When in 2009 renowned novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, gave her maiden TED talk, aptly titled, “The Danger of a Single Story”, she was coming from the all too familiar backdrop of the fact that Western narrative of other countries and cultures shape the global perception of these other countries (usually Third World Countries). Thus, she warned the world of the danger of believing just one side of a story and not looking for other sides, other angles. This creates the danger of inappropriate, and mostly unfair, stereotypes.

Adichie would understand the adverse effect of stereotypes created as a result of years of “single stories” influencing the global consciousness. After all, She is from Nigeria; a country that has been perennially maligned and described in the worse adjectives ever. Ask a foreigner, no matter where they are from, to tell you two things about Nigeria, and 8 out of 10 times, you’d get: "419 scammers and Boko Haram". It was so bad that sometime in 2009, a Nigerians-in-Diaspora group had to start a campaign, asking Nigerians to post 100 positive things about Nigeria on social media platforms “so that the next time someone googles Nigeria, the search results would have a little of positives.” And it’s not just Nigeria. The whole continent of Africa is perceived in the global arena as devastating, helpless, badly governed, diseased, starved, hopeless, and bleak; everything dark, negative, and dependent. To the rest of the world, especially the First world countries, Africa is like that irresponsible emancipated relative you have to keep supporting all your life, to your chagrin and irritation.

This world-view of Africa did not just come out of nowhere. It became engraved in the global sphere through a myriad of events, circumstances, emanating from politics, sociology, and history. But, most importantly, from “single stories” told by non-Africans (read: Americans and Europeans) for many ages; even before the African could decipher what a pen and paper is, or the rudiments of mass communication. They already painted the continent the sun shines the brightest, as the dark continent in the global thought pool. This narrative sealed the fate of Africa and Africans as always helpless, hopeless, and needy; not minding the fact that some of the early African civilisations (like the Ethiopians, Egyptians, Bini kingdom, etc.) were self-sustaining and majestic.

This is not to say that the African continent is not all these they say it is; but, this is an argument to say that the African continent, like every other entity in nature, has a good and bad side. So, why the proliferation of just the bad sides in the global consciousness? Why can’t African countries be, like India or Brazil, a territory of rich culture and human acumen as well as a territory plagued with leadership problems?

In the words of Adichie,“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.” She further asserted that, “Of course, Africa is a continent, full of catastrophes…But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them”. African scholars and thinkers have always found this lopsided representation of Africa in the popular media as grossly biased and imperialist. In their paper, titled ‘The impact of International Broadcasting On Africa’, published under the Developing Countries Studies in the April 2014 issue of the IISTE journal, Asekun-Olarinmoye et al, cites Makunike (2011) as stating about the global media portrayal of Africa as; “we hear of famines and coups but not the rejuvenation of the cities and the cultural vitality of its village life; about oppression and massacres but not education, self-help and political development; about poaching and habitat destruction, but not on-going action or efforts at conservation, re-forestation and environmental awareness.” The effect of this is that Africans are judged guilty until proven innocent; their collective human dignity reduced to sub-zero. Other world citizens instinctively treat all Africans as inferior and brainless - a liability rather than an asset in global development and sustainability.

In her TED talk, Adichie, speaking about her American roommate in the University when she moved to Philadelphia to study at 19, intimated that; “…What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronising, well-meaning pity. 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, no possibility of a connection as human equals…So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. 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. I would see Africans in the same way…”

The average American or European cannot see Africa and Africans as anything different from these negative portrayals; even when they visit Africa. They come with this condescending air and entitlement. Their idea of Africa does not include: healthy children, educated minds, self-sustaining enterprises inventors, large business moguls, etc. n the words of Makunike (2011) as quoted in Asekun-Olarinmoye et al 2014 paper, “…in the United States of America for instance, for listeners or viewers to be interested in news out of Africa, it must be negative; conform to the traditional stereotype in its spotlight on grotesque and sensational events; it must show misery and woe, corruption, mismanagement, starvation, primitive surroundings and in the case of Somalia, chaos and outright anarchy.” Because of the immense influence of years and years of the media of World powers of Europe and America depicting Africa and Africans in the “single story” of catastrophe and helplessness, it is very difficult for the non-Africans to be interested in any positivity coming from the continent; because that to him, would be un-African. Like Adichie herself noted, after the publication of her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, her American professor complained that the novel was not “authentically African” because “[the] characters were too much like him, an educated and middle class man…[they] drove cars. They were not starving…”

How do we, the new age Africans - illustrious, ambitious and extremely intelligent - change this centuries-old entrenched worldview? How do we announce our ‘other stories’ to the world and ensure we get the respect and dignity we deserve? How do we change the world from viewing us first, as less human; with less intellectual capability and enterprise than they are? How do we tell them about laughing children, self-sufficient households, a thriving middle class, rising economic power?

The answer is right in our faces – Telling our stories, ourselves! Creating - as the late Chinua Achebe put it – “a balance of stories”.

To do this end, the nouveau African cannot sit in his/her corner of the world and whine about how the Western media propagate the misconceptions of Africa with “single stories”; the new African would have to contribute his/her voice to the global discourse on, and about Africa. They (Western media) might have the power and influence and use “this ability”, as Ms Adichie put it, “not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly””. But the African has a unique form of power too – Authenticity! The African is the one who experiences these things, it is their story. Unlike the European explorers and historians, who were outsiders and aliens to the African heritage and culture, the African can tell the African story as an active participant; an eye-witness.

To this end, there’s a new movement of African novelists, writers, broadcasters,and filmmakers, both within the continent and in diaspora, determined to tell the other side to the African story prevalent in the global sphere.

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