If the Olinka are willing to make small social allowances for Olivia, though, the code is not so elastic concerning one of their own young women — Tashi, Olivia's best friend. The Olinka do not want Tashi to be exposed to the idea that perhaps she too might someday be more than a mere wife, even the wife of a chief. Nettie also wonders if Tashi should be exposed to the idea that women have worth; "Tashi," she says, "knows she is learning a way of life she will never live." Tashi's parents cling to their Olinka tradition because of their ethnocentrism — that is, the attitude that one's group is superior to another group. A daughter who is a misfit, harboring unnatural, "progressive" ideas, can never be acceptable to them. They will never be despotic toward Nettie, whom they judge to be inferior because she is an older, mature, unwed woman, and an outsider. But toward their own people, the Olinka's ethnocentrism is so complete that it makes them not only want to keep Tashi from Nettie's house, but it compels them to want to change Olivia's values. They hope to teach young Olivia "what women are for."
Nettie compares the Olinka's ethnocentrism to that of white Southerners:
I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything is done for them.
Just as the slave traders arrived many years before and robbed Africa of its people, the roadbuilders now rob the Africans of their homes and lands. The Olinka did not realize that the road was going to run through their village. They are symbolically blind to progress that they cannot halt. In Letter 64, they befriended the roadbuilders, who were their distant cousins. Much like the time when blacks sold their brothers into bondage to the white man, the roadbuilders are again executing the will of ruling whites.
