Summary
In the story, The Danger of a Single Story, a Nigerian woman tells a story of her love for reading and writing at an early age. She loved to read British and American children's books due to the limited number of African books. Chimamanda Adichie was an early writer and at about the age of seven, she had drafted stories like the ones she had read. She became convinced that books had to have foreigners in it because she was consumed by them. This was when Chimamanda understood the danger of a single story. That changed for Chimamanda when she discovered African books. Chimamanda went through a mental shift in her perception of literature due to writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye. Chimamanda came from a middle- class Nigerian family where her father was a professor, and her mother was an administrator. The family would help people from nearby rural villages. At the age of eight, Chimamanda's parents got a new house boy named Fide. Chimamanda mother would tell her that Fide's family was extremely poor, the mother would send yams, rice, and clothes to them. One Saturday they went to Fide's village to visit. Fide's mother showed them a patterned basket that his brother made. Chimamanda was startled because all her mother would say was that the family was poor, so she did not think of anything else about them but being poor. At 19, Chimamanda left Nigeria to go to a university in the United States. There, she had an American roommate who was astonished that she was able to speak English so well. The roommate asked her would she be able to listen to the tribal music of Nigeria and was disappointed when Chimamanda showed her a tape of Mariah Carey. The roommate assumed she did not know how to use a microwave. The roommate felt sorry for her before she even got the chance to meet her. Chimamanda did not identify as African before coming to America but once she was here, she embraced being African. After spending years in America, Chimamanda began to understand her roommate's view on Africa. Americans' misconception of Africa was due to the pictures seen of landscapes, beautiful animals, dying of poverty and AIDS, and them fighting senseless wars. Chimamanda observed that she did the same thing with Fide's family. Chimamanda quotes John Locke, a London merchant who sailed to west Africa in 1561. John Locke referred to black Africans as "beasts who have no houses" and people who have no heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts. John Locke's writing represented the beginning of a tradition of story- telling about Africans in the West. A professor once told Chimamanda that her novel was not "authentically African". Chimamanda visited Mexico from the U.S. There were debates about immigrants in Mexico fleeing the country to come to America. She walked around in Guadalajara, watched the people go to work or roll up tortillas and realized she had become immersed in the media coverage of Mexico that she viewed them only as immigrants.
