Until about 15 minutes into her reading, I had not the foggiest idea what the title was all about; the danger of a single story was how she titled it and it was how the young Nigerian author rode her way to global prominence.Chimamanda Adichie chose a Western audience, used a Western diction, touted a western charm and poise to hold captive her London audience, (intra and extramural) as she paced eloquently through her lines.She was only half way through. I had already started to feel like I was having an epiphany, not dissimilar to Sauls; instantaneously morphing in to a Paul.Scales fell from my eyes and ever since, I have come to love hating the single story, even more passionately than I had ever done.It dawned on me with a gutting force, what ravages single stories had done to mankind and still seem to be doing.Single stories, told only in one direction, for one direction by one direction, and told by foreign and manipulative venture capitalists and power vultures killed pre-independence Africa.Chimamanda read out its dangers to the very crowd that matters, in non-toxicological but persuasive doses; so persuasive, the world has never stopped wanting more and more of her ever since.The colonial time was ubiquitously replete with the powers of the day reducing the stories of national activists to single stories.Stories nefariously or self-servingly crafted to forge on their victims, cross heavy enough to railroad them into untimely Golgothas.Time and again, local or international activists who step on power bases strewn in the path of their various causes, run the risk of having their stories reduced to single ones. Reduced to the point of de-championing their credibilities and derailing them into pariah status, locked into ignominous social or psycho-social quarantines.Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Samora Machel and the like are a few of the lucky ones who narrowly escaped the scourge of single stories.But only narrowly!But for sheer luck, Fidel Castro, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mahatma Ghandi and these genre of people might have had their names in same pidgeon holes as those of Osama bin Ladens, Gaddafis, Saddam Husseins etc, if providence rather than brute force hadnt intervened.In fact, brute force sought to intervene in Castros instance, but providence (I would have to say) stood in the path of the Bay of Pigs and so allowed Fidel live long enough to be part of his own biography and so escape the painful scourge of the single story; stories that would have portrayed him a brutal dictator, out to exploit his people and destabilise the world.And there would have been neither shortage of believers nor even of in- house co-authors to such stories.For Martin or Malcolm, while the prologue might have been read or even written by wielders of institutional brute force, thankfully, providence, not the brutish, won the role to write and read the epilogue.The danger of a single story is the ladder, Chimamanda climbed into dizzying heights and lofty repute but ironically the same ladder threatens to de-escalate the rest of us into disrepute by our vulnerabilities to the very dangers to which she sought to alert us.I refuse single stories about anybody because none ever has a story that is single, be the name Gaddafi, or Saddam or Osama or Churchill or Hitler or Bonaparte or X or Y or ZIf anybody tells you a single story, good or bad, about BJF, this writer, or your own neighbour, believe it, only to your own peril or your own embarrassment.None, big or small, comes without a duality to his or her true story and balance is the least, one should pursue.Bar the balance, propaganda is king and a mischievous, despotic one at that.My advice remains Chimamandas: Beware of single stories.Always insist on the other segment to the story and then get an unweighted scale like you would an unloaded dice to do the counter-poising, taking care to check where the arrow comes to rest its tip.Its another way of heeding the philosophers caution when he says, it is just as difficult in nature to find something entirely good as it is to find one entirely bad.Single story dishes out entirely bad, or rarely, entirely good narratives, stripped of the necessary balance and therefore of desirability.Like Chimamanda, Africa and her likes will much sooner ride to fame if single stories dont pester resolves, poison minds or paralyse strides.Its high time the albatross was slaughtered.Fadipe is the Director, Justin Fadipe Hospital in the Commonwealth of Dominica, West Indies. He can be reached at fadipeb@cwdom.dm
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