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Ulenna Gonzales
Ulenna Gonzales

Shuv Rana Bhat

Introductory Composition: Writing as Inquiry 080

October 23, 2023

Rhetorical Analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ted Talk: “The Danger of a Single Story”

Claim

We have all had a time in our lives where we have only heard one side of the story

causing us to judge the situation prematurely. We can all think of a time when we have

stereotyped someone else based on a one-sided story that we have seen or heard causing us to

create a misconception about certain individuals. In this Ted Talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

goes in-depth about the dangers of a one-sided story and how it can be fixed.

Rhetorical context

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer and author who comes from a middle-

class Nigerian family. She is the daughter of a professor and administrator. Her fame grew with

her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. She has written novels and short stories that survey

intersectionality (Leubering, 2023). A few of her most famous works include Purple Hibiscus,

Half of a Yellow Sun, and We Should All Be Feminists. Chimamanda is the second oldest child in

her family and is from Nsukka Nigeria.

According to the TED website, the audience for TED Talks includes CEOs,

entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, designers, and intellectuals who must apply to be in attendance.

The audience is full of people who have most likely made assumptions about others and may
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lack one-sided assumptions about themselves. Misconceptions can be made about other

individuals based on only what others see instead of the truth. For the audience to find

persuasion in what Mrs. Adichie is saying, the audience would need to have an open mind so that

they can accept the new information that they will get from her. The audience would also have to

think beyond what they were taught or what they believed prior to listening to the message. If the

audience is not able to do those two things, they will not understand, and the message will fly

right over their heads.

Ethos

As stated previously, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer who received

international fame after her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Chimamanda did not start out as

an author. In the 1990s in her home country, she was studying medicine. In 1997 she moved to

the United States and attended Eastern Connecticut University where she would double major in

communication and political science. After her undergraduate, she received her master’s degree

in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and studied African History at Yale University

(Leubering, 2023). One of Adichie’s earliest works was a play For Love of Biafra which

surveyed the war of the late 1960s between Nigeria and its anarchist Biafra republic. After her

first project, she wrote several short stories regarding the conflict of Nigeria and Biafra. Her first

novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 2005 for Best First Book

(Africa) and the 2005s Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (Overall). As stated

previously, Half of a Yellow Sun was Adichie’s second novel. It was an international best seller,

and it won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and won “Best of the Best” Baileys

Women’s Prize for Fiction and Adichie was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in

2008.
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The list of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s releases and awards keeps going on. She is a

very educated woman and author, and her achievements speak for themselves. Adichie seems to

understand opposing views that she speaks about in the TED talk because she recognizes that at

one point, she had a one-sided story of someone else. In the TED talk, she tells the story about

her family’s house boy, Fide.

Logos

The claim of the Chimamanda is that there is a danger to a single-sided story. A single-

sided story only gets one point of view which she goes on to describe and discuss. The first

example that we are given in the video comes from Chimamanda’s own personal perspective. At

the age of four Chimamanda began reading books that were primarily British and American

books. At the age of seven Chimamanda became a writer. The characters that she wrote about

heavily resembled the characters that she read about early on. “All my characters were white and

blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked about the weather, how

lovely it was that the sun had come out” (Adichie, 00:00:56 – 00:01:10). Although none of the

characters she wrote about resembled herself or the people she wrote about, she still did not

believe that people that looked like her existed in literature because none of the characters in the

books she read looked like her. Reading books with African authors showed her that books are

not limited to one’s imagination.

Chimamanda gives another example of a one-sided story. As a child of a middle-class

Nigerian family, she had live-in domestic help that came from other rural villages. At 8 years old

they got a new house boy, Fide. Adichie’s mother told her that Fide was very poor. Her family

sent Fide with food and second-hand clothes. When they went to visit Fide’s village his mother

showed Adichie’s family the woven basket that Fide’s brother made. Adichie said that she did not
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think anyone in Fide’s family could make anything. She only saw poverty when she thought of

Fide. Since he was poor, she did not realize that it was possible for Fide or his family to have any

fun or hobbies or anything that was the same as middle-class children (Adichie, 00:03:08 –

00:04:15). These are a few examples are Adichie’s personal reasons to support her claim. She

had first-hand experience of the danger of a single story. Adichie’s use of evidence is effective

because not only is she a credible source, but her evidence is her own that she has acknowledged.

Pathos

Since Chimamanda used her own personal experiences to support her reasonings it

resonated with the audience more instead of spitting facts at them. The example with Fide shows

that she was able to acknowledge misconceptions that she had made about him and his family.

That speaks more volumes to the audience and helps support the fact that even though they may

have made judgments or misconceptions about individuals they can acknowledge it and change

the way they view others and not jump to conclusions so easily. This way it is easier to for the

audience to imagine her perspective and for them to think about their own personal lives.

Throughout the video, the audience is very calm because Chimamanda is a very calm speaker

without being monotone. She is not loud or angry to arouse the audience in a negative way.

There is slight laughter in the audience when she references American Psycho, gives her

misconceptions about her book characters, and talks about a Mariah Carey album being her

“tribal music.”

Rhetorical Strategies

One example of rhetorical strategies could be the intimate humor that Chimamanda uses

in one of her stories about her roommate asking if she could listen to Chimamanda’s “tribal

music” (Adichie 00:04:21- 00:05:00). Adichie then goes on to parallel American Psycho, “It was
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such a shame that all young Americans were serial killers” in response to a student who assumed

that all Nigerian men are physical abusers (00:10:57 – 00:11:18).

Semiotic resources

The mode that is used the most throughout the video is verbal. Aural because the audience is

listening to the spoken language of the speaker and verbal because once again the speaker is

presenting a verbal message. In other TED talks the audience may see PowerPoint that may even

have sound effects would count towards a visual mode. The video shows that Adichie is relaxed

and content. She does not gesture throughout the video or give any significance to a spatial

mode. The lighting within is the video is effective because there is a bright spotlight on the

speaker which gives direction to the audience for where they should be attentive.

Overall persuasiveness of the argument

The feature that contributed most to the danger of a single-story argument is that she used her

own personal experiences to give significance to the claim. Her perspective is persuasive because

it shows the audience that it is easy to make misconceptions and it is also easy for the audience

to acknowledge those misconceptions. The message of the speaker may be received differently if

the audience is not open to other perspectives or opinions. Instead, they may have taken offense.

One thing that I will remember from this video is Fide because Chimamanda was such a young

girl when she realized that she was only viewing Fide and his family as poor. When she first

introduced Fide as a houseboy, my imagination immediately saw him as poor.

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Works Cited

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozie, director. Youtube Video. YouTube, YouTube, 7 Oct. 2009,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg. Accessed 30 Oct. 2023.

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 15

Sept. 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chimamanda-Ngozi-Adichie

“Conferences.” TED, www.ted.com/about/conferences#:~:text=Attendance%20at%20TED%20is

%20by,remarkable%20people%20across%20many%20fields. Accessed 30 Oct. 2023.
https://www.ted.com/about/conferences#:~:text=Attendance%20at%20TED%20is
%20by,remarkable%20people%20across%20many%20fields.