In July 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED Talk about cultural ignorance. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist, nonfictional and short story writer. Her work and writing has been very well received among the public, and her effort to promote African literature is extremely recognized. Furthermore she talks about the importance of knowing the entire story of person before you categorize, judge or think less of them. She gives examples from her own life, where she in different situations has had the wrong impression of another human being due to the fact that she only had heard a single story. In addition to understanding the consequence of the single story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, declares that it robs people of their dignity, it makes recognition of our equal humanity difficult and emphasizes how people are different rather than how they are alike. The general purpose of the talk is to make narrow-minded people more open and to go against cultural ignorance. In addition she also manages to shed a more positive and nuanced light on Africa.
The sentence “a single story” is used several times throughout Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s talk, it is even called “the danger of a single story”. In this context the single story has different interpretations. It is used as a metaphor to shed light cultural ignorance in many forms, both generalization about Westerners, non-Westerners, poverty and so on. She gives numerous examples on “a single story” for instance she starts out by pointing out her own ignorance and the single stories that she believed in as a child. Example of this is that she believed as a child that all books were about foreigners and poor people. “So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.” (ll. 24-25); “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.” (ll. 34-36). Futhermore she gave examples of other peoples ignorance, like the ignorance she was met with by her roommate “My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way” (ll. 43-45). By “a single story” she points out the importance of knowing and being truly willing to discover other people to avoid cultural ignorance and not only take the single story as the entire truth. “That 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.” (ll. 109-110)
In the beginning of Adichie’s TED Talk she talks about her own experiences as a child coming from Nigeria, and how she for example went from only reading Western books, that made her believe “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.”(ll. 16 -17), to discovering African books. That small change in literature made her see things totally different, because she
read more than a single story. Her experiences and knowledge increases her credibility among the audience and make her qualified as spokesman on this specific topic. Due to her reliability the audience is more likely to pay attention and agree with her arguments.
Apart from appealing to her ethos, she also uses logos in form of her own experiences. She uses her experiences as examples to support her statements “the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about their charity work in “India, Africa and other countries.”(ll. 49-51), and she is thereby able to convince the audience by means of a reasonable and rational argumentation. Pathos doesn’t take an especially large part of her speech due to the fact that Adichie primarily has a neutral terminology not affected by emotions or feelings. On the other hand she combines her arguments with her personal story, which inevitably leads to a description of what she thought or felt “So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.” (l. 31). She continuously uses humor and irony in her speech, which guarantees the readers engagement all the way and ensures that the speech remains interesting. “I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho – (Laughter) – and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) […]” (ll. 77 – 79). By applying irony Adichie manages to insert critic in her speech, for example when she talks about Westerns and their cultural ignorance. “She asked if she could listen to what she called my “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.” (ll. 39-41).
Adichie engages and directly involves the audience by targeting rhetorical questions to the audience. “What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music?” (ll. 85 – 87). However Adichie uses in this specific quote, numerous rhetorical questions to elucidate the other side of the story, in order to point out that positive stories about Nigerians exist that focus on the good things that the majority of Nigerians actually take part of. To further engage the audience Adichie uses different methods for instance she uses accumulation to emphasize the meaning behind her key messages. By enumerating different meaningful points Adichie highlights her irony, emphasizes the particular context or sheds light on the main topic, cultural ignorance. “I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner” (ll. 53 – 56) and “A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling” (ll. 63 – 64).
In order for Adichie to explain cultural ignorance and how only knowing a single story, can define how you perceive other people, she makes several references to common known stories. For instance she uses “snow white and the seven dwarf”(ll. 7 – 8) as an example of a Western story. She also uses allusions to emphasize the fact that Western literature has been talking negatively about Africans, and Adichie believes that it is one of the main reasons that Western people think less of Africans.
“After referring to the black Africans as “beasts who have no houses,” he writes, “They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.”(ll. 59-60) and
“A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling5, are “half devil, half child.” […]” (ll. 63 – 64). Here are clear evidence of Western literature talking poorly of the Africans and as said by Adichie, this shows how a single story, may affect us to believe that it is the entire truth.
The issue of cultural ignorance is a frequently discussed topic because it involves and has severe consequences for so many people. In a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie it is pointed out that one of the main reason that cultural ignorance exists to this extend is a result of the stories that we are told, and the fact that we therefore take it for granted that it must be the truth, which in most of the cases is a simplification. She also points out that our preconceived ideas can come from everywhere, depending on what we read or chooses to listen to. Unfortunately cultural ignorance is a huge issue, which many people are affected by on a daily basis. By stereotyping other cultures and societies you put people in boxes instead of being open-minded, and actually finding out about their cultural perspective. 34.3 million people migrated to EU in 2015 , along with the 34.3 million people comes many different cultures. Western countries are becoming multicultural, along with the increase of migrants. In many cases, neither the host country nor the migrants know a lot about the others’ culture. In a situation like that, how is the migrant suppose to thrive and develop, if they are constantly but in a box as poor or as victims just because of our reluctance to learn about them.
An article that takes cultural ignorance up for discussion is “Stereotyping of Africans is everywhere, but Australians are particularly clueless” which was published on theguardian.com on Monday 7 st March 2016. It is written by Rebka Bayou, and it is about the cultural ignorance, that she has been met with in Australia. Just like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bayou has been met with the thoughts about a stereotype and prejudice opinions. They both have in common that they believe that the media and what people choose to read/see is what creates stereotypes “For me, the biggest issue is that people here think they have black Africans all figured out because they’ve seen a few episodes of Oprah and got front row tickets to Beyonce’s concer”. The most surprising is, that cultural ignorance still is going on, in the world today. With all of the migrants, travelling across the borders, you would think that cultures in general have been mixed so much that it wouldn’t be an issue anymore. But as Bayou mentions, there is no longer an excuse for not knowing “Is this not the digital age? What excuse do people have, in 2015, to be ignorant? I feel like the problem has switched from not being able to know, to choosing to not care.” According to both Bayou and Adichie, the way to end cultural ignorance is to be willing to look at things nuanced and both see and read different perspective on everything, so you don’t end up with only a single story.
Is seems very logical that it is a persons own free will that determines what to think about other people and cultures. However it is important to be aware of human psychology where research shows that we are unconsciously biased in our perception of the world. It is not deliberately wicked intentions to categorize other people but based on the fact that our human minds categorizes the world in order to process less information. This phenomena causes people to judge or rather prejudge our perception of others before actually taking the time to explore the differences. I firmly believe that education plays a central role in providing alternative perspectives. In order to prevent cultural ignorance the different educations could focus more on learning about other cultures and in stimulating natural curiosity. Bayou also points out that the media plays a significant role in telling more detailed and nuanced about people and not only reinforcing the established stereotypes. The best solutions however are probably to be exposed to different cultures by travelling.