamin Tracy, the dour, neat-bearded Secretary of the Navy, was having a standardisation drive and passed an order saying all bases must play the song when the flag was raised each morning. The following year, he ordered the Navy Band to play it – ‘the national air of the United States' – at all concerts. Within a few years of that, the navy had ordered all its men to stand to attention whenever the song was played. The army, of course, quickly followed.

On a quick stop in Washington, I met Mike Bayes, senior chief musician at the Navy Band and its unofficial historian. He was cramped in a basement office in the city's naval yard surrounded by boxes of ancient papers, piles of photos and random memorabilia: an anchor here, a dusty saxophone there. ‘I'm not sure what the catalyst was for the navy promoting it, but maybe the government wanted something to try to unify the states,' he said. ‘You think of the period after the Civil War when reconstruction's happening. The union was very fragile; the whole thing could have come crumbling down. How could they keep people unified? Well, band music was popular, and this song was a rallying cry, telling people to look at the flag, remember who you were and that they were part of the union. It's the only song that did that. You could sing it in the south, west, north or east, so politically it made sense for some people in government to want the song out there, and the only way to do that was with the Navy Band because it travelled the country. It was really like a stadium rock band back then.'

The anthem eventually picked up momentum outside the navy too, being played more frequently at baseball games around the end of the First World War, in part to remind people of the troops off fighting in Europe. Some teams initially played it during the ‘seventh innings stretch', the traditional rest break in games, but people complained that it was disrespectful to remember war dead while eating a hot dog or going to the toilet and so it was moved to the start of games.

However, the biggest push for the song came from a congressman, John Charles Linthicum. Linthicum was a Baltimore resident and a man who believed patriotism was ‘the great bulwark of the Republic', so he was receptive when both his wife and local women's groups started harassing him to introduce bills into the House of Representatives for the song to be adopted as the official anthem. They also played on his home-town sentiments, as if he should ‘do it for Maryland'. And he did. He tried five times over ten years without a hint of success.

It didn't help that the song still had legions of detractors. Countless newspaper and magazine editorials over the years said it was the wrong song to be America's anthem, particularly focusing on its difficulty. ‘The American people have been trying in vain for nearly a century to sing it,' went a typical one. Another said the audience's response ‘continues to be as pathetic as it has ever been desperate … Will not someone kindly present us with a new distinctively American hymn?' There were also campaigns against it, especially around Prohibition, with one group taking out full-page adverts in newspapers to slam the tune, pointing out it was a drinking song and an insult to British allies. How could the US ever consider giving such filth the highest status in the land? (Drinking connections don't seem to have ever put people off making songs anthems. The words to Slovenia's ‘A Toast' were taken from a poem written so each verse looked like a wine glass.)

But ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' had been gathering momentum regardless, and at Linthicum's sixth attempt, in 1929, the other congressmen finally listened to him and agreed to hold hearings on the issue. It certainly helped that a veterans' organisation turned up to those hearings with some 5 million signatures backing the move. The committee let Linthicum's bill go forward and it then slowly wound its way through the two houses of Congress, until, in 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed it into law.

*

A few days after meeting Mike Bayes, I'm in New York in Federal Hall, a squat, pillar-clad building sitting amongst Wall Street's skyscrapers. It's the place where George Washington became America's first president and where the Bill of Rights was written, guaranteeing freedom of speech. Today it's covered in red, white and blue drapes, and there are guards in bright ceremonial uniforms standing at each entrance, their guns shouldered, their brass buttons gleaming. There are about a hundred people inside, each waving a small American flag as high and fast as they can. There's a Canadian Jew in a yarmulke, an Egyptian housewife in a hijab, a seven-foot-tall former basketball player from Jamaica, a Dutch banker in a fur coat, a Korean mother bouncing a baby, and people from Argentina, Russia, Poland … All of them are about to become US citizens, which explains why, right now, they're reciting the strangest oath I've ever heard. ‘I hereby declare that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty,' they each try to say, many unsurprisingly stumbling over the word ‘potentate'. They go on to promise, when required, ‘to bear arms on behalf of the United States', and to perform ‘non-combatant service', and do ‘work of national importance under civilian direction'. And they say they'll do all of this ‘freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, so help me God'. It lasts two whole minutes but for that entire time, no one seems able to stop smiling.