The Danger of a Single Story Blog Post

    Adichie comes out and starts the TED Talk by introducing herself as a storyteller and how she's going to tell a few personal stories. She starts off by saying her background, how she's from Nigeria, and started reading at a very young age, but how most of her pieces of writing were about white kids with blue eyes playing in the snow, eating apples, and talking about the weather. She never actually experienced any of those things because she lives in Nigeria and its always hot and they don't eat apples. She then goes to say that she is middle class and her parents both have good jobs, her dad is a professor and her mom is an administrator. The more important part of the story is that they had a house boy named Fide who her mother always told her that he was very poor, and they would go bring him food and clothes. She went over there and and saw a basket that they Fide's brother made Adichie's mom, she was surprised that he could make something so nice because she realized that all she heard about Fide's family was that they were very poor so that's all she thought of them of. Nothing else that they were poor and this is how she introduces her first single story.

    Another example of a single story is when Adichie leaves Nigeria and has an American roommate. When she meets her roommate, the roommate says that she is surprised at how good Adichie's English is, but what she didn't know was that Nigeria's national language is English. She also asked Adichie if she could show her some of her tribal music. Her roommate felt sorry for her before she had even met Adichie, her default position towards her was that as an African was kind of patronizing but well intended pity. Her roommate had a single story in the way she viewed Africans. This can be dangerous because her roommate pretty much perceived herself better than Adichie which is dangerous because then you get negative stereotypes that can hurt the view of a certain group of people. Adichie says later that the she never had a single story of the U.S. because of how the U.S. was so powerful economic and culturally that they produced many stories of themselves so she didn't have a single story towards her roommate. Which leads us to the next thing of what power language has to the way we view the world. I thought that Adichie summed this up best when she said, "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," about how white Americans stereotypically view Africans. The power of language can distort and change the view of a specific area or region. Language can do this because most people can't travel, and go live in places like Africa and actually experience the culture so they have to resort to picture, videos, and writing that people can distort to make a group of seem a certain way over and over again until they become the thing. 

    African authenticity is the idea of almost stereotypes, Adichie brings up the idea when one of her professors told her that her characters were too much like him, an educated, middle-class man. They drove cars and weren't starving so he said that they weren't authenticity African. She seemed shocked when he said this just because of how ignorant he sounded. Adichie lived in Nigeria and knew what it was like but her professor thought that there was no way an African could be that similar to him but they are he just doesn't know it because clearly he has a single story towards Africans. 

    The state of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not good. The region is ravaged by internal warring and as a result of this not only are women not equal to men, but they also have to deal with the constant threat of rape and sexual violence. They also have a big issue with child marriages with a little over a third of all girls getting married before the age of 18.