THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY - Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice - and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Adichie comments on the pitfalls of a monotholitic image of Africa as a site of catastrophe: she cautions that limiting ourselves to a 'single story' flattens experience and creates stereotypes. Western media often treats the African continent as a malignant appendage, rather than as an integral systemic part of the earth and all its natural functions in accordance with universal laws. With a stroke of a journalist's pen, the African, her continent and her descendants, are pejoratively reduced to nothing: a bastion of disease, savagery, animism, pestilence, war, famine, despotism, primitivism, poverty, and ubiquitous images of children, flies in their food and faces, their stomachs distended.
Africa's image in the Western media is not a self-portrait. It is not a "what you see is what you get". As media-conditioning shapes moulds and monopolizes those images, references to Africa are received sometimes with disdain and contempt. Even African descendants, who have virtually no cultural competence, actually contribute to how Africa is projected globally. Ashamed of their "heritage and historical past", they side with media characterizations projected through stories, newspapers, and propaganda campaigns. This attitude, while supremely disturbing, also pervades the psyche, pre-empts behaviors, infers worthlessness, disregards African humanity, and devalues the mind. Therein one falls victim to Adichie's criticism of not questioning the single story of Africa. Failing to provide an alternative story in itself surrenders Africa to the prescribed identity as a "Shackled Continent" (Robert Guest).
To apply this homogenous view to such a diverse and heterogeneous group of people representing unimaginable multicultural, poly-ethnic, polyreligious, multipolitical, and megaeconomic groups is shocking. It is a gross injustice to a Continent which birthed the first human civilization; harbours 50% of the worlds precious metals; has 1/6th of the world population, speaking over 2000 languages. Little is said about Africa's strategic importance to industrialized nations; her indispensability and relevance to world development, global technology, and the wealth of nations, derived from involuntary African largesse are not acclaimed in the media.
The time has come to re-brand Africa; to tell another story.
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