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So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.

I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature.

Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage.

After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."

Now, I've laughed every time I've read this.

And one must admire the imagination of John Lok.

But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."

And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African.

Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity.

In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was.

The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man.

My characters drove cars. They were not starving.

Therefore they were not authentically African.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story.

A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S.

The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration.

And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans.

There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing.

I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.

I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant.

I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.

So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

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