Life & Wisdom Quote by Chinua Achebe

Stereotypes are a lazy technology of certainty: they let you stop thinking and start labeling. Achebe isn’t merely scolding prejudice here; he’s dissecting its operating system. “Simplify” sounds innocent, even practical, until he shows the cost of that convenience: the erasure of “all this great diversity,” the messy, human reality that refuses to sit still. His phrasing mimics the mental shrug stereotypes provide - “it’s this or maybe that” - the exhausting work of staying open to complexity. Then comes the bait-and-switch: you trade that effort for “one large statement,” a blunt instrument that feels like knowledge but functions as control.

The subtext is about power as much as perception. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, the stereotype isn’t just a misunderstanding; it’s an administrative tool. If you can compress a people into a single story, you can justify how they’re treated - governed, “civilized,” ignored, or exploited. Achebe, whose fiction challenged Western narratives about Africa, is pointing to the way simplification masquerades as common sense. The “whole idea” suggests design, not accident: stereotypes are built to travel easily, to be repeated, to resist correction.

What makes the line work is its plainness. Achebe avoids moral grandstanding and instead exposes the mechanism: complexity requires attention; attention requires respect; disrespect prefers the shortcut. That final “it is this” lands like a stamp on paper - definitive, official, and dangerously wrong.