45 pages • 1 hour read
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Growing up in a middle-class Nigerian home, Chimamanda Adichie had live-in domestic help. When she was eight years old, Fide, a houseboy from a rural village, came to live with her family.
For Adichie, Fide and his family became a symbol of poverty. They were the recipients of her parents’ generosity, and Adichie’s mother would urge her, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing” (2:50). As a result, guilt and pity shaped Adichie’s view of Fide. However, when Adichie finally visited Fide’s family, it challenged her single story of them. She discovered that they were hardworking and able to create beautiful baskets. She realized that “[T]heir poverty was [her] single story of them” (3:35).
Adichie’s relationship of pity with Fide becomes a symbol of the West’s relationship with Africa:
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 (5:47).
By referring back to Fide, Adichie removes the barrier between herself and her American roommate. In one anecdote, she is the object of stereotypes; in the other, she stereotypes Fide. The episode helps Adichie relate to her audience and emphasize again that everyone is susceptible to single stories.
As both a reader and a writer, Adichie reflects on the power of books and literature. While she mentions other forms of media in her speech, she focuses on books and literature as the arena where stories form and challenge one another.
Adichie values her childhood exposure to Western literature; however, she also recognizes that it led her to believe a single story about books. She thought that literature, by default, was about Western people and Western places. In her early writing attempts, she worked within that framework. It was only when Adichie encountered African stories and voices that she gained the confidence to write from her own context. She says that “[W]hat the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are” (2:28). As an author, Adichie now writes to challenge single stories of Africa. Because books and literature are critical to dismantling single stories, she also works to empower Nigerian publishers, “dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries” (17:05), and conducts workshops for African readers and writers.
While Adichie explores the concept of the single story as something that can apply to any group or region, she primarily focuses on the dynamic between Western culture and Africa. As a Nigerian, Adichie did not identify as “African” until she lived in the United States. She realized that Americans often held a flat, simplistic view of Africa that stemmed from their ignorance of it and their exposure to a repeated single story.
For many Americans, Africa represents poverty, catastrophe, and darkness. Western literature defines it by difference, positioning it as the West’s polar opposite. This has compromised the common humanity of Africans. One of Adichie’s professors, for example, claimed that her novel was not “authentically African” because he could not accept that the characters would be so similar to himself. For Adichie’s American roommate, “[T]here 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” (4:41).
Adichie acknowledges that “Africa is a continent full of catastrophes” (13:16). However, these negative stories of Africa are not the only stories of Africa. To challenge Africa as only a symbol of poverty, only a recipient of pity, it is necessary to tell these other stories. Doing so restores the dignity and complexity of Africa and its people.
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie