The danger of the single story inspired by Chimanda Adichie’s speech.
Statement 1: The people of Sub- Saharan Africa are poor and cannot lift themselves from poverty. This is as opposed to the rich and powerful Western countries which are the only hope of saving for the poor of the South.
Statement 2: Homosexual people should not be allowed to get married and have children. Homosexual couples do not conform with what we perceive as normal. Besides, they should not be allowed to raise children because these might grow to be homosexual like their parents.
The two statements above are harsh, racist and biased aren’t they? Indeed I believe they are and I don’t believe one single word of what I wrote down. Yet, this is a perfect example to show you how dangerous one side of the story can be. We are fools. We believe what we hear and what we read. The story is important, but these stories are most often single sided, twisted by what the majority believe, manipulated to hide the other side of it.
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Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
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Stories impact our lives in various ways. Whether they’re written or passed on to us orally, we tend to believe what we hear or read with certain apathy, not questioning anything. For instance, we hold this perception that dark-skinned people are poor, we tend to associate them with lack of health care, education and poor standards of living. As soon as we here of migration, our minds go straight to "the blacks on boats’ which is a racist and demeaning expression to use. Underneath the skin we are all the same. However, few of us are aware that out of the 14 countries which have registered an improvement in their Human Development Index of more than 2% since 2000 11 are located in Sub-Saharan Africa.
As we grow up, we are exposed to stereotypes and the challenge with them, as Adichie herself says, is that “stereotypes are incomplete.” They may not be necessarily wrong or harmful, they are just incomplete — they trick us into one side of the story. Representing dark-colour-skinned people as poor is one thing, but referring to them as poor and striving to achieve economic development and lift themselves up the social ladder is another thing. Adichie makes reference to her mother who always tells her that their family home-boy was very poor and she had bought into this story. For Adiche they were nothing but poor and it never occurred to her that these people had talents and capabilities.
This, the danger of the single story, is why I believe we should question and discover. Travel, read, travel some more, question and read some more. Why should you believe anything you hear? Go visit countries, see for yourself if the stories they tell you are a real representative story of that country or whether there is more to it. Never read something and believe it instantly — question it and read other sources to see whether there are other perspectives. Even when writing yourself, don’t stick to one side of the story, uncover the truth, dig deep.
One person should never define a whole crowd. If there is a person in a village which is a criminal, not all the others are. If there is an area in a country which is poor, not the whole country is and that area may be striving to lift themselves up. White people are not superior to blacks, homosexuals have nothing less than heterosexuals. Underneath the flesh we are all the same, yet we buy ourselves into the single story.
I would like to end this article with some food for thought Chimanda Adichie herself said: “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”
