The Danger of a Single Story

“The Danger of a Single Story” is a TED Talk given by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at TEDGlobal 2009. In the speech, Adichie reflects on the power of story and the danger of believing one story about a region or group instead of acknowledging the complexity of many stories. Since 2009, “The Danger of a Single Story” has prompted reflective responses and has been used in classrooms around the world.

As a child and aspiring writer, Adichie says, she wrote stories exclusively about white people in Western countries; she had only encountered Western literature, and she didn’t realize that books could depict anything else. It was only when she discovered writers like African Chinua Achebe that her perspective changed, and she realized how limiting her “single story” had been. At the same time, Adichie herself wasn’t immune to stereotyping. She grew up in a middle-class household and could only see their houseboy Fide as an object of pity until she visited his family.

When Adichie went to college in America, she grappled with her classmates and instructors’ stereotyped ideas about her. Adichie uses these anecdotes to explore the colonialist roots of Western literature’s single story about Africa. She can’t truly blame Westerners, she says, for absorbing the single stories they encounter, and she offers another personal story as proof; while living in America, Adichie encountered so much anti-immigration rhetoric that the experience of traveling to Mexico and witnessing its diversity surprised her.

Adichie states that power is a key factor in understanding single stories. A group with greater cultural and economic power can tell stories that define groups with less power; the group with greater power also has the resources to tell many of its own stories. The stereotypes that single stories promote sometimes reflect partial truths—Adichie, for example, discusses the impact that the Nigerian government’s mismanagement and repression has had on her own family—but they are not the whole truth.

To combat the single story, it is important that groups with lesser power be able to share their own stories. Adichie wonders, for example, how her roommate’s views might have changed if she knew about the work of Nigerian writers, doctors, lawyers, and musicians. To combat single stories, Adichie has established a non-profit with her publisher: “We have big dreams of building libraries […] 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” (17:05). Adichie ends by encouraging her audience to dismantle single stories by seeking out different perspectives.

In this study guide, direct quotes come from the transcript of Adichie’s speech on the TED talk website (www.ted.com). Instead of referring to paragraphs, citations refer to the time designations given in the transcript. The full English transcript can be found at this link: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript#t-209460.