The Danger of a Single Story

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) is a giant of postcolonial African literature. Like Adichie, Achebe was a Nigerian writer. Over the course of his career, he wrote novels, essays, poetry, and children’s books; he was also a leader in Nigerian publishing. Achebe’s writing frequently challenged Western colonial narratives, depicting the historical and modern complexities of life in Nigeria. His best-known work is likely the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), which depicts the upheaval of colonialism and its fallout in African societies. Later in life, Achebe moved to the United States, where he spent time teaching in colleges and universities.

In “The Danger of a Single Story,” Adichie describes the immense impact that Achebe had on her. As a child exposed to primarily Western literature, Adichie came to believe that books themselves must be about white characters in Western countries. She says, “[B]ecause of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye [a Guinean author], I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature” (2:07). Later in her speech, Adichie quotes Achebe. As she imagines a world where single stories are dismantled, she asks: “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’” (14:00). These two direct references to Achebe underscore his importance as a literary forerunner to writers like Adichie.

John Lok was an English sailor and one of the pioneers of what would become the transatlantic slave trade. In 1552, Lok led a voyage to Guinea and, in 1555, brought five enslaved people back to England. Adichie quotes from Lok’s account of a 1561 voyage to West Africa: “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’” (6:26). 

Lok’s writing is significant because it is “the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West”—specifically, stories that paint “Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness” (6:56). Although Lok’s descriptions are outlandish, they represent the root of the Western single story about Africa. Lok’s writing and his ideas about Africans as subhuman also shaped the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade; for the next 300 years, millions of Africans were enslaved and removed from the continent. This history of colonialism, slavery, and power is the vital context to understanding the single stories that today influence Western perceptions of Africa. 

When Chimamanda Adichie was eight years old, Fide came to her middle-class family home to work as a live-in domestic helper. Fide’s family lived in a rural village, and Adichie’s perspective of his family—based on her mother’s descriptions of them—was simply one of poverty. When Adichie actually visited Fide’s family, she was surprised to see “a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made” (3:35). She realized that her single story of his family as defined by poverty and pity did not allow room for other stories, like their creation and appreciation of beauty and their hard work.

Throughout Adichie’s speech, Fide is an important example of a time she herself adopted a single story regarding others. Her initial view of Fide closely mirrors the dynamic between the West and Africa, which often revolves around pity and stereotypes of poverty.