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Ulasi 2018.pptx

Abstract

Ulasi’s Many Thing You no Understand (1970), set in the 1930s, fills the chronological gap left by Achebe’s trilogy and centres around a case of head-hunting following the local chief’s death, with two British officers on the case, the younger one very concerned, the other one, with a longer experience of Nigeria, very reluctant. The novel opposes two very different ways of dealing with the locals: the young Assistant District Officer Macintosh, fixed on high moral grounds, is bent on showing a better way to the people; as for the District Officer Mason, with fifteen years of rural life in Nigeria and a diet of pepper soup, “rice and stew and egusi soup [that] hasn’t affected [him] (MTNU 163), he prefers just letting people go on with their way of life and trying not to interfere, while studying them. One interesting point highlighted in that novel is that knowing the other’s language can change a situation.