THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY1

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie2

Translation, notes and comments: Raffaela Cedraschi, National Museum of
Cultures, Mexico 2011
I am a storyteller and I would like to tell you some personal
stories about what I like to call “the danger of a single story.” I grew
up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says I
started reading when I was two, but saying I started reading when I was
four would be closer to the truth. So I was an early reader and what I read

were English and American children's books.

I was also a precocious writer. And when I started writing, around

the age of seven, stories in pencil with illustrations painted with crayons
that my poor mother was forced to read, I wrote exactly the same kind of
stories as those I read. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They
played in the snow, ate apples, and talked a lot about the weather, and
were glad that the sun had come out. That despite the fact that I lived in
Nigeria. I had never left Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes
and we never talked about the weather because we didn't have to.

1 TED Talk: Ideas Worth Spreading, July 2009. Original English talk:
www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
Spanish subtitles: Beverly Pérez Rego.
2 Nigerian writer born in 1977, in the village of Abba, Enugu State. She is known for her short
stories and the novels Purple Hibiscus (2005), about religious intolerance, and Half of a Yellow Sun
(2007), a novel based on the Nigerian-Biafran War of 1967–1970. This novel was the winner of the
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2007, one of the most renowned prizes in the United
Kingdom, awarded to women who write in English.
 My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters
in the English books I read drank ginger beer. It didn't matter that I didn't
know what ginger beer was. And for many years I had a desperate desire
to try ginger beer. But this is another story.

I think this shows how susceptible and vulnerable we are to a story,

particularly as children. Because I had only read books in which the
characters were foreigners, and I had convinced myself that books, by
their very nature, had to have foreigners in them and had to tell things
that I could not personally identify with. But things changed when I
discovered African books. There weren't many available and they weren't
as easy to get as foreign books.

However, thanks to authors like Chinua Achebe3 and Camara Laye4,

I underwent a change of mentality in my perspective on literature. I
realized that people like me, girls with chocolate skin, whose curly hair
couldn't be tied into ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started
writing about things I recognized.

3 Nigerian writer of the Igbo ethnic and linguistic group, like the author, winner of the Booker
International Prize in 2007 and best known for his novels that reflect on Africa's colonial and
postcolonial periods: Things Fall Apart (Everything falls apart), 1958; Arrow of God (Arrow of God),
1964; No Longer at Ease (No more peace), 1960.
4 Guinean writer of the Malinke ethnic group, known for his novels written in French, the main
themes of which are ancestral African traditions: L'enfant noir (The African Child), 1953, an
autobiographical novel about his childhood; Le regard du roi (The Regard of the King), 1954, an
initiation novel about African wisdom; Dramouss (Dramouss), 1966, a critique of the regime of
Sékou Touré (President of Guinea from 1958 to 1984).
 Chinua Chinua Achebe
Achebe
It is true that I loved those American and English books that I read.
They sparked my imagination; they opened up new worlds for me. But the
unintended consequence was not knowing that people like me could exist
in literature. So the effect that the discovery of African writers had on me
was this: it saved me from having a single story about what books are.

I come from a conventional middle-class Nigerian family: my father

was a teacher, my mother an administrator. And so we had, as was
normal, domestic staff who came from nearby rural towns. When I turned
eight, a new boy arrived as a servant. Her name was Fide. The only thing
my mother told us about him is that his family was very poor. My mother
sent her family yams and rice and our old clothes. When I didn't finish my
dinner, my mother used to say, “Finish your food! You don't know? “People
like Fide’s family have nothing!” So I felt very sorry for Fide's family.

Then one Saturday, we went to her village to visit and her mother
showed us a beautiful basket decorated with dyed raffia, made by her
brother. I was surprised. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone in his family
could even do anything. All I had heard about them was how poor they
were, so it had become impossible for me to see them as anything other
than poor. Their poverty was my unique story about them.

Years later I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to college

in the United States. I was nineteen years old. My American roommate
was impressed when she met me. She asked me where I had learned to
speak English so well and was confused when I told her that the official
language of Nigeria was English. She asked if she could hear what she
called my “tribal music” and was consequently greatly disappointed when
I showed her my Mariah Carey tape. He also assumed that I wouldn't
know how to use a stove.
 What puzzled me was this: he had felt sorry for me even before
he saw me. Their default position towards me, as an African, was
reduced to a kind of condescending pity. My roommate had a unique
story about Africa. A unique story of catastrophe. In this unique story
there was no possibility that Africans could be similar to her in any
way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility
of connection as equal human beings.

I must admit that before going to the United States, I did not
consciously identify as African. However, in the United States, whenever
Africa was mentioned, people would point to me. It didn't matter that I
knew nothing about places like Namibia. However, I came to adopt this
new identity. And in many ways I now think of myself as African. Although
it still bothers me quite a bit when people refer to Africa as a country. The
most recent example was on my otherwise wonderful flight two days ago
from Lagos, where they made an in-flight announcement by Virgin about
the charity work done in “India, Africa and other countries.”

So after living a few years in the United States as an African, I began

to understand my roommate's reaction to me. If I hadn't grown up in
Nigeria and if all I knew about Africa came from popular images, I too
would think that Africa is a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful
animals and incomprehensible people, waging senseless wars, dying of
poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved
by a kind white foreigner. I would see Africans the same way I, as a child,
saw Fide's family.

I think this unique story about Africa ultimately comes from Western
literature. This is a quote taken from the writings of a London merchant
named John Locke who set sail for West Africa in 1561 and wrote a
fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to African blacks as
“beasts that have no homes,” he writes, “They are also people without
heads and have their mouths and eyes in their chests.”

Now, I laugh every time I read this. One cannot help but admire John
Locke's imagination. What is important about his writings, however, is that
they represent the beginning of a tradition of African storytelling in the
West. A tradition where sub-Saharan Africa is a place of negatives, of
difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet
Rudyard Kipling, are “half demon, half child.”

In this way I began to understand that my American roommate must

have seen and heard, throughout her life, different versions of this unique
story, just like a professor who once told me that my novel was not
“authentically African.” I was willing to admit that there were several
flaws in the novel, that it had failed in some parts. But not at all
I had imagined that the novel had failed to achieve something called
“African authenticity.” In fact, I didn't know what African
authenticity was! The professor told me that my characters were too
much like him, an educated, middle-class man; that my characters
drove vehicles; they didn't starve. Therefore, they were not
authentically African.

But I must add right away that I am equally guilty in this matter of
the single story. A few years ago I visited Mexico from the United States.
The political climate in the United States was then tense. There were
debates about immigration and, as often happens in America, immigration
became synonymous with Mexicans. There were countless stories about
Mexicans as people who looted the health care system, who sneaked
across the border, who were arrested at the border, and things like that.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching

people go to work, kneading tortillas in the market, smoking, laughing. I
remember feeling a little surprised at first, and then I was overcome with
shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in media coverage of
Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject
immigrant. I had believed the single story about Mexicans and I couldn't
be more ashamed of myself. This is how a unique story is created, showing
a people as one thing, as a single thing, over and over again, until it
actually becomes that.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about

power. There is one word, one Igbo5 word, that I remember every time I
think about global power structures and it is nkali. It is a noun that
translates as “being bigger than another.” Like our economic and political
worlds, stories are also defined by the principle of nkali. How they are
told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, really
depends on power.

Power is an ability not just to tell someone else's story, but to make
that story the definitive one for that person. Palestinian poet Mourid
Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way
to do it is to tell their story beginning with “secondly.” Start the history of
Native Americans with the arrows, not the arrival of the English, and you'll
get a completely different story. Start the story with the failure of African
states and not with the colonial creation of African states, and you get a
completely different story.

5 Igbo or Ibo, in the English form, is an ethnic people from eastern Nigeria, where the author is
originally from. This people was the protagonist of the war of secession against Nigeria in the late
1960s, because of the oil fields in the Biafran territories, whose brutal and devastating results
remained imprinted in the memory of numerous generations of all latitudes.
 Mourid Barghouti

I recently gave a lecture at a university where a student told me that

it was really a shame that Nigerian men were abusers like the father
character in my novel. I told him I had just read a novel called American
Psycho and that it was truly a shame that American youth were serial
killers. Well…, obviously I was a little upset when I said that.

It would never have occurred to me that just because I had read a

novel where a character was a serial killer, that he would somehow
become representative of all Americans. Now, that's not because I'm a
better person than that student, but because of the cultural and economic
power of the United States, I had a lot of stories about America. I've read
Tyler and Updike, Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I didn't have a single story
about America.

A few years ago, when I learned that writers were expected to have
really unhappy childhoods in order to be successful, I started thinking
about how I could make up all kinds of horrible things my parents had
done to me. Although the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of
laughter and love, in a very close family.

But I also had grandparents who died in refugee camps. My cousin

Polle died due to lack of medical attention. One of my closest friends,
Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks had no water. I
grew up under repressive military regimes, which placed very little value
on education, so my parents sometimes did not receive their salaries. So
as a child, I watched jelly disappear from the breakfast table; then
margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk was
rationed. And, above all, a kind of general political fear invaded our lives.
 All these stories make me who I am, but to dwell only on these
negative stories would be to simplify my experience and omit many
other stories that shaped me. The single story creates stereotypes,
and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are false, but that
they are incomplete. They make a story become a unique story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes – some of

them huge, like the horrific rapes in Congo, and others depressing, like
the fact that 5,000 candidates applied for a vacant job in Nigeria. But
there are other stories that are not about catastrophes and it is very
important, it is equally important, to talk about them.
I've always felt that it's impossible to properly engage with a place
or a person without understanding all the stories of that place or that
person. The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of
dignity. It makes it difficult to recognize our human equality. It emphasizes
our differences rather than our similarities.

So, what would have happened if, before my trip to Mexico, I had
followed both poles of the immigration debate, that of the United States
and that of Mexico? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was
poor, yes, but very hard-working? What if we had an African television
network that broadcast diverse
 African stories around the world? What Nigerian writer Chinua
Achebe calls a “balance of stories.”

What if my roommate had known about my Nigerian editor, Mukta

Bakaray, an extraordinary man, who left his job in a bank to follow his
dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was
that Nigerians don't read literature. He did not agree. I thought that
people who could read would read, if literature was available and
affordable.

Shortly after publishing my first novel I went to a television station

in Lagos for an interview. A woman who worked there as a messenger
came up to me and said, “I really liked your novel, but I didn't like the
ending. Now you have to write what follows and this is what will
happen…”. And he went on to tell me what I should write in the sequel.
Not only was I delighted, but I was also deeply moved. I was facing a
woman belonging to the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not
supposed to be readers. Not only had he read the book, he had taken
ownership of it and felt entitled to tell me what I should write in the
sequel.

What if my roommate had met my friend Fumi Onda, a bold woman,

a TV show host in Lagos, determined to tell us the stories we'd rather
forget? What if my roommate had known about the heart surgery
performed in a Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew
about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in English
and Pidgin, in Igbo, Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela,
from Bob Marley to their grandparents. What if my roommate knew about
the lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous
law that required women to have their husbands' approval in order to
renew their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood 6, full
of innovative people, making movies despite great technical limitations?
Movies so popular that they are really the best example of Nigerians
consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my
wonderful and ambitious hair braider who just started her own business
selling hair extensions? Or did you know of millions of other Nigerians who
start a business and sometimes fail, but still have ambitions?

Every time I return home I am confronted with the same sources of

irritation for most Nigerians: our failing infrastructure, our failing
government. But also with the incredible malleability of people who
prosper despite the government and not because of it. Every summer I
lead writing workshops in Lagos

6 Nollywood is the Nigerian film industry and is the second largest in the world, behind Bollywood
(Indian film industry) and ahead of Hollywood.
And it's amazing to me to see how many people are eager to write, to
tell stories.

My Nigerian editor and I have just started a non-profit called

Farafina. We have big dreams of building libraries and stocking
existing libraries, and providing books to state schools that have nothing
in their libraries, and also organizing many, many reading and writing
workshops for all those who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories
matter, many stories matter. Stories have been used to disempower and
slander, but stories can also be used to empower and humanize. Stories
can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken
dignity.
American writer Alice Walker wrote about her southern relatives
who moved north. He presents them with a book about the Southern life
they left behind; “They sat there, reading the book themselves, listening to
me read the book, and we regained a kind of paradise.” I would like to end
with this thought: that when we reject the single story, when we realize

that there is never a single story about any place, we recover a kind of
paradise. Thank you so much.