The Dangers Of A Single Story 'Sharing In Africa'

Lacking a wider variety of stories on any given topic can lead to dangerous misconceptions and casual racism. In her TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Ms. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award winning Nigerian novelist and public speaker, uses personal encounters with the effects of a single story to normalize her experiences with her audiences so that they may internalize them and act upon them easier. Ms. Adichie's use of pathos, as well as her comedic tone and understanding of who her audience is makes it significantly easier for her to accomplish the aforementioned goal.

Between America and other European nations, stereotypes and misrepresentations have ultimately plagued the continent of Africa. To every side there is often another story, yet unfortunately for the many countries of Africa, they are ultimately victimized and suffer through further oppression. According to Curtis Keim’s book Mistaking Africa, Keim suggests that Africa is essentially under the public microscope, it tends to be scrutinized, and compared to European nations and America. Keim elaborates on human natures need to group people, places, and things, which creates the theory of superiority or dominance over races, cultures, and even religions.

“The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” said Chimamanda Adichie in her TED talk speech seven years ago. She is spreading awareness about the value of working against spreading a single story in a culture and community. She is correct because people should not be influencing a single story to represent a whole community of many different stories.

A single story is a limited viewpoint. A single story reduces cultures and people into a simple stereotype.

The Danger of a Single Story is about having a one sided perspective on different cultures and countries. She explains that she originally had a single story of writing because as a kid, all she had read were children’s books from America or England and all the characters in these books were stereotypical white children. Adichie said that this one and only perspective she had of books reflected on her personal writing as a kid because all of the characters in her stories were stereotypical white children. She goes on to

This Ted Talk served as a basis for all our essays. Chimamanda Adichie is an African writer who is from Nigeria, but studied in America. In this talk, there is a lot of information about, what she calls, the curse of a single story. This means that if you only have one story about a certain subject, then you have only a limited view of it. Adichie talks about how dangerous this can be, because you are perceiving something hat is most likely more complex and has more information to it, as something that is simple and has one view towards it. I used this to compare my main topic of gap years to. I used

Watching the TED talk that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave on “The Danger of a Single Story” was powerful. A single story has insufficient primary sources to have the full comprehension of the real story. Seeing Adichie verbalize issues that I have discovered in myself allowed me to reflect deeply regarding my perception of others. Adichie spoke on how her childhood was filled with English stories and how she gained a perspective on their culture through books. Books are truly powerful storytellers and is often forgotten about in a society where books are taken for granite. A book in another one of my classes was based on Adichie’s idea of how English stories only told one side of the story; this book explored the lives an Igbo society and how English stories portrayed them differently than who they actually were. This proved that I am not alone in making a single story, furthermore

In America, millions of people are reported to be living below the poverty line each year. To be exact, in 2014, about fifteen percent of Americans, or forty-seven million people were considered to be in poverty (Poverty). However, in 2014, countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa, seventy-two percent of people who lived in rural areas, and fifty-nine percent of urban households lived in poverty (Rural Poverty Portal). One of the main reasons for this alarming, high number is caused by the constant political wars and the effects it has on the civilians. In the photograph,“The Starving Boy and the Missionary”, Mike Wells captures a starving Ugandan boy resting his hand on that of a healthy

However, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has provided an impeccable speech “The Danger of a Single Story”. She applies ethos with personal experiences that expresses her creditability. It also allows her listeners to understand the main idea that is a single story is dangerous. She wants her audience to be aware of the dangers that comes with

Cynthia Heredia Prof. Moore English 1B 9/4/17 Reading Critique #1            In a recent TED talk, the famous author Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, spoke about her piece, “The Danger of a Single Story”, and how a single story that has been passed on from one person to another without being experienced by anyone else, can modify the way you see an individual or a group of people. She used many tactics such as personal stories and examples that she has encountered in life and also used humor to what I believed was used to attract and capture the audience. Her point strongly stayed throughout her whole speech as she shared her story and how she and the world viewed others around her after they had only a small amount of facts and information about them.

Throughout a lifetime people hear thousands of single stories from people, places, and things. This makes the passing of information very dangerous. A single story means, a limited viewpoint, or only seeing something from one angle. As proved in many cases, this is very dangerous in knowing the whole story from every perspective. In many cases the source you are hearing this from may have opinions or facts beyond the point adjusting your way of thinking. The dangers of singles stories was noted by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She had a first hand experience with this situation. As a child in Nigeria she was always reading english books. Appropriately, the national language of Nigeria is english, so it is likely that those were the books available. Later Chimamanda got ahold of African books and this completely changed her mindset, and realized she was only receiving stories from english perspective. This was one of her first encounters with single story. Later when she moved to America for school her she encountered a similar situation but rather someone else experiencing a single story. In her university Chimamanda had a roommate, this roommate was not from Nigeria. When Chimamanda was living with her the roommate was very surprised but her ability to speak perfect english, that she didn’t listen to “tribal” music, and that she could use a stove. Chimamanda believed this to be very odd that someone thought of her like that, but then she realized it was something similar to

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk, The Power of a Single Story, examines the power of story, both as a tool to create stereotypes and as a tool to teach people about the complexity of humanity (Adichie). In her words: “stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity” (Adichie 17:24). Adichie emphasizes that a single story obscures the complexity of the people supposedly represents. By attributing one story, one stereotype to an entire population, you eliminate the possibility of complexity or humanity for the object of the story (Adichie 04:49). The power of story comes from “how they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told,”(Adichie 09:37). It is this power that

Volunteers are sent to developing countries and placed in remote villages and tiny towns. They live like locals—in terms of both income and housing. From cement houses to mud huts, volunteers learn to live without the “necessities” like running water and toilets. In places like Mali, access to fresh foods is extremely limited, which means meals are often the same morning, noon and night. And unlike a semester at sea or study abroad, Peace Corps offers no tour guide or set schedule, which means figuring out the pace of life and a balance with work is left up to the volunteer.

The myth and stereotypes about Africa are not anything new and they are very present in our daily lives and the way Africa is portrayed. For example the reason why many people today think that Africa is bleak land of poverty and diseases is because early writers, historians, and geographers talked about Africa in that way. Because these stereotypes are so readily available, they infiltrate people’s daily thinking. Furthermore this makes people less likely to actually seek to really learn about Africa because they feel that their [inaccurate] suffice for their worldview of Africa. This is in turn leads people completely ignoring anything that contract their already established ideas.

From the TED Talk video “The Danger of a Single Story,” I think that the speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wanted to tell us that we need to read more and know different stories about one place because there are more than one story exist. We should not judge other without knowing themselves. Furthermore, she said that we should not easily believe everything we heard from media because they only give us one impression. I especially felt close to her when she described how she felt after she realized her American roommate teetered her as African not Nigerian. (4:13) Moreover, she had only a single story about Africa. (4:49) Those paragraph remind me when I was in college in New York, my American classmates did not know the differences between Japanese and Chinese or