	Such is the Western perception of Africa, as Adichie perceives it. But she is also in a position to do something about it, and a privileged one at that: Adichie is certainly having a moment in the Western literary limelight.
These two means of popularization, an American pop star and an American newspaper, also highlight her largely Western audience. 
Both Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah satisfy each of those points, with the exception that Half of a Yellow Sun’s ending is arguably quite grim. Both novels were also primarily received in the West, and conceived for an at least largely Western market. Adichie’s Western context helps to explain her preoccupation with Western stereotypes of Africa. But in her TED talk, she gives an even more compelling reason and, essentially, explains her novelistic philosophy. In the talk, she tells the story of her roommate at the American university she attended. 
Of course, this is remarkably similar to the perception of Africa shared by many Americans Ifemelu meets. 
And that is the heart of Adichie’s philosophy—that the “authentically African” does not exist at all in the way that Westerners believe it does. She seeks to challenge this intellectual fixity by telling new stories that do not reinforce the old ones but provide new African narratives, such that Africa can be understood as a nuanced continent.  Certainly many of the horrible things believed about Africa are true, that some areas are dangerous or violent, that some people starve and die of diseases. 
Adichie is providing alternative narratives for her Western audience, providing them with the means to understand Africa as a place of many stories, not just one.
	Specifically, Adichie’s fiction diverges from this typical African story in a number of ways. Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay “How to Write About Africa” delineates this story even more explicitly than Adichie does in her novels, and is a useful guide for evaluating Adichie’s difference. 
Obviously, both Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun are replete with all three things. In fact, Adichie focuses most of all on the Nigerian domestic scene; in a way, both novels are love stories, and Americanah straightforwardly so. In addition, a great number of her characters actually are African intellectuals, or the children of African intellectuals, and the two main characters of Americanah are, while they are of appropriate age, school-going African children not suffering from any of the three diseases Wainaina mentions. Even in Half of a Yellow Sun in which death and suffering and disease become commonplace, this is approached as exceptional, not as the norm, and from a human rather than anthropological perspective. 
In neither book is this Adichie’s Nigeria. Adichie’s Nigeria is always troubled but, even during the Biafran War in Half of a Yellow Sun, never doomed. What doomed country could give birth to such characters as Olanna and Kainene and Odenigbo? To Ifemelu who decides to return after years in America, and to Obinze who, once he has the money to go, decides to stay? There are good, smart people in Nigeria, living lives as vibrant and complicated as any American life. These lives are Adichie’s contribution to the perception of Africa. They are alternate paths; they are bright new stories.
