If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

Main content

WATCH: Chimamanda Adichie — The Danger of a Single Story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10. Created by World History Project.

Want to join the conversation?

  • leaf green style avatar for user Aman
    I don't see a transcript on my screen?
    (8 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user FaithCozette
    I liked it
    (8 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user ZG∞9PhilEzAE
    What did she say in ?
    (3 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user Neasa Dalton
    1. About what type of characters did the young Adiche write, and what did they do? Explain the significance thereof.

    She wrote primarily on characters not dissimilar to those within publications, often British in origin, which she had in her youth read. Adichie states that this was significant primarily due to how dissimilar they were from those individuals with whom she found herself surrounded in Nigeria. The white skinned, apple eating, ginger-beer drinking and snow accustomed characters were almost fantasy like to her.

    2. Why did it matter that Fide’s brother had made a beautiful patterned basket? How did that affect Adichie’s understanding of the story of Fide’s family?

    It showed the ability of a family to produce something ornate or artistic in the face of adversity. It provided Fide’s family with a narrative beyond poverty, speaking to the ability of art to demonstrate spirit and transcendence from tethers, socioeconomic, physical or otherwise.

    3. What expectations did Adichie’s roommate have about Nigeria and Africa more broadly? According to Adichie, what gave her roommate these expectations? How does it relate to Adichie’s previous point about the story of Fide’s family?

    Adichie’s American roommate expected society in Nigeria (and Africa more broadly) to be worlds apart from the modern USA society in which she lived. She was ill accustomed to how globalised modern African nations have become, as evidenced by her assumption that Adichie would be more familiar with “tribal music” than the Mariah Carey CD which Chimamanda later produced. This is not dissimilar to the assumptions cast by the middle class Adichie on her counterpart from a lower socioeconomic class; It presents a commentary on divisions of nation, class and otherwise and the stereotypes therewith associated.

    4. Why did Adichie’s professor think her novel lacked authenticity?

    It was a deviation from the stereotypical narrative of African society to which the professor had become accustomed; It was a refusal to conform to the overly pessimistic and catastrophising narrative of African society presented to the USA.

    5. What did Adichie witness during her trip to Guadalajara that surprised her? Why was it surprising to her? What did this make her realise?

    She witnessed multiple narratives of Mexican civilisation, challenging the “single story” and overly negative immigrant narrative which she admits she had internalised. She witnessed a society thriving within its own culture, making reference to citizens “walking to work”, “smoking, laughing… and rolling tortillas”. These are presented as actions which humanise a society previously at that time othered and criminalised by media.

    6. Why would starting a story with “secondly” affect different communities? What are examples that Adichie gives?

    Adichie states that it can “dispossess… a people” when used to shift narratives. To exemplify this. Adichie evokes two scenarios. One wherein the story of the genocide of Native American communities is started with the arrows of the tribes rather than the attack of the British. One wherein the narrative is presented secondary to the failure of an African state and not the colonial creation thereof. The speaker argues that both can ill-service an egalitarian narrative.

    7. Why did Adichie tell the student that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers? What was different about Adichie’s understanding of America versus the student’s understanding of Nigeria?

    Adichie uses this hyperbolic statement as a rebuttal to the narrative of the student which she deemed to be painting with too broad of a stroke. The student had presented Adichie with a solely negative and ill dialectical narrative of Nigerian society, evoking an image of a society almost ubiquitously plagued with corruption, conflict and suffering. In her overly exaggerated statement regarding the novel “American Psycho”, Adichie makes a nuanced statement regarding the importance of examining a multiplicity of reliable sources and not surrendering to the trap of internalising the tropes of fictional media as sole truths.

    8. Adichie describes negative experiences she and her family and friends have experienced in Nigeria, including poor healthcare and education, limited water, repressive governments, and poverty. She also mentions war crimes and unemployment. How, according to Adichie, do these stories fit into the stereotype of Africa as a “continent full of catastrophes.” What, according to Adichie, is the problem with stereotypes?

    They refuse to present a multiplicity of narratives in favour of focussing on only the good or bad of a situation; in effect this can be interpreted as a lack of dialectics. This can lend itself to an overarching pessimism (or optimism) which can ultimately become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is important to be accurate in one's presentation of narratives and cognisant of the dangers of stereotyping, unconscious bias and other fallacies - this too can be said to hold true when reading critically.

    9. What are some examples Adichie gives of stories that challenge stereotypes?

    It can be argued that Adichie’s portrayal of modern Nigerian civilisation within her writing challenges the aforementioned stereotype. Adichie also comments more specifically that the adoption of modern Nigerian literature by an increasingly literate society can achieve such. Her reference of an encounter with an individual who goes so far as to suggest an alternative ending or sequel for her book exemplifies such. A further example to which she makes reference within her talk is the consumption of other forms of Nigerian media by Nigerian natives, for example “Nollywood” films. Nollywood’s ability to produce narrative-rich pieces, sometimes in the face of circumstances ill conducive thereto challenges the latent catastrophisation of the Nigerian nation.

    1. Adichie claims that power affects which stories are told, how they are told, and which stories become “definitive” accepted stories that people believe. Using evidence from the video and anything else you have learned in this Era, give an example of a story which has been accepted because a powerful group had told it in a certain way.

    The use of media as a propaganda tool has become widespread, with a striking example of the modern era being the narrative presented by the “War on Drugs” and resultant “Mass Incarceration”. The correlation of minor drug offences with narratives often rooted in racism served to stigmatise the individuals who fell victim to policies now widely accepted to be flawed. A further example of stigmatisation by powerful media groups is that of AIDs and as a result homosexuality within the 1970s, now widely accepted to be a grievous failure of empathy, compassion and humanity.

    2. Adichie argues that beginning a story with “secondly” can completely change the story. How does order and context affect stories? Using an example from your life or what you have learned in past history classes, give an example of a story which can become a completely different story if you change the context or order.

    Adichie argues that doing so can “dispossess... a people”. I would reference the narrative of those affected by the opioid crisis. Oftentimes, those who struggle with substance abuse disorder or opioid dependency are presented as perpetrators rather than victims; their own vulnerability being leveraged as a moral failing when the converse is usually true. Presenting such narratives secondary to the circumstances, societal failings or otherwise which lent themselves to the development of such can be more effective in combating the root cause thereof in an considerate manner.

    Please find above some brief sample answers from a quick perusal of this section. Admittedly I did not watch the video thrice over nor read the transcript due to time limitations, but I wholly enjoyed the opportunity to engage therewith. As a disclaimer this is not a referenced piece of writing, nor do I present myself as an expert in any of the fields outlined therein. I wholly recommend doing your own reading on any and all scenarios presented, and the consultation of reputable sources when so undertaking.
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • boggle purple style avatar for user .
    Why is there an ad for toyota 😥
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • leafers seedling style avatar for user horsebackjensen
    Where are the other stories? Are they being written or are they being blocked or forgotten?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • stelly blue style avatar for user cheskasflorentino
    How did she get her courage to write stories about her culture.
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user _seth.minzghor
    I wonder if she ever got that ginger beer?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user Amber Buechler
    do you km
    (0 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user

Video transcript

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting 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 in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. 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. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable 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 disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. 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. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." 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 regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)