Summary

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie starts her TED talk “The danger of a single story” by presenting some of her personal stories. She describes how reading British and American literature as a child led her to believe that all the characters in literature had to be foreigners. However, her perspective shifted when she started reading African writers who wrote about characters she could identify with.

Adichie talks about how her parents hired a boy named Fide from a poor family as a domestic helper. Her perception about Fide and his family was influenced by her idea of poverty, and so she was shocked when she visited them and saw that they were hardworking, creative people. Similarly, when Adichie went to university in the United States, she realised that her roommate’s perc...