The stories we hear shape our view of the world. But often these stories turn out to be one-sided – this is how stereotypes arise. Narrated by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
“As a child, I loved American and English books. They excited my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But because of them, I didn’t know that people like me could exist in literature.
I started writing stories at the age of seven. All my characters were with white skin and blue eyes. They played in the snow. They ate apples. They talked a lot about the weather: “How wonderful that the sun came out from behind the clouds.” And this despite the fact that I have never traveled outside of Nigeria. We didn’t have snow. We ate mango. We never talked about the weather because there was no need to. The discovery of African writers saved me from having a single point of view about what books are.
Years later, I left Nigeria to study at an American university. My neighbor was shocked by me. She asked where I learned to speak English so well and was embarrassed when she heard that in Nigeria, English is the official language. She asked if she could listen to “my tribe’s music” and was very disappointed when I pulled out the Mariah Carey tape. She assumed that I didn’t know how to use the stove.
Read more:
- Why do we need stereotypes?
My neighbor had only one point of view about Africa. This single point of view did not admit that Africans could be anything like her. After I lived for some time in the USA, I began to understand the attitude of my neighbor towards me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria and only knew about Africa from popular sources, I would also think that Africa is a place with beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people who fight in senseless wars, die of poverty and AIDS, cannot speak for themselves and wait for kind white foreigners to rescue them.
And I began to realize that my American neighbor must have heard and seen different versions of this story throughout her life. As did one professor who felt that my novel was not “genuinely African.” He told me that my characters were too much like him, a well-educated middle-class man. My characters knew how to drive. They didn’t die of hunger. Because of this, they were not “real” Africans.
I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because good medicine was not available. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because we didn’t have enough water for the fire trucks. I grew up under a repressive military government that devalued education, and my parents didn’t always get paid because of it. I remember how jam disappeared from our table, then margarine, then bread became too expensive, then there was less milk.
All these stories have made me who I am. But to focus only on the negatives is to forget all my other experiences and lose sight of the many other stories that have shaped me. A single point of view creates stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete. They turn one story into one and only.
I have always believed that it is impossible to find a resemblance to a place or a person without finding a resemblance to all the stories of that place or person. The consequences of forming a single point of view is that it deprives people of human dignity. It makes it harder for us to recognize the equality of people. It highlights how different we are, not how similar we are.”
Lecture read at the conference