Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is keenly, uncomfortably aware of the misconceptions the West has of Africa, and while these misunderstandings have never been the primary focus of her art, she still takes pains to set them down in her novels, in order to dissect and, one assumes, refute them. Fortunately, Adichie’s recent success and her relative prominence in the Western literary community gives her an unusual amount of power to bring attention to the issues she finds compelling, and uses her position to add more layers to what she calls the “single story” of Africa. She accomplishes this literally through her novels, in which she constructs a sophisticated, multidimensional Nigeria filled with sophisticated, multidimensional people who differ drastically from the Western stereotype of the starving African in desperate need of Western aid. In her most recent novels Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie includes endless examples of the complicated, contradictory stereotypes of Africa, particularly through Ifemelu’s experiences in America and through the character Richard, respectively, and together these works exemplify Adichie’s attempts to provide the West with multiple stories of Africa.
	In her novels, Adichie spends time clearly demonstrating instance after instance of these Western stereotypes, in order to emphasize the contrast between these incomplete pictures and the worlds of the novels themselves. Additionally, she has to know and name the monster she is fighting in order to cut it down most effectively. Americanah in particular is a goldmine of racist and colonialist tropes projected onto Africa and its inhabitants by the (often well-meaning) Americans Ifemelu falls in with. In the novel, Adichie presents five main facets of Western ignorance, each one another common but incomplete picture of Africa. First, and earliest in the novel, Adichie confronts the plain racism that Africans experience in the West. This facet is more similar to racism against African Americans than to any specifically African stereotypes, but is just as invidious and harmful. 
Uju’s natural hair would be perceived as a mark of unruliness or rebellion, both unacceptable traits in a black woman—even a black African woman—to the white establishment. Adichie’s establishment of how African women are subject to the same racism is an important part of the African “story” in white America: that, just as African-Americans are considered inferior, the same broken logic applies to all African people; Africans are also somehow “less.” The second facet of the stereotype as conveyed by Adichie is slightly subtler but not much more so: the idea of Africa as constantly war-torn—as first and foremost a continent of violence. When Ifemelu, not long in America, goes to an apartment for a grim home-care job, the woman whose father lives there notices Ifemelu’s accent and asks where she is from.  
Of course there is not. But when the woman hears the name of any African country, she immediately associates it with violence, so much so that it is her first question. Such a question in any case is extremely tactless, but considering Nigeria’s state of peace is even more so, as it betrays the woman’s perception of Africa as a bloody and warlike place. While not malicious, the woman’s ignorance is damaging. But, as Adichie portrays it, this lack of knowledge in some segments of the American population is only a supplement to those who enact the third and aspect of the Western story of Africa, the well-meaning white liberal perception of Africa as a poor helpless disaster of a continent in desperate need of foreign humanitarian aid. This third aspect is most present in Americanah, as the majority of people Ifemelu is surrounded with are privileged white liberals. 
