[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-155540-en":3,"doc-seo-155540-105":30,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":90},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":27,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":28,"read_time":29},155540,24189269381491,"Bill Black","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/160000cf11732dd8392?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1788146458752108895",2,"Literature","The Danger of a Single Story - Talk","Personal narrative exploring how one-sided narratives shape identity, especially in childhood and cross-cultural encounters. The speaker recounts reading British and American children’s books in Nigeria, forming a belief that “books” require foreign characters and unfamiliar settings. Discovering African writers reframes literature to include her own reality. She also describes how a roommate’s simplistic views of Africa reduce people to pity and catastrophe, mirroring earlier assumptions about a village family.","Transcript  \nThe Danger of a Single Story  \nBy Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  \n00:00  \nI'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call \"the danger of the single story.\" I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.  \n00:27  \nI was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples,  \n00:52 (Laughter)  \n00:54  \nand they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.  \n00:58 (Laughter)  \n01:00  \nNow, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.  \n01:14  \nMy characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.  \n01:24 (Laughter)  \n01:25  \nAnd for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.  \n01:32  \nWhat this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in  \nwhich characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.  \n02:03  \nBut because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.  \n02:24  \nNow, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.  \n02:47  \nI 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  \nnorm, 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.  \n03:31  \nThen 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 was 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.  \n04:01  \nYears 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 ask","cbCaihY0LPFBU8CA","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaihY0LPFBU8CA","pdf",64704,1,8,"English","en",105,"# The danger of a single story\n## Early reading and writing\n## Discovery of African books\n## The “single story” of a village family\n## A single story of Africa in the U.S.","[{\"question\":\"Why does the speaker call it “the danger of a single story”?\",\"answer\":\"Because one-sided narratives can make people feel that certain identities or experiences do not belong in stories. Over time, this limits understanding and reduces complex human realities to stereotypes.\"},{\"question\":\"How did reading British and American children’s books influence the speaker?\",\"answer\":\"It led her to believe that characters in books must be foreign and that the worlds she read about were the ones she could not personally identify with. Her own environment in Nigeria did not appear in what she read.\"},{\"question\":\"What changed after the speaker discovered African writers?\",\"answer\":\"She experienced a mental shift in how she perceived literature, realizing that people like her could exist in books and that she could write about what she recognized.\"}]","The Danger of a Single Story - Talk | PDF",1787914340,12,{"code":4,"msg":31,"data":32},"ok",{"site_id":24,"language":23,"slug":33,"title":13,"keywords":34,"description":14,"schema_data":35,"social_meta":85,"head_meta":87,"extra_data":89,"updated_unix":28},"the-danger-of-a-single-story-talk","",{"@graph":36,"@context":84},[37,53,67],{"@type":38,"itemListElement":39},"BreadcrumbList",[40,44,47,50],{"item":41,"name":42,"@type":43,"position":20},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":45,"name":46,"@type":43,"position":11},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",{"item":48,"name":12,"@type":43,"position":49},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":51,"name":13,"@type":43,"position":52},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/the-danger-of-a-single-story-talk/155540/",4,{"url":51,"name":13,"@type":54,"author":55,"headline":13,"publisher":57,"fileFormat":60,"inLanguage":23,"description":14,"dateModified":61,"datePublished":61,"encodingFormat":60,"isAccessibleForFree":62,"interactionStatistic":63},"DigitalDocument",{"name":9,"@type":56},"Person",{"url":41,"name":58,"@type":59},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-08-28",true,{"@type":64,"interactionType":65,"userInteractionCount":4},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":66},"ViewAction",{"@type":68,"mainEntity":69},"FAQPage",[70,76,80],{"name":71,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":73},"Why does the speaker call it “the danger of a single story”?","Question",{"text":74,"@type":75},"Because one-sided narratives can make people feel that certain identities or experiences do not belong in stories. Over time, this limits understanding and reduces complex human realities to stereotypes.","Answer",{"name":77,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":78},"How did reading British and American children’s books influence the speaker?",{"text":79,"@type":75},"It led her to believe that characters in books must be foreign and that the worlds she read about were the ones she could not personally identify with. Her own environment in Nigeria did not appear in what she read.",{"name":81,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":82},"What changed after the speaker discovered African writers?",{"text":83,"@type":75},"She experienced a mental shift in how she perceived literature, realizing that people like her could exist in books and that she could write about what she recognized.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":51,"og:type":86,"og:title":13,"og:site_name":58,"og:description":14},"article",{"robots":88,"canonical":51},"index,follow",{"doc_id":7,"site_id":24},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":91},[92,96,99,103,108,113,118,122,127,130,134],{"id":20,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":93,"show_sort_weight":94,"slug":95},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":11,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":12,"show_sort_weight":97,"slug":98},80,"literature",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":100,"show_sort_weight":101,"slug":102},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":104,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":105,"show_sort_weight":106,"slug":107},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":109,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":110,"show_sort_weight":111,"slug":112},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":114,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":115,"show_sort_weight":116,"slug":117},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":21,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":119,"show_sort_weight":120,"slug":121},"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":123,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":124,"show_sort_weight":125,"slug":126},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":125,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":128,"show_sort_weight":125,"slug":129},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":131,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":132,"show_sort_weight":131,"slug":133},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":135,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":46,"category_name":136,"show_sort_weight":104,"slug":137},19,"General","general"]