TED
October 7, 2009 · 6 min read
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED
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Key Takeaways
- 1I'm a storyteller, and I would like to tell you about what I call "the danger of the single story.
- 2What this demonstrates is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.
- 3I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family, and we had live-in domestic help who would often come from nearby rural villages.
- 4Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother ha...
- 5Years later, when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States at age 19, my American roommate was shocked by me.
Overview
I'm a storyteller, and I would like to tell you about what I call "the danger of the single story." Growing up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria, I was an early reader of British and American children's books. When I began writing at age seven, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: all my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, ate apples, and talked about the weather. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria, had never been outside Nigeria, didn't have snow, ate mangoes, and never talked about the weather because there was no need to.
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