The Danger of a Single Story

At a Glance

Who: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
What: Speech: The Danger of a Single Story
When: July 2009
Where: Oxford, England
About the speaker: Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian novelist.


"Stories matter," says Chimamanda Adichie. "Many stories matter."

In her July 2009 speech in Oxford, England, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie warns of the danger of a single story, the story that defines a person or a people, a nation or a world.

As a young child in her native country, Adichie read literature that shaped her picture of the world with no concept that English and American literature did not match her life or her own country.

Therefore, what she read eventually became her story--she craved what she read about.

She was later to learn that while those stories stirred her imagination "the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature."

However, it wasn't until she was a college student that she fully realized that just as she had learned one story about the world, others had learned a single story about themselves, their world and the people in it.

Adichie later defined an Igbo word as "power--to be greater than another", and says, "How they are told, who tells them, when they are told and how many stories are told are really dependent on power.

The power is the ability to tell a story that defines a people."

If you repeatedly tell a single story that characterizes someone in a particular way, they eventually become what you have created.

Therefore, a single story should never be the only story that is told.

Adichie says "The consequence of the single story is that it robs people of dignity." It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar and warns against hearing and accepting one story as the only story.

In doing so, she says, "we risk a critical misunderstanding."