Single Story By Chimamanda Adichie Analysis

Chimamanda Adichie in her TED presentation talks about the dangers of a “single-story”, she warns us to against using a “single-story” to understand questions of identity. To understand what “single-story” is Chimamanda Adichie narrated a story when she was nineteen years old, she was leaving Nigeria to go to a university in the United States her American roommate was surprised by her because she spoken English very well. Her roommate wondered how she spoke English so well; she told her Nigeria happen to have English as its official language, the roommate also assumed she didn’t know how to use a stove. Her roommate a had a “single-story” about Africa, a single story of catastrophe in this “single-story” there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in anyway, …show more content…
Their family had a house boy and all she knew about that house boy and his family was they were poor, it was impossible for her to see them as anything else but poor, Poverty was her “single-story” about them. She understood her roommates’ response to her that if she didn’t grew up in Nigeria and all she knew about Africa were from popular images, she would to 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. The Danger of a single story is about having one sided perspective on different cultures and countries. Although the stories we read gives us depiction of what these people have gone through, the depictions they portray themselves in the story, make their readers feel no other complex feelings other than pity. These stories become our "single-stories" thus we who are fortunate enough to enjoy life have the urge to help and try to share a little bit of that experience thus we become to have “white-savior industrial