Decolonisation is not about deleting or re-writing history, it's about telling stories from different perspectives or that have never been told. It is also about challenging the narrative of the storyteller. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk about the ‘Danger of a Single Story’ (Adichie, 2009) she speaks about her experience at an American university where her room-mate was confused when she learned that English was the official language of Nigeria and that Adichie's favorite music was that of Mariah Carey. The room-mate had a single story about Africa and its people – that of poverty, famine and war. It was unfathomable that Adichie, a middle-class Nigerian, would have so much in common with an average American student. In fact, Adichie grew up in a household with live-in domestic help. And just as her American room-mate knew a single story about Africans, so did Adichie have a single story about the boy who worked for her family. Adichie could see only his poverty until she visited his village and learned more about his life and family. If we hear only the single story, we do a disservice to the protagonist by flattening them to one dimension. And we rob ourselves of the richness and complexity of the full picture often blindly leading us to incorrect conclusions. As stewards of information, it is the role of librarians to encourage users to look beyond, even question, the veracity of that single story. Moreover, librarians should encourage users to write new stories.

A standard storytelling technique is to have a hero and a villain. In old western films, the hero normally wore a white hat and the villain the black hat. Familiar imagery? The simplicity of the story makes it easy for the audience to follow. The audience cheers on the guy in the white hat because the narrative is shaped to reinforce that he is the hero. The audience sees the story from that single perspective and, in the absence of any other evidence, believes it. And that is the danger of library collections if they tell stories from a single perspective. Even if the stories tell the students that they are not clever enough, not pretty enough, or paint them as villains – there is the danger that students will believe it. This negative self-image impacts students’ outcomes and lives.