You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Audio.

This talk features novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, recorded live at TED Global 2009.

We're featuring this talk today as part of a special selection themed around journeys.

I'm a storyteller, and I would like to tell you a few personal stories about

what I like to call the danger of the single story. I grew up on a university campus

in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think

four is probably close to

the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write at about the age of seven, stories in pencil

with crayon illustrations that my

poor mother was obligated to read. I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading.

All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples.

And they talked a lot about the weather.

How lovely it was that the sun had come out.

Now, this, despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria,

had never been outside Nigeria.

We didn't have snow.

We ate mangoes.

And we never talked about the weather because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer

because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer.

Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.

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