A flagpole on the Lagos racecourse, and a crowd standing about in the dark waiting for midnight — the Union Jack came down there, and the green-white-green went up, with Princess Alexandra on hand to pass over the constitutional instruments on the Queen's behalf. Tafawa Balewa spoke as prime minister of a country that had been one for about ten minutes.
The flag itself came out of a competition a year or so earlier, won by a student named Michael Taiwo Akinkunmi, who was in England studying engineering and sent in a design with a radiating red sun in the white band. The committee kept his bands and took out his sun. He was twenty-three, as it happens, and not in Lagos that night.
Marguerite, the morning after the flagpole there were thanksgiving services all over — churches in Lagos and the East, Friday prayers and emirs' durbars in the North — each region marking it in its own idiom, and as far as I can tell nobody tried to make one liturgy do for everyone. Twenty-three and watching it from England, poor Akinkunmi.
That racecourse got built over later — Tafawa Balewa Square, with the four rearing horses up on the gate piers and eagles beside them. Stand under them now and you're more or less where the pole stood. And the committee's edit left a flag a tailor can cut from three straight pieces, no sun to get wrong.