Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) is a Nigerian writer. She is Igbo. She has been called "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors that is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature".
Her Ted Talk about the importance of stories is powerfully
compelling and humbling.
Quotes from Adichie's Ted Talk:
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, 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.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Show a people as one thing — as only one thing — over and over again, and that is what they become.