In “The Danger of a Single Story”, the author Chimamanda Adichie talks about her background growing up in her native country Nigeria. Adichie was an early writer who grew up in a university campus in eastern Nigeria. She recalls that she started reading British and American children books at the age of two, and at the age of seven she was writing stories in pencil with crayon illustrations. Those stories, unfortunately, didn’t reflect the environment she was living. “All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the facts that i lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.” Later, at age of 19, she moved to the United States to attend university. Her American roommate was shocked at her because she was different at the stereotypes that Americans had of African people. “She asked where i had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when i said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language”. Years later, she starts to understand the her roommate’s stereotype about her because of the single storie that American have about Africans.
Adichie believes that the single story that society has about Africans comes from Western literature, and she cites a quote from a London Merchant called John Locked, who sailed in west Africa in 1561 and referred to Africans as “beast with no houses”, that says: “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.” She says that this writing “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 are half devil, half child.”
Adichie also describes her experience on her visit to Mexico from the US. She has always heard that immigration was synonymous with Mexicans, and other stories of Mexicans crossing the border and taking advantage of the healthcare system. After knowing the lifestyle of Mexican people, she felt ashamed because she believed the single story that American media has about Mexicans.
So we this examples, Adichie points out that the single story not only affects how others perceive someone but also how we perceive ourselves. Those who are constantly subjected to a single narrative may create stereotypes and doubt their own worth and abilities. It is crucial to recognize the danger of creating a single story about others.
