The Danger Of The Single Story Essay

The Ted Talk “The Danger of the Single Story” presented by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author. The presentation outlines her experience with literature as a female from Nigeria throughout her life, and the influence a single story has. In her early childhood, Adichie solely read American and British children’s book as that was what was readily available to the population. As result, when she started to write her own books her stories only had white characters, who had entirely different experiences than she had had as a child growing up in Nigeria. Due to the power relations of Nigeria compared to that of Britain and the United States, children’s books from those countries are more accessible and available than children’s books written in Nigeria by Nigerian authors.
When Adichie began to read African literature, her experienced a mental shift in the perception of literature. She realized that people like her, who were not white, could also exist in literature and look like her and experience the same things she experienced in her life. She also realized this in other aspects of her life outside of literature, for example, her impression of her domestic help as someone who was poor, and nothing but that, and when she learned that he was indeed more than just a poor person, she was shocked. On the reverse end, she learned that when she attended university in the United States that a single story was presented to those in America of people living in Africa, that presented African people as incomprehensible, those who fight senseless wars, are dying of AIDs and poverty, unable to speak for themselves and waiting around to be saved by white people. This single story of Africa is produced by western literature, which can be attributed to the fact that many African countries were once colonized, as post-colonialists would