In light of her observation that telling stories about other people means to exercise power, I am reading her 2013 novel Americanah as an attempt to correct the one-sided story about Africa. Probably the most prominent account of dehumanizing portrayals of Africans is Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, about which Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe writes that it is making Africa “a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality“. They were, in the words of traveler John Lok, “beasts who had no houses“ (Adichie 06:35- 07:00).
In 2009, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a memorable TED-Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story“, where she reminds her audience that, as early as the XVI century, travelers engaged in a rhetoric meant to legitimize imperialist interests by portraying Africans in a dehumanizing way. The tradition of telling stories about Africa has not been doing justice to the complexity of the continent.
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