write an summary of this transcript of an TedTalk in the reported form:


0:12
I'm a storyteller.
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And I would like to tell you a few personal stories
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about what I like to call "the danger of the single story."
0:22
I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.
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My mother says that I started reading at the age of two,
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although I think four is probably close to the truth.
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So I was an early reader,
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and what I read were British and American children's books.
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I was also an early writer,
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and when I began to write, at about the age of seven,
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stories in pencil with crayon illustrations
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that my poor mother was obligated to read,
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I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading:
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All my characters were white and blue-eyed,
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they played in the snow,
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they ate apples,
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(Laughter)
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and they talked a lot about the weather,
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how lovely it was that the sun had come out.
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(Laughter)
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Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria.
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I had never been outside Nigeria.
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We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes,
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and we never talked about the weather,
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because there was no need to.
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My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer,
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because the characters in the British books I read
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drank ginger beer.
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Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.
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(Laughter)
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And for many years afterwards,
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I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer.
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But that is another story.
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What this demonstrates, I think,
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is how impressionable and vulnerable we are
1:49
in the face of a story,
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particularly as children.
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Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign,
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I had become convinced that books
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by their very nature had to have foreigners in them
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and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
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Now, things changed when I discovered African books.
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There weren't many of them available,
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and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.
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But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye,
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I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature.
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I realized that people like me,
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girls with skin the color of chocolate,
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whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,
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could also exist in literature.
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I started to write about things I recognized.
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Now, I loved those American and British books I read.
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They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me.
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But the unintended consequence
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was that I did not know that people like me
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could exist in literature.
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So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this:
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It saved me from having a single story of what books are.
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I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family.
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My father was a professor.
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My mother was an administrator.
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And so we had, as was the norm,
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live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages.
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So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy.
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His name was Fide.
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The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor.
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My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family.
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And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say,
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"Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing."
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So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
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Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit,
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and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket
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made of dyed raffia that his brother had made.
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I was startled.
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It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family
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could actually make something.
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All I had heard about them was how poor they were,
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so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.
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Their poverty was my single story of them.
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Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria
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to go to university in the United States.
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I was 19.
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My American roommate was shocked by me.
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She asked where I had learned to speak English so well,
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and was confused when I said that Nigeria
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happened to have English as its official language.
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She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music,"
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and was consequently very disappointed
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when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
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(Laughter)
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She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
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What struck me was this:
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She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me.
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Her default position toward me, as an African,
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was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.
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My roommate had a single story of Africa:
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a single story of catastrophe.
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In this single story,
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there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way,
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no possibility of feelings more complex than pity,
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no possibility of a connection as human equals.
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I must say that before I went to the U.S.,
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I didn't consciously identify as African.
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But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me.
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Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia.
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But I did come to embrace this new identity,
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and in many ways I think of myself now as African.
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Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country,
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the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight
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from Lagos two days ago,
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in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight
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about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."
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(Laughter)
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So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African,
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I began to understand my roommate's response to me.
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If I had not grown up in Nigeria,
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and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images,
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I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes,
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beautiful animals,
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and incomprehensible people,
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fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS,
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unable to speak for themselves
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and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.
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I would see Africans in the same way that I,
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as a child, had seen Fide's family.
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This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.
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Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok,
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who sailed to west Africa in 1561
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and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.
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After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses,"
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he writes, "They are also people without heads,
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having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."
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Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.
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And one must admire the imagination of John Lok.
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But what is important about his writing
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is that it represents the beginning
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of a tradition of telling African stories in the West:
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A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives,
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of difference, of darkness,
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of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling,
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are "half devil, half child."
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And so, I began to realize that my American roommate
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must have throughout her life
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seen and heard different versions of this single story,
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as had a professor,
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who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African."
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Now, I was quite willing to contend
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that there were a number of things wrong with the novel,
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that it had failed in a number of places,
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but I had not quite imagined that it had failed
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at achieving something called African authenticity.
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In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was.
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The professor told me that my characters were too much like him,
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an educated and middle-class man.
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My characters drove cars.
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They were not starving.
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Therefore they were not authentically African.
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But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty
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in the question of the single story.
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A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.
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The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense,
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and there were debates going on about immigration.
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And, as often happens in America,
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immigration became synonymous with Mexicans.
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There were endless stories of Mexicans
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as people who were fleecing the healthcare system,
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sneaking across the border,
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being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.
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I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara,
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watching the people going to work,
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rolling up tortillas in the marketplace,
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smoking, laughing.
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I remember first feeling slight surprise.
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And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.
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I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans
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that they had become one thing in my mind,
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the abject immigrant.
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I had bought into the single story of Mexicans
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and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.
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So that is how to create a single story,
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show a people as one thing,
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as only one thing,
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over and over again,
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and that is what they become.
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It is impossible to talk about the single story
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without talking about power.
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There is a word, an Igbo word,
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that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world,
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and it is "nkali."
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It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another."
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Like our economic and political worlds,
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stories too are defined by the principle of nkali:
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How they are told, who tells them,
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when they're told, how many stories are told,
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are really dependent on power.
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Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person,
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but to make it the definitive story of that person.
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The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes
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that if you want to dispossess a people,
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the simplest way to do it is to tell their story
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and to start with, "secondly."
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Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans,
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and not with the arrival of the British,
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and you have an entirely different story.
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Start the story with the failure of the African state,
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and not with the colonial creation of the African state,
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and you have an entirely different story.
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I recently spoke at a university
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where a student told me that it was such a shame
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that Nigerian men were physical abusers
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like the father character in my novel.
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I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" --
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(Laughter)
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-- and that it was such a shame
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that young Americans were serial murderers.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
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(Laughter)
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But it would never have occurred to me to think
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that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer
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that he was somehow representative of all Americans.
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This is not because I am a better person than that student,
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but because of America's cultural and economic power,
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I had many stories of America.
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I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill.
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I did not have a single story of America.
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When I learned, some years ago,
11:57
that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods
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to be successful,
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I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.
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(Laughter)
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But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood,
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full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.
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But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps.
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My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare.
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One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash
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because our fire trucks did not have water.
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I grew up under repressive military governments
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that devalued education,
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so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries.
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And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table,
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then margarine disappeared,
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then bread became too expensive,
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then milk became rationed.
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And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear
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invaded our lives.
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All of these stories make me who I am.
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But to insist on only these negative stories
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is to flatten my experience
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and to overlook the many other stories that formed me.
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The single story creates stereotypes,
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and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,
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but that they are incomplete.
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They make one story become the only story.
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Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes:
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There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo
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and depressing ones,
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such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria.
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But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe,
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and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.
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I've always felt that it is impossible
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to engage properly with a place or a person
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without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.
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The consequence of the single story is this:
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It robs people of dignity.
14:00
It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.
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It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.
14:09
So what if before my Mexican trip,
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I had followed the immigration debate from both sides,
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the U.S. and the Mexican?
14:17
What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor
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and hardworking?
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What if we had an African television network
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that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world?
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What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories."
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What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher,
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Muhtar Bakare,
14:39
a remarkable man who left his job in a bank
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to follow his dream and start a publishing house?
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Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature.
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He disagreed.
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He felt that people who could read, would read,
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if you made literature affordable and available to them.
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Shortly after he published my first novel,
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I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview,
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and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said,
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"I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending.
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Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..."
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(Laughter)
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And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel.
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I was not only charmed, I was very moved.
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Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians,
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who were not supposed to be readers.
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She had not only read the book,
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but she had taken ownership of it
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and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.
15:33
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda,
15:37
a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos,
15:40
and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget?
15:43
What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure
15:47
that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week?
15:50
What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music,
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talented people singing in English and Pidgin,
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and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo,
15:59
mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela
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to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.
16:06
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer
16:08
who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law
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that required women to get their husband's consent
16:15
before renewing their passports?
16:18
What if my roommate knew about Nollywood,
16:21
full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds,
16:25
films so popular
16:27
that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce?
16:32
What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider,
16:35
who has just started her own business selling hair extensions?
16:39
Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail,
16:43
but continue to nurse ambition?
16:47
Every time I am home I am confronted
16:49
with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians:
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our failed infrastructure, our failed government,
16:55
but also by the incredible resilience
16:57
of people who thrive despite the government,
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rather than because of it.
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I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer,
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and it is amazing to me how many people apply,
17:09
how many people are eager to write,
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to tell stories.
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My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit
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called Farafina Trust,
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and we have big dreams of building libraries
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and refurbishing libraries that already exist
17:24
and providing books for state schools
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that don't have anything in their libraries,
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and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops,
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in reading and writing,
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for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.
17:36
Stories matter.
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Many stories matter.
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Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign,
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but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.
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Stories can break the dignity of a people,
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but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
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The American writer Alice Walker wrote this
17:58
about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North.
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She introduced them to a book about
18:04
the Southern life that they had left behind.
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"They sat around, reading the book themselves,
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listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained."
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I would like to end with this thought:
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That when we reject the single story,
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when we realize that there is never a single story
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about any place,
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we regain a kind of paradise.
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Thank you.
18:32
(Applause)