Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.
Biography
About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) is a Nigerian author whose fiction and essays have made her one of the most important voices in contemporary world literature and feminism. Born in Enugu, raised in Nsukka in the house once occupied by Chinua Achebe, she published her debut novel *Purple Hibiscus* (2003) to wide acclaim. Her second novel *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006), set during the Biafran War, won the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her TED talks — "The Danger of a Single Story" (2009) and "We Should All Be Feminists" (2012) — have been viewed tens of millions of times. Her essay "We Should All Be Feminists" was sampled by Beyoncé and distributed in Swedish schools as required reading. S.
National Book Critics Circle Award.
Key Themes
Quick Facts
- Born
- 1977
- Status
- Living
- Age
- 49 yrs
- Quotes
- 3 collected
Wisdom
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Famous Quotes
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.”
— We Should All Be Feminists (TEDxEuston), 2014
Adichie's TED talk — later sampled by Beyoncé and published as a standalone essay — identified the specific social training that socializes girls toward smallness: taking up less space, speaking less, wanting less. She connects this to low self-esteem and self-censorship in adult women. The talk has been translated into dozens of languages and distributed in Swedish schools as required reading.
“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
— The Danger of a Single Story (TED), 2009
In one of the most-watched TED talks in history, Adichie used her experience of Western audiences expecting only poverty-narrative African stories to articulate the danger of reducing people to a single identity. The problem is not falseness but incompleteness — a stereotype may contain a partial truth while omitting the fuller humanity that gives it meaning.
“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”
— The Danger of a Single Story (TED), 2009
Adichie here expands on her "single story" thesis to argue that narrative is a tool of power — it can strip humanity or restore it depending on who controls it. Colonial literature used stories to justify dispossession; postcolonial literature uses stories to reclaim personhood. She positions the author not as entertainer but as moral agent in how the world is represented.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) is a Nigerian author whose fiction and essays have made her one of the most important voices in contemporary world literature and feminism. Born in Enugu, raised in Nsukka in the house once occupied by Chinua Achebe, she published her debut novel *Purple Hibiscus* (2003) to wide acclaim. Her second novel *Half of a Yellow Sun* (2006), set during the Biafran War, won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her TED talks — "The Danger of a Single Story" (2009) and "We Should All Be Feminists" (2012) — have been viewed tens of millions of times. Her essay "We Should All Be Feminists" was sampled by Beyoncé and distributed in Swedish schools as required reading. Her novel *Americanah* (2013) won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lived b. 1977.
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