Single stories

"We see the world, not as it is but as we are" Stephen Covey. The world is built in the principle of the known and unknown, meaning that daily affairs either come as knowing or not. Knowledge is the fundamental center of reality itself. Our identities are shaped by our beliefs and values. We cannot deny diversity in mankind but that should not be an opportunity to be deliberately uninformed. Structural ignorance denies people from acquiring knowledge due to control system. A society that is without knowledge is also a society without power because they do not know what to do in order to survive.

What I've gathered is that ignorance in society makes individuals turn a blind eye to understanding reality. As an African, I feel that we too need to tell our side of the story modern world. My work is not based on what people think but it is to reveal experiences told by African people across the world.

In one of my research about single stories, I came across the story of a Nigerian woman Chimamanda Adichie on YouTube. Chimamanda emphasis the role played by power in the economic and political world. In her university days, she went to the United States of America, and her roommate was shocked to see an African speaking English well, The roommate asked to listen to African tribal music, and to her surprise, there was international, music like Mariah Carey. Chimamanda was stuck that the American girl felt pity for her even before she knew her. The view of African people by the American-born girl was displayed as a patronizing well-known 'pity'. This evidence that her roommate had a single story of Africa a story of a catastrophe in this story there was no possibility of Africans being like her in any way. Single stories depend entirely on who tells them and how they are told and when they are told, according to her this is power. People tell stories about the world, and what you hear is not always what you get.

Single stories have ruined the picture that I have of Africa as being a continent of possibilities. We cannot turn a blind eye that Africa is the most underestimated continent in the World. The media itself displayed the wrong message about Africa as a continent of no possibilities. We saw periodicals with titles like "Save Africa" and a picture of a malnourished child. This image has not only contaminated the minds of people around the world including Africans and today the black child sees himself as not being enough.

African stories from this point of view seem to be so much deemed and very gloomy when being interpreted in other places like America. I feel that we should be authors of our own stories so that we can directly tell these untold and ununderstood raw stories in this notorious land of ours.