Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story 02

Part Two

• I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. 
• My father was a professor. 
• My mother was an administrator. 
• And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. 
• So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. 
• His name was Fide. 
• The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. 
• My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. 
• And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, 
• "Finish your food! Don't you know? 
• People like Fide's family have nothing." 
• So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
• Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. 
• And 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 had heard about them is how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me 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 university in the United States. 
• I was 19. 
• My American roommate was shocked by me. 
• She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. 
• She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very dissapointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. 
• She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.
• What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. 
• Her default position toward 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.