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.

This line comes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s widely viewed TEDGlobal talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” delivered in 2009. In the talk, Adichie reflects on her childhood reading of British and American books in Nigeria, her early assumptions about what stories “should” look like, and later experiences in the United States where others held reductive ideas about Africa. She also recounts how, as a young person, she formed her own “single story” about her family’s houseboy. The quote crystallizes her argument that power, representation, and repetition can narrow complex peoples and places into one dominant narrative.

Adichie argues that stereotypes often persist not because they are wholly false, but because they are partial truths elevated into total explanations. A “single story” selects one angle—poverty, violence, exoticism, backwardness, even heroism—and repeats it until it crowds out other realities. The harm is epistemic and ethical: it limits what we can know about others and what we can imagine for them, flattening individuality and agency. The quote also implies a remedy: multiplying stories—through literature, journalism, education, and listening—restores complexity and dignity by showing that no person or culture can be adequately contained by one narrative.

1) “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
2) “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
3) “They make one story become the only story.”