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Tio Sage
I am a copywriter and digital marketer. @ Adekunle Ajasin University
Lagos, Nigeria
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The Day the Flag Rose
<p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">I was only eleven the day the flag went up.</span></p><p><br></p><p>Not the old one with foreign colors and a name that didn’t belong to our tongues, but the new one — our flag. Green, gold, and black, stitched by the hands of women who had sung for freedom with calloused palms and fierce hearts.</p><p><br></p><p>My father stood in the crowd, silent, his eyes glassy. I had never seen him cry before, but something in that moment broke through the stone of him.</p><p><br></p><p>He had been part of the movement — quietly. Not one of the leaders, not the voices on the radios or the names whispered in fear. But he ran messages through the forest at night. Hid rebels in our home. Risked everything so that I might grow up in a land not borrowed but ours.</p><p><br></p><p>At school, we were taught to sing the colonizer’s anthem. But at home, my mother taught me songs in our native tongue — songs that smelled of dust and firewood and hope. Songs we were never supposed to remember, but somehow always did.</p><p><br></p><p>I didn’t understand it all then. Only that grown-ups spoke in codes. That some names disappeared. That some people left and never came back.</p><p><br></p><p>The day of independence, the streets were alive. Not with violence, but with dancing. Pots banged. Feet stomped. Drums echoed into the sky. Strangers embraced like family. I had never seen joy so full of pain.</p><p><br></p><p>Later that night, as the stars blinked awake, my father sat me down.</p><p><br></p><p>“You will forget the speeches, but remember this,” he said, voice low. “We were never given freedom. We took it. Piece by piece. Day by day. And now it is yours to protect.”</p><p><br></p><p>I remember that more than the flag.</p><p><br></p><p>Because the flag can be raised or lowered, but a people — a people must rise again and again, even when no one is watching.</p><p><br></p>
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