People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made.
I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something.
All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor.
Their poverty was my single story of them.
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States.
I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me.
She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language.
She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.