The Danger Of A Single Story

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.

The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls “a balance of stories.”

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.