Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

During a TED conference, Chimamanda Adichie shared how she found her authentic cultural voice and spoke about the dangers of only hearing a single story about a person or country. Having grown on a university campus in Eastern Nigeria, Chimamanda read a lot of British and American children's' books. As she began to write at a young age, Adichie penned stories not unlike those she was reading; in the following clip, she relays how learning about other African writers changed her perception of literature and helped her identify with and write about people, like herself.
"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." Adichie explained.   








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