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The Danger of a Single Story
The Danger of a Single Story
What’s so “dangerous” about story telling? Author Chimamanda Adichie reveals how the stories we tell—and hear—shape our view of the world.
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Key Ideas
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
- Why did Adichie write about white, foreign characters as a child, and why is this significant?
- What do Adichie’s examples about Fide and her roommate reveal about single stories?
- What do Adichie’s examples about her professor and her trip to Mexico reveal about single stories?
- What does Adichie mean when she says that starting a story with “secondly” changes its meaning?
- What does Adichie say is the problem with stereotypes, and how does she think they affect our understanding of people and places?
- What are some examples Adichie gives of stories that challenge stereotypes?
: (chime, water drop)
: (music playing)
: (applause)
: I'm a storyteller, and...
: I would like to tell you a few personal stories
: about what I like to call
: "the danger of the single story."
: I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
: My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,
: although I think four is probably closer to the truth.
: So I was an early reader,
: and what I read were British and American children's books.
: I was also an early writer, and when I began to write,
: at about the age of seven,
: stories in pencil with crayon illustrations
: that my poor mother was obligated to read,
: I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading.
: All my characters were white and blue-eyed.
: They played in the snow.
: They ate apples. (clears throat)
: (audience laughter)
: And they talked a lot about the weather,
: how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
: (laughter)
: Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.
: I had never been outside Nigeria.
: We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes,
: and we never talked about the weather,
: because there was no need to. (laughter)
: My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,
: because the characters in the British books I read
: drank ginger beer.
: Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
: (laughter)
: And for many years afterwards,
: I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.
: But that is another story.
: What this demonstrates, I think,
: is how impressionable and vulnerable we are
: in the face of a story, particularly as children.
: Because all I had read were books
: in which characters were foreign,
: I had become convinced that books by their very nature
: had to have foreigners in them,
: and had to be about things
: with which I could not personally identify.
: Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
: There weren't many of them available,
: and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
: But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye,
: I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
: I realized that people like me,
: girls with skin the color of chocolate,
: whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,
: could also exist in literature.
: I started to write about things I recognized.
: Now, I loved those American and British books I read.
: They stirred my imagination.
: They opened up new worlds for me.
: But the unintended consequence was that I did not know
: that people like me could exist in literature.
: So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this,
: it saved me from having a single story of what books are.
: I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.
: My father was a professor.
: My mother was an administrator.
: And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help,
: who would often come from nearby rural villages.
: So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy.
: His name was Fide.
: The only thing my mother told us about him
: was that his family was very poor.
: My mother sent yams and rice,
: and our old clothes, to his family.
: And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say,
: "Finish your food!
: Don't you know people like Fide's family have nothing?"
: So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
: Then 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 had made.
: I was startled.
: It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family
: could actually make something.
: All I had heard about them was how poor they were,
: so that it had become impossible for me to see them
: as anything else but poor.
: Their poverty was my single story of them.
: Years later, I thought about this
: when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States.
: I was 19.
: My American roommate was shocked by me.
: She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,
: and was confused when I said that Nigeria
: happened to have English as its official language.
: She asked if she could listen to what she called
: my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed
: when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
: (laughter)
: She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
: What struck me was this--
: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me.
: Her default position toward me, as an African,
: was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.
: My roommate had a single story of Africa:
: a single story of catastrophe.
: In this single story, there was no possibility
: of Africans being similar to her in any way,
: no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,
: no possibility of a connection as human equals.
: I must say that before I went to the U.S.,
: I didn't consciously identify as African.
: But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up,
: people turned to me.
: Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.
: But I did come to embrace this new identity,
: and in many ways I think of myself now as African.
: Although I still get quite irritable
: when Africa is referred to as a country,
: the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight
: from Lagos two days ago in which there was
: an announcement on the Virgin flight about
: the charity work in "India, Africa, and other countries."
: (audience groans)
: So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,
: I began to understand my roommate's response to me.
: If I had not grown up in Nigeria,
: and 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.
: I would see Africans in the same way
: that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.
: This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think,
: from Western literature.
: Now, here is a quote from the writing
: of a London merchant called John Lok,
: who sailed to West Africa in 1561
: and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.
: After referring to the black Africans as,
: "beasts who have no houses," he writes,
: "They are also people without heads,
: having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
: Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.
: And one must admire the imagination of John Lok.
: But what is important about his writing
: is that it represents the beginning
: of a tradition of telling African stories in the West.
: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives,
: of difference, of darkness, of people who,
: in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling,
: are "half devil, half child."
: And so, I began to realize that my American roommate
: must have, throughout her life, seen and heard
: different versions of this single story,
: as had a professor, who once told me that my novel
: was not "authentically African."
: Now, I was quite willing to contend
: that there were a number of things wrong
: with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places,
: but I had not quite imagined that it had failed
: at achieving something called African authenticity.
: In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was.
: The professor told me that my characters
: were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man.
: My characters drove cars.
: They were not starving.
: Therefore, they were not authentically African.
: But I must quickly add that I, too,
: am just as guilty in the question of the single story.
: A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.
: The political climate in the U.S. at the time
: was tense, and there were debates
: going on about immigration.
: And, as often happens in America,
: immigration became synonymous with Mexicans.
: There were endless stories of Mexicans
: as people who were fleecing the healthcare system,
: sneaking across the border,
: being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
: I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara,
: watching the people going to work,
: rolling up tortillas in the marketplace,
: smoking, laughing.
: I remember first feeling slight surprise.
: And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.
: I realized that I had been so immersed
: in the media coverage of Mexicans
: that they had become one thing in my mind,
: the abject immigrant.
: I had bought into the single story of Mexicans
: and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
: 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.
: It is impossible to talk about the single story
: without talking about power.
: There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about
: whenever I think about the power structures of the world,
: and it is "nkali."
: It's a noun that loosely translates to
: "to be greater than another."
: Like our economic and political worlds,
: stories too are defined by the principle of nkali.
: How they are told, who tells them,
: when they're told, how many stories are told,
: are really dependent on power.
: Power is the ability not just to tell the story
: of another person,
: but to make it the definitive story of that person.
: The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes
: that if you want to dispossess a people,
: the simplest way to do it is to tell their story
: and to start with "secondly."
: Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,
: and not with the arrival of the British,
: and you have an entirely different story.
: Start the story with the failure of the African state,
: and not with the colonial creation of the African state,
: and you have an entirely different story.
: I recently spoke at a university
: where a student told me that it was such a shame
: that Nigerian men was-- were physical abusers
: like the father character in my novel.
: I told him that I had just read a novel
: called "American Psycho." (audience laughter)
: And... (laughs)
: And that it was such a shame
: that young Americans were serial murderers.
: (laughter) Now...
: (applause)
: Now-now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
: (laughter) But...
: It would never have occurred to me to think
: that just because I had read a novel
: in which a character was a serial killer
: that he was somehow representative of all Americans.
: And now this is not because
: I am a better person than that student,
: but because of America's cultural and economic power,
: I had many stories of America.
: I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.
: I did not have a single story of America.
: When I learned, some years ago,
: that writers were expected
: to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful,
: I began to think about how I could invent
: horrible things my parents had done to me.
: (laughter)
: But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood,
: full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
: But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps.
: My cousin Polle died because
: he could not get adequate healthcare.
: One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash
: because our fire trucks did not have water.
: I grew up under repressive military governments
: that devalued education, so that sometimes,
: my parents were not paid their salaries.
: And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear
: from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared,
: then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed.
: And most of all,
: a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.
: 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.
: Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes.
: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo,
: and depressing ones, such as the fact
: that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria.
: But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe,
: and it is very important, it is just as important,
: to talk about them.
: 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."
: What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher,
: Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man
: who left his job in a bank to follow his dream
: and start a publishing house?
: Now, the conventional wisdom was
: that Nigerians don't read literature.
: He disagreed.
: He felt that people who could read, would read,
: if you made literature affordable
: and available to them.
: Shortly after he published my first novel,
: I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview,
: and a woman who worked there as a messenger
: came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel.
: I didn't like the ending.
: Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen..."
: (laughter)
: And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel.
: Now, I was not only charmed, I was very moved.
: Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians,
: who were not supposed to be readers.
: She had not only read the book,
: but she had taken ownership of it
: and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
: Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda,
: a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos,
: and is determined to tell the stories
: that we prefer to forget?
: What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure
: that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?
: What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music,
: talented people singing in English and pidgin,
: and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,
: mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela,
: to Bob Marley, to their grandfathers.
: What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer
: who recently went to court in Nigeria
: to challenge a ridiculous law
: that required women to get their husband's consent
: before renewing their passports?
: What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,
: full of innovative people making films
: despite great technical odds,
: films so popular that they really are
: the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce?
: What if my roommate knew about
: my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,
: who has just started her own business
: selling hair extensions?
: Or about the millions of other Nigerians
: who start businesses and sometimes fail,
: but continue to nurse ambition?
: Every time I am home,
: I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation
: for most Nigerians-- our failed infrastructure,
: our failed government, but also by
: the incredible resilience of people
: who thrive despite the government,
: rather than because of it.
: I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer,
: and it is amazing to me how many people apply,
: how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.
: My Nigerian publisher and I have just started
: a non-profit called Farafina Trust,
: and we have big dreams of building libraries
: and refurbishing libraries that already exist
: and providing books for state schools
: that don't have anything in their libraries,
: and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops
: on reading and writing, for all the people
: who are eager to tell our many 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.
: The American writer Alice Walker wrote this
: about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North,
: and she introduced them to a book about the Southern life
: that they had left behind.
: "They sat around, reading the book themselves,
: "listening to me read the book,
: and a kind of paradise was regained."
: I would like to end with this thought,
: 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.
: Thank you.
: (applause)
: (music playing)
: (applause)
: I'm a storyteller, and...
: I would like to tell you a few personal stories
: about what I like to call
: "the danger of the single story."
: I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
: My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,
: although I think four is probably closer to the truth.
: So I was an early reader,
: and what I read were British and American children's books.
: I was also an early writer, and when I began to write,
: at about the age of seven,
: stories in pencil with crayon illustrations
: that my poor mother was obligated to read,
: I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading.
: All my characters were white and blue-eyed.
: They played in the snow.
: They ate apples. (clears throat)
: (audience laughter)
: And they talked a lot about the weather,
: how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
: (laughter)
: Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.
: I had never been outside Nigeria.
: We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes,
: and we never talked about the weather,
: because there was no need to. (laughter)
: My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,
: because the characters in the British books I read
: drank ginger beer.
: Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
: (laughter)
: And for many years afterwards,
: I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.
: But that is another story.
: What this demonstrates, I think,
: is how impressionable and vulnerable we are
: in the face of a story, particularly as children.
: Because all I had read were books
: in which characters were foreign,
: I had become convinced that books by their very nature
: had to have foreigners in them,
: and had to be about things
: with which I could not personally identify.
: Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
: There weren't many of them available,
: and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
: But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye,
: I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
: I realized that people like me,
: girls with skin the color of chocolate,
: whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,
: could also exist in literature.
: I started to write about things I recognized.
: Now, I loved those American and British books I read.
: They stirred my imagination.
: They opened up new worlds for me.
: But the unintended consequence was that I did not know
: that people like me could exist in literature.
: So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this,
: it saved me from having a single story of what books are.
: I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.
: My father was a professor.
: My mother was an administrator.
: And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help,
: who would often come from nearby rural villages.
: So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy.
: His name was Fide.
: The only thing my mother told us about him
: was that his family was very poor.
: My mother sent yams and rice,
: and our old clothes, to his family.
: And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say,
: "Finish your food!
: Don't you know people like Fide's family have nothing?"
: So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
: Then 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 had made.
: I was startled.
: It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family
: could actually make something.
: All I had heard about them was how poor they were,
: so that it had become impossible for me to see them
: as anything else but poor.
: Their poverty was my single story of them.
: Years later, I thought about this
: when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States.
: I was 19.
: My American roommate was shocked by me.
: She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,
: and was confused when I said that Nigeria
: happened to have English as its official language.
: She asked if she could listen to what she called
: my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed
: when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
: (laughter)
: She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
: What struck me was this--
: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me.
: Her default position toward me, as an African,
: was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.
: My roommate had a single story of Africa:
: a single story of catastrophe.
: In this single story, there was no possibility
: of Africans being similar to her in any way,
: no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,
: no possibility of a connection as human equals.
: I must say that before I went to the U.S.,
: I didn't consciously identify as African.
: But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up,
: people turned to me.
: Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.
: But I did come to embrace this new identity,
: and in many ways I think of myself now as African.
: Although I still get quite irritable
: when Africa is referred to as a country,
: the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight
: from Lagos two days ago in which there was
: an announcement on the Virgin flight about
: the charity work in "India, Africa, and other countries."
: (audience groans)
: So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,
: I began to understand my roommate's response to me.
: If I had not grown up in Nigeria,
: and 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.
: I would see Africans in the same way
: that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.
: This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think,
: from Western literature.
: Now, here is a quote from the writing
: of a London merchant called John Lok,
: who sailed to West Africa in 1561
: and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.
: After referring to the black Africans as,
: "beasts who have no houses," he writes,
: "They are also people without heads,
: having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
: Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.
: And one must admire the imagination of John Lok.
: But what is important about his writing
: is that it represents the beginning
: of a tradition of telling African stories in the West.
: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives,
: of difference, of darkness, of people who,
: in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling,
: are "half devil, half child."
: And so, I began to realize that my American roommate
: must have, throughout her life, seen and heard
: different versions of this single story,
: as had a professor, who once told me that my novel
: was not "authentically African."
: Now, I was quite willing to contend
: that there were a number of things wrong
: with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places,
: but I had not quite imagined that it had failed
: at achieving something called African authenticity.
: In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was.
: The professor told me that my characters
: were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man.
: My characters drove cars.
: They were not starving.
: Therefore, they were not authentically African.
: But I must quickly add that I, too,
: am just as guilty in the question of the single story.
: A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.
: The political climate in the U.S. at the time
: was tense, and there were debates
: going on about immigration.
: And, as often happens in America,
: immigration became synonymous with Mexicans.
: There were endless stories of Mexicans
: as people who were fleecing the healthcare system,
: sneaking across the border,
: being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
: I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara,
: watching the people going to work,
: rolling up tortillas in the marketplace,
: smoking, laughing.
: I remember first feeling slight surprise.
: And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.
: I realized that I had been so immersed
: in the media coverage of Mexicans
: that they had become one thing in my mind,
: the abject immigrant.
: I had bought into the single story of Mexicans
: and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
: 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.
: It is impossible to talk about the single story
: without talking about power.
: There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about
: whenever I think about the power structures of the world,
: and it is "nkali."
: It's a noun that loosely translates to
: "to be greater than another."
: Like our economic and political worlds,
: stories too are defined by the principle of nkali.
: How they are told, who tells them,
: when they're told, how many stories are told,
: are really dependent on power.
: Power is the ability not just to tell the story
: of another person,
: but to make it the definitive story of that person.
: The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes
: that if you want to dispossess a people,
: the simplest way to do it is to tell their story
: and to start with "secondly."
: Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,
: and not with the arrival of the British,
: and you have an entirely different story.
: Start the story with the failure of the African state,
: and not with the colonial creation of the African state,
: and you have an entirely different story.
: I recently spoke at a university
: where a student told me that it was such a shame
: that Nigerian men was-- were physical abusers
: like the father character in my novel.
: I told him that I had just read a novel
: called "American Psycho." (audience laughter)
: And... (laughs)
: And that it was such a shame
: that young Americans were serial murderers.
: (laughter) Now...
: (applause)
: Now-now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
: (laughter) But...
: It would never have occurred to me to think
: that just because I had read a novel
: in which a character was a serial killer
: that he was somehow representative of all Americans.
: And now this is not because
: I am a better person than that student,
: but because of America's cultural and economic power,
: I had many stories of America.
: I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.
: I did not have a single story of America.
: When I learned, some years ago,
: that writers were expected
: to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful,
: I began to think about how I could invent
: horrible things my parents had done to me.
: (laughter)
: But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood,
: full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
: But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps.
: My cousin Polle died because
: he could not get adequate healthcare.
: One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash
: because our fire trucks did not have water.
: I grew up under repressive military governments
: that devalued education, so that sometimes,
: my parents were not paid their salaries.
: And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear
: from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared,
: then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed.
: And most of all,
: a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.
: 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.
: Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes.
: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo,
: and depressing ones, such as the fact
: that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria.
: But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe,
: and it is very important, it is just as important,
: to talk about them.
: 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."
: What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher,
: Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man
: who left his job in a bank to follow his dream
: and start a publishing house?
: Now, the conventional wisdom was
: that Nigerians don't read literature.
: He disagreed.
: He felt that people who could read, would read,
: if you made literature affordable
: and available to them.
: Shortly after he published my first novel,
: I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview,
: and a woman who worked there as a messenger
: came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel.
: I didn't like the ending.
: Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen..."
: (laughter)
: And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel.
: Now, I was not only charmed, I was very moved.
: Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians,
: who were not supposed to be readers.
: She had not only read the book,
: but she had taken ownership of it
: and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
: Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda,
: a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos,
: and is determined to tell the stories
: that we prefer to forget?
: What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure
: that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?
: What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music,
: talented people singing in English and pidgin,
: and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,
: mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela,
: to Bob Marley, to their grandfathers.
: What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer
: who recently went to court in Nigeria
: to challenge a ridiculous law
: that required women to get their husband's consent
: before renewing their passports?
: What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,
: full of innovative people making films
: despite great technical odds,
: films so popular that they really are
: the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce?
: What if my roommate knew about
: my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,
: who has just started her own business
: selling hair extensions?
: Or about the millions of other Nigerians
: who start businesses and sometimes fail,
: but continue to nurse ambition?
: Every time I am home,
: I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation
: for most Nigerians-- our failed infrastructure,
: our failed government, but also by
: the incredible resilience of people
: who thrive despite the government,
: rather than because of it.
: I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer,
: and it is amazing to me how many people apply,
: how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.
: My Nigerian publisher and I have just started
: a non-profit called Farafina Trust,
: and we have big dreams of building libraries
: and refurbishing libraries that already exist
: and providing books for state schools
: that don't have anything in their libraries,
: and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops
: on reading and writing, for all the people
: who are eager to tell our many 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.
: The American writer Alice Walker wrote this
: about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North,
: and she introduced them to a book about the Southern life
: that they had left behind.
: "They sat around, reading the book themselves,
: "listening to me read the book,
: and a kind of paradise was regained."
: I would like to end with this thought,
: 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.
: Thank you.
: (applause)