The Danger of a Single Story

Growing up in a middle-class Nigerian home, Chimamanda Adichie had live-in domestic help. When she was eight years old, Fide, a houseboy from a rural village, came to live with her family.

For Adichie, Fide and his family became a symbol of poverty. They were the recipients of her parents’ generosity, and Adichie’s mother would urge her, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing” (2:50). As a result, guilt and pity shaped Adichie’s view of Fide. However, when Adichie finally visited Fide’s family, it challenged her single story of them. She discovered that they were hardworking and able to create beautiful baskets. She realized that “[T]heir poverty was [her] single story of them” (3:35).

Adichie’s relationship of pity with Fide becomes a symbol of the West’s relationship with Africa:

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.