The Danger of a Single Story

“What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.”

Adichie does not demonize or demean people who have believed single stories. She understands the power of story itself, arguing that we are all susceptible to believing single stories. She therefore recognizes that people who have offended her with their single stories—her American roommate, her American professor—might have absorbed single stories about Africa as impressionable children.

“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.” 

Adichie references Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and Guinean author Camara Laye. These African writers undermined her single story of books as necessarily about foreigners (especially Westerners). This empowered Adichie to write from her own context and eventually to become an important voice in postcolonial literature. Later in her speech, Adichie explicitly articulates the importance of Nigerian writers, readers, and publishers. This earlier depiction of herself as a Nigerian child impacted by African authors builds her argument. 

“So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.” 

To move away from the single story, Adichie argues that many stories are essential. Stories from the perspective of various groups and regions—especially historically disempowered groups and regions—are needed. Her own experience as a child underscores her argument that Nigerian writers, publishers, and libraries are essential. When she discovered African writers, she abandoned her view of books as limited to Western people and places. 

“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.” 

This quote is one of several that prompts audience laughter. Although Adichie grapples with serious topics such as race and colonialism, she also weaves humor throughout her speech. By using humor, Adichie engages her audience and highlights the ridiculous inaccuracy of the single story.

“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.”

This quote demonstrates the danger of the single story. In other parts of the speech, Adichie traces the history of the Western story of Africa. Here, she illustrates how this broader cultural perspective manifests in an individual relationship. The single story perpetuated about Africa creates a barrier between two roommates and university women. The single story Adichie’s roommate believes does not allow room for “connection as human equals.”

“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.”

Adichie is honest about her American roommate’s prejudice toward her as an African woman. Although she earlier describes her roommate’s view as “patronizing” and even points out the humor in its inaccuracy, Adichie does not lay blame on her roommate. She acknowledges that she herself would be susceptible to the same beliefs had she grown up in the United States; she also reminds her audience of her own view of Fide as an object of pity. By relating both to those judged by a single story and to those who have judged others, Adichie reinforces that everyone is susceptible to the single story. 

“But what is important about [John Lok’s] 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.’” 

Adichie identifies Western literature as a root source of the single story about Africa. She traces the historical influence of John Lok’s outlandish descriptions and other Western writers’ negative stereotypes of Africans, and she connects these to the single story many Americans believe about Africa today.

“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.” 

This quote follows Adichie’s description of her trip to Mexico. Before her trip, she consumed the American media’s perspective on Mexican immigration. During her trip, she was ashamed to realize how much this single story had taken root in her mind. She uses this experience to reflect on how a single story emerges; in order to challenge single stories, it is necessary to understand how they develop. 

“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.” 

In order to examine the roots of single stories, Adichie argues that it is necessary to first understand the power dynamics at play. While any group—powerful or not—can have a single story about another group, the ability to define another group entirely by a single story depends on power.

“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.” 

This quote identifies a key idea in Adichie’s speech. While Adichie initially describes stereotypes of Africa as inaccurate and even humorous, later in the speech she acknowledges that there is truth in some of these stereotypes. She agrees that Africa is a place of poverty and catastrophe but asserts that even these stories—however true—are not complete.

“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.”

Single stories are not just inaccurate; they are dangerous. In this quote, Adichie articulates “the danger of the single story”: it steals dignity and creates barriers between people. Understanding this danger is key to understanding why it is important to dismantle the single story. 

“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?”

Near the end of her speech, Adichie uses rhetorical questions to imagine a world without single stories. Instead of providing definitive answers to these questions, Adichie leaves room for her audience’s imagination. She returns to anecdotes of single stories from earlier in her speech—her view of Mexicans, her view of Fide, her roommate’s view of her—and wonders aloud how they could have been different had those involved encountered other 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.” 

Adichie says these words near the end of her speech. She clearly articulates the core idea that stories are important because of the way they affect those who absorb them. Adichie uses repetition and varied sentence length to engage her audience and strongly state her points.