Chimamanda Adichie Ted Talk

Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story” could be a second name for the class African Women Writers. Adichie discusses growing up in post-colonial Africa and how there were still a lot of colonial influencers, especially on her education. She read and subsequently wrote books about little blonde girls with blue eyes, who ate apples and played in the snow. She then goes on to talk about how she personally could relate with none of these experiences, she ate mangos, did not have blonde hair or blue eyes and had never seen snow. Eventually, she found African writers and she began to read stories that were like her own, and she says it “saved her from having a single story.” In order to dispel the possibility of the …show more content…
Adichie writes Purple Hibiscus to help others who might fall into the tap of the single story. In the United States there is a very specific view of Africa for a large population of people, this stigma has a lot to do with the UNICEF commercials, portraying Africa as one giant continental slum of disease, poverty and death. With these commercials playing on repeat, how can Americas, think of all the middle class suburbs of Africa? We like to think that it is just the uneducated Americans who think this way but in Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk she recalls a college professor telling her that her novel that failed, it was “not authentically African: the characters were too much like him a middle class white man. This man is himself a highly educated person, who one would think be able to see that not all African people are like the ones portrayed in the UNICEF commercials and still, he made this comment to Adichie. Purple Hibiscus is one of the most popular books written by an African women and in the first few years after its publishing it sold over 850,000 copies. Even after selling so many copies of this book that tells such a multisided story people in America cannot see the dangers of a single story. We can see that Adichie’s professor is clearly a victim of the single story, even after having read Adichie’s book. This kind of American exceptionalism is extremely dangerous, not only does it erase entire portions of peoples, culture and society but it additionally negates that fact that there is extreme poverty in America that Americans refuse to acknowledge. Rather, they would much prefer to look aboard and support fundraising efforts in Africa, because it means they can criticize the African governments at the same