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I am a storyteller and i will like to tell you a few personal stories about what I call 'The Danger of a Single Story. I grew up in a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says 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 books. I was also an early writer and when i began to write at the age of seven, stories in pencil and crayons which my poor mother was obligated to read, i wrote exactly the kind of stories i was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in h snow, they ate apples, and talked a lot about the weather-how lovely that the sun had come out J Now this despite the fact that i lived in Nigeria. We ate mangoes, and we didn’t talk about the weather because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books i read drank ginger bee. Never mind that i had no idea what ginger beer was and for many years afterwards, I would have the desperate 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 all the 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. They weren’t many available and they weren’t as easy to find as the foreign books, but because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Kamara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that girls like me, 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 the American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination and opened up new world for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know people 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 family. My father was a professor and my mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, living domestic help who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight, we got a new houseboy, his name was Fidel. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams rice and our old clothes to his family; and when I didn’t finish my food, my mother would say, “finish your food, don’t you know that people like Fidel’s family have nothing?” So I felt enormous pity for Fidel’s family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit. 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 heard about them was how poor they were, that it had become impossible 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 the United States. I was eighteen. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music” and was consequently disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove! What struck me the most was this: she had felt sorry for me even before she met me. Her default position towards 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 with Africa. But in the U.S., when Africa came up, people turned to me not knowing I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity and in many ways now I come to think of myself as African; although I still get a little irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about their charity work in “India, Africa and other countries”
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 n Nigeria and all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa is 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 saw Fidel’s family.
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western Literature. Now, here’s a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke who sailed to West Africa in 1561. He kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black African as beasts that had no houses, he writes, “they are also people without heads, having their mouths and eyes in their breasts” now I’ve laughed every time I’ve read this and one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represented 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 in the words or the wonderful poet, Roger 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.
I once had a professor who 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 my novel that it had failed in a number of areas. But I had not quite imagined that it had failed in achieving what I called “African authenticity”. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters ere too much like him-an educated middle class man. My characters drove cars, they were not starving, and therefore they were not authentically African.
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty of the single story. A few years ago, visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at that time was tense and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happened in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans 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 to tea as in the market place, smoking, laughing. I remember feeling slight surprise and then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had 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 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 of when I remember the power structures of the world and it is “Nkali”. It is a noun that loosely translates to “to be greater than another”. Like our economic and our political world, stories too are defined by the principle of Nkali; hoe they are told, who tell them, where they are told, how many stores are old 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, writes, “…The simplest way to dispossess a people is to tell their story by starting with ‘secondly’…” start the story with the arrows of the native Americans and not with the arrival of the British; start the story with the failure of the African states and not the colonial creation of the Africa states and you will have an entirely different story.
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me how it as such a shame that Nigerian men were such abusers as was the male character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called “American Psycho” and it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers! :) Now, obviously, I said this in a fit of mild irritation. But it would never have occurred to me that just because I read a novel in which a character was a serial killer, that it was somehow representative of all-Americans. This was not because I’m a better person than that student, but because of America’s cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read several books. I did not have a single story of America.
When I learned some years ago that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhood to be successful, I began to think of how I could invent horrible things that my parents had done to me. But the truth is I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love in a close knit family. But I also ad grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin, Paully, died because he did not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Uloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military government that devalued education so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so as a child saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. 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 mu 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; immense ones such as the horrific events in Congo and depressing ones such as the fact that five thousand people will apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. It is just as important to talk about them. I‘ve always felt it is impossible to engage properly with a person or a place without engaging properly with all of the stories of that person or place. The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of their 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 debate from both sides-U.S. and Mexico? What if my mother had told us that Fidel’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 Mukhta Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? The conventional wisdom then was that Nigerian didn’t read literature. He disagreed; he felt people who wanted to read would read if he made literature available and affordable to them.
Shortly after I published my first novel, I went to a T.V. station to do an interview and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said: “I really liked your book, but I did not like the ending. Now you should write a sequel and this is what will happen…” And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was much moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigeria, who are not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend, Funmi Yonda, a fearless woman who hosts a T.V. show in Lagos and is determined to tell those stories that we prefer to forget? What if my friend knew about the heart procedure that was performed in Lagos last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in pidgin in Yoruba and in Ijaw, mixing influences from Jay Z to Fela and Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who personally went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husbands 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 are really the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce)? What if my roommate knew about my talented hair braider who just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of Nigerian who start businesses and sometimes fail but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I’m home, I’m confronted with the same usual 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 workshop every summer in Lagos, and it is amazing how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started an non-profit we call PARAFINA 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 of reading and writing for people for 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 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 that moved to the north. She introduced them to a book on their southern lifestyle: “they sat around reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book and a sort 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….
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Every time I listen to this speech, I get something new. It fascinates me how uncommon common sense actually is. The truth is often in the place we least expect. The truth is often the last thing we would expect to hear. I would also want to add that I’ve been guilty of this single story a lot of times, especially in my interactions with people from other tribes. I bought into the single story that the Ibo man is synonymous with shrewd business sense (often with an intention to cheat). I bought into the single story that the Hausa man does not possess equal mental dexterity as the Yoruba man. I bought into a lot of single stories, and I’m sure I’m not alone in thisJ. But I’ve realized that one single story should not be sufficient to form my opinion on any person, any place or anything.
