The Danger of a Single Story

Today, the society’s lives and cultures are composed of many overlapping stories. A single story confines a corner of the world to a generalized stereotype. Chimamanda Adichie in TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, addresses that “if you hear a single story about a person or a country we risk a critical understanding.” Adichie also states, “a single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not what they are untrue, but they are incomplete.” Adichie believes everyone is guilty in creating single stories and they are dangerous because they rob people from their identities and dignity. Diversity of stories and possibilities are things that should be read and discussed. Single stories are dangerous because they make the differences in people stand out and the single story an incomplete description.

She gains credibility in her introduction by demonstrating that she has experienced firsthand the negative effects of single stories. Adichie uses personal tales, observations, and insights to illustrate her point about what happens when people and cultures are reduced to a single story. Adichie plays

Adichie had grown up on western books and had no clue of her own culture and history. However, people like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye saved her from having a single story. “This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western Literature (Adichie. Part 15 - "The 'Paint'" Western Literature had formed a single story of what Africa was like. Many Americans see Africa for its bad things, like the wars, the slums, and the diseases.

Elisabeth says then there will never be any solution to the problem of novel in Africa if the Africans wanted a ‘living voice’. The main problem faced by them was because the African writers unlike the French and the English were not acting as writers but were actually behaving like interpreters of their exotic cultures and that the root of their problem was ‘ Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write.’

As human beings, we tend to not understand that what we see or hear about social media, television, books, etc. can guide us towards this one piece of the puzzle. Not knowing the rest of the puzzle creates the assumption of a single story. In her TED talk, Chimamanda Adichie has spoken about the dangers of only knowing a story which leads to stereotyping. By this being said, to what extent do we as a society form a single story about others? To answer this question, there is a great extent when people create their single stories about others because we make these single stories without even realizing it. Chimamanda is a mere example, a representative of how our society thinks and is treated  when making a single

Adichie tells the story of the new houseboy her family had hired when she was eight, Fide, was the houseboy’s name. Her mother always told Adichie that she should be grateful for what she had and never let it go to waste because there was people like Fide’s family that didn’t have anything (Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story). Adichie goes on to say that when she visited Fide’s family at his village, his mother had shown her a very beautiful woven raffia basket that Fide’s brother had made. Adichie recalls being stunned and saying that she had heard so much about how poor Fide’s family was, that it was now just not possible for her to see them as anything else, she had acquired a single story on Fide’s family (Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story). Some years after, Adichie moved to the United States for university and had a realization the day she met her roommate. Her roommate assumed many things about Adichie that a lot of people in the Western Hemisphere assume about Africans because this is the story that they are familiar with, and much like Adichie with her houseboy’s family, they are unable to see anything else. The point that Adichie is making here is that everyone is susceptible to the influence of a single story, even if they are not aware of

Adichie’s characters are subject to cultural suppression in several of the short stories. This is most pronounced in ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’ where Chinaza is forced by her husband to assimilate to her new surroundings by ridding herself of all signs of being Nigerian,

According to Adichie, since the childhood, she was a victim of single story consequences. Her first false conception was caused by the children books, all of which is from American and Britain, filling up characters with totally different features, behaviors and “things which I could not personally identify” (1:43). This used to make she think that there would be no literature for the people like her. However, she got out of this perception when finding out other African authors and books. The second misconception is about Fide’s family when she turned eight. She knew nothing about Fide’s family except their poverty by keeping listening to the single story about them through

After watching this very powerful video, I believe that the single voice Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie points of could be the voice to the many people that are close minded and believe that there is only one actuality, a single story, to a specific group of people. Having this mindset could, in essence, destroy the similarities that we have in common and send us into an era, in which we have sadly eased ourselves into, where we are only able to spot the differences and flaws that we have. During Adichie’s speech, she points out that the danger of a single story is a horrendous act of robbing people of their dignity and emphasizing how we are all different yet we still adopt the mindset of believing that there is only one side to every story.

Chimamanda Adichie’s collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck deviates from what many individuals in the West may consider to be the traditional view of Africa. In her 2012 TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Adichie states that the “telling of African stories in the West” is a “tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness…”. In this same TED Talk, Adichie also speaks about how at one point a professor told her that the novel was not “authentically African”. These ideas that are common in the West confine the African continent and the people who live on it to stereotypes. Through the short stories, “A Private Experience” and “Jumping Monkey Hill”, Adichie steers away from what the West may consider to be “authentically African” as well as what other Africans may consider to be “authentically African” avoiding the single story that has grown common. In The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Adichie complicated “the single story” of Africa being a backwards place through the use of dynamic characters in order to display the complexities of the lives of Africans.

In her speech, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explained that a single story is something that is shown as one thing, as the only thing, and over and over again. In other words, a "single story" is a source of information that has not been debunking by anyone. It is present as something that ordinary people cannot explore or experience, therefore it becomes a reliable source that people believe in. It is like an adult telling a fictional story to a kid, and we can be sure that the kid would believe everything from that story without any objection. I think a "single story" is dangerous because it creates stereotype, bias, and discrimination among the society. When a "single story" get told over and over again, it becomes a belief. As the result, it

In many ways, language can be the most powerful weapon of all. Stories can have a great and lasting impact on their readers, and those who cannot make their voices heard can find themselves excluded from collective thought and memory. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie puts it, there is great danger in exposure only to a “single story;” as per the oft-quoted axiom, “history is written by the winners,” and thus the voices of those on the proverbial losing end—or, indeed, those whose stories simply cannot permeate the barrier separating them from another culture—often go unheard. Such was the case for many Africans during the early twentieth century, as Europeans invaded the continent and suppressed the voices and cultures of those who already lived there. Set during this time are Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, which tells of an African clan’s encounter with European settlers, and Athol Fugard’s one-scene play “Master Harold”…and the boys (hereinafter Master Harold), the story of the relationship between a South African boy of European descent and his family’s African servants. In both texts, the story told by many Europeans of a “primitive” culture in need of “civilization” is clearly the dominant view of Africa in European culture. However, the horrifying ramifications of this ignorant viewpoint quickly reaffirm Adichie’s argument. The danger of the "single story" Europeans tell is its silencing of the voices of the Africans whose supposed story is being told,

These strong, and independent African women authors use insightful and educational language, which invites the western world to be a part of their world through the power of literature. One of the

Coming from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family, where her father was a professor and her mother was an administrator, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lived a normal life exposed to the typical books of white, blue-eyed characters playing with snow, eating apples, and drinking ginger beer. However, she realizes that literature didn’t always contain the same characteristics as the books she had read growing up and that “people like her, girls with the skin color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails” can exist in literature (2:15). Through this experience, it “saved her from having a single story of what books are” (2:36).

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, “African “Authenticity” and the Biafran Experience” Adichie explains why she writes about the things she does. Adichie believes that there are many misconceptions and negative impressions of those who are of African descent. Adichie explains that she grew up in southeastern Nigeria, and loved to read. Growing up, she believed that all books had to have white people in them. When she began to write, all of her stories consisted of white characters with blue eyes. Her stories consisted of things that she did not know first hand, like ginger beer. It was not until she read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that Adichie realized that her stories could have characters that were more like her. She continues to explain how Achebe’s writing helped her realize that the stereotypes towards Africans are not always the best. She says that she does not find all stereotypes to be bad,