Nkali: The Danger of "Power" in Adichie's Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's phenomenal 2009 TED Talk, "The Danger of A Single Story," is just simply that: phenomenal. With over seven million views on TED website alone it represents one of TED's most popular talks. 

Every now and then friends and acquaintances from around the world watch the video and, knowing my passion for Africa, send me a link, wondering if I have seen the video and what's my take on it. My response is always, "amazing," "phenomenal." And then I'm prompted to watch the video again, relieving the joy of having a sister tell her African story with pride and joy in her Africanness.

As I watched the video the umpteenth time this morning, I was struck anew by Adichie's insightful location of power at the root of telling a single story. She emphasizes that "it's impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power." Using nkali, an Igbo noun that loosely translates as "to be greater than another" to illustrate this power structure, Adichie brilliantly points out, "power is the ability not just to tell a single story of a person, but to make it the definitive story about that person."

Well, "like economic and political words," Adichie rightly argues, "stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when, and how many stories are told are really dependent on power." And, I will add, when a people is represented in a particular way over and over again, they inevitably become that representation in the eyes and minds of the audience.

That reminded me of twentieth century French philosopher Michel Foucault's attribution of meaning-construction to discourse, a process determined by a knowledge-power dynamics.  According to Foucault (1972: 216), "the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures..." By that, Foucault implies that there are multiple explanations to every reality in the world; however, few of these predominate. But whichever explanation that carries the day, often with institutional and political support, becomes "knowledge," and therefore the dominant and controlling "truth."

Now, therein lies the danger of the single story that Adichie bemoans. 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." The often unacknowledged consequence of that is that such a single story continues to rob Africa of its history, identity, and dignity.