The Nigerian novelist and essayist whose Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, and whose talks 'The Danger of a Single Story' and 'We Should All Be Feminists,' carried Igbo and Nigerian life into the center of twenty-first-century world literature — a writer who insisted that Africans be granted the full complexity of their own stories, refusing the single story in both its colonial and its sentimental forms.
A young Nigerian student arrives at an American university and meets a roommate who is sorry for her before they have spoken. The roommate asks to hear her 'tribal music' and is puzzled to be handed a Mariah Carey tape. She assumes Africa means only poverty and catastrophe, because that is the only Africa she has ever been shown. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has told this story many times. From it she built a single idea that traveled around the world: that to know only one story about a people is to risk a dangerous and dishonest kind of pity.