‘Dead Men’s Path’ is a short story by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. First published in 1953, the story features a culture-clash that becomes violent when Obi, the new headmaster, starts interfering with the traditional beliefs of the native people.
Dead Men’s Path SUMMARY
It is January 1949 and Michael Obi is appointed headmaster of the Ndume Central School. This early appointment is a happy surprise for Obi and the ‘Mission authorities’ have picked the ‘young and energetic’ Obi to run this unprogressive school. Obi has had a sound secondary education and sees the narrow ideas and beliefs of the old and the less educated with scorn, and he is also quite outspoken.
Obi’s wife Nancy has her own plans pertaining to Obi’s recent promotion; she wants to have beautiful gardens around the school, and she wants everything to be ‘modern’ and ‘delightful’. She wants to be under the spotlight thanks to the rank of her husband and she wants to be a trend-setter in everything. However, her hopes and plans are shattered when Obi informs her that the other teachers are unmarried, and there are no wives here to be jealous of her. Nancy is upset but this fact delights Obi because he thinks that the unmarried teachers would be able to devote more time and energy to the school. By and by, Nancy’s gloom regarding this matter disappears.
Here the reader gets a description of the appearance of Obi; he is a stoop-shouldered, frail man who nevertheless has ‘sudden bursts of physical energy’. He also looks older than his age but on the whole, he is not unhandsome. He shares with Nancy his thoughts that they have now got a ‘grand opportunity’ to show people how a school should be run.
Ndume School is absolutely backward. Obi has two aims here: to ensure a high standard of teaching and to make the school compound a beautiful place. Nancy’s ‘carefully tended’ gardens come to life and are separated from the ‘rank neighborhood bushes’.
One evening, as Obi is admiring his own work, he spots an old woman moving across the school compound following what Obi later finds out to be an almost inconspicuous path. The path runs across the school compound to the bush on the other side.
Upon questioning one of the teachers of the school, Obi learns that the path, connecting the village shrine to the place of burial, holds some mystical significance to the villagers. He learns further that an attempt to block the path caused some furor some time back. Obi, however, insists on blocking this path, wondering that the Government Education Officer might not like it if the path were allowed to run across the school compound. Further, Obi expresses his irritation at the backwardness of the people of the region by accusing them of potentially participating in pagan rituals. The path is blocked out using heavy sticks and barbed wire.
Three days later, the village priest of Ani visits Obi and requests the latter to revoke his decision. The priest emphatically argues about the significance of the path; he mentions how this path has been there for a long time, and how the dead relatives depart by the path while the ancestors visit them by the same. The priest further claims that children come through that path to be born in these parts. Obi listens to the old man but he is adamant on his previous decision. Moreover, he states that the whole purpose of the school is to spread education among all so that such beliefs as this are not only followed anymore but also actively mocked. Obi cites regulations to tell the priest that the school compound cannot have that path running across it. Instead, he suggests that the villages should make a new path for similar purposes since the ancestors might not find the little detour ‘too burdensome’.
Two days later, a woman dies in childbed. A diviner proposes heavy sacrifices to the ancestors as a means to apologize for the insults done to them with the fences blocking the path.
Obi wakes up the next morning to see all his works destroyed: the gardens have been maimed and one of the school buildings has been pulled down. That day, a white Supervisor visits the school and writes a ‘nasty report’ about the state of the premises and also the ‘tribal-war situation developing between the school and the village, arising in part from the misguided zeal of the new headmaster.’
‘Dead Men’s Path’ ANALYSIS
Achebe wrote at a time when the African nations were struggling to gain independence from their colonizers. This story came out seven years before Achebe’s country Nigeria got its independence in 1960. Hence, the story is a timely record of the clash between two very different sets of values and worldviews.
THEMES
‘Dead Men’s Path’ is a tale of cultural conflict. Two different sets of values are represented by Obi and the villagers, and the collision of these opposing values forms the central tension of the play. The tension is cultural, political, and of course, ideological. The graveness of the clash between traditions and imposed modernity is indicated by how total chaos erupts at the end of the story.
Both Obi and the ‘backward’ people of the village hold on to their beliefs sincerely and are ready to take harsh measures in order to ensure that their respective ideals prevail. The trouble, however, is that their ideals are mutually opposed to each other inherently; Obi and Nancy’s modernity is like an anti-tradition crusade for the people of the village. Postcolonial discourse often points out how the colonizing party tries to justify its mission of colonization citing its alleged superiority in the ‘soft’ powers of culture like possessing a ‘modern’, ‘educated’ way of life, among others. The colonized party is deemed inferior in these regards. This created dichotomy is unfair for the colonized party, and any aspect of its culture that does not sufficiently resemble the colonizer’s ways is deemed ‘backward’.
Historically, education has been one of the most potent ways to ‘manufacture consent’ for the purposes of cultural and eventually general colonization. Obi’s language and thought betray this unflattering face of the colonial education programme: he wants to improve the ways of the ‘unprogressive’ and ‘less educated’ people, ensuring, among other things, that the village children are taught enough so that they can laugh at the beliefs their elders hold. Again, Nancy, Obi’s wife, fantasizes about being the ‘admired wife of the young headmaster, the queen of the school’. Both Nancy’s and Obi’s ambitions are riddled with the politics of exclusion, imposition, and mastering. Their ideal of modernity and education is a condescending project that creates barriers in the name of spreading enlightenment by virtue of the simple fact that their view of enlightenment is an alien one for the native community, and they are unwilling to respect and accommodate the latter’s philosophies of life.
Achebe carefully critiques some of the aspects of life as practiced by the people of Ndume or similar places. For instance, his seminal novel Things Fall Apart is often critical of the various traditions African people abide by. Similarly here, the verdict of the diviner does feel like an instance of superstition in practice. However, Achebe presents far more nuanced pictures that do not allow gross generalizations and hasty judgments: Things Fall Apart does show the ruthlessness of the colonizers at the end. And this story too ends on a bleak note where the cultural conflict is only expected to unleash further violence. What Achebe critiques are the coloniser’s treatment of the colonized as an entity inherently backward and therefore needing help. Yes, these cultures may have unpleasant aspects but so does every culture, and this cannot justify colonialism in any way.
Through this story, the hollowness of the colonizer’s claim as the enlightened one is also brought forward. The colonizer claims to be educated but is not receptive to ways of life not their own. Thus, this education is in fact quite narrow in scope. Apart from the educated-backward binary, the religious-pagan binary, another favorite tool in the colonizer’s arsenal, is also subtly brought out. The missionaries have historically played a vital role in spreading Christianity in colonies or soon-to-be colonies, ensuring that the ‘uneducated’ and ‘barbaric’ ‘pagans’ learn the civilized ways of the Christians. This cultural colonization makes the task of actual colonization easier.
Violent imposition of foreign values is another theme of the story. Postcolonial writers often write about how colonizers introduced their ways of life and imposed them on foreign cultures, disturbing the harmony of the now colonized party’s ways of life. Authors like Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer, among others, have often noted the cultural conflicts that resulted whenever the white people tried to impose their ways of life in communities of Africa.
The white Supervisor at the end of the story notes the ‘misguided zeal’ of Obi, the new headmaster. This might be ironic coming from a white person in a position of power but the observation is correct if read objectively. Obi’s zeal, indeed, is misguided. As a teacher, his utmost responsibility is to help his people through education. Instead, he forces his view of education and modernity on the people without ever trying to understand the latter’s perspectives or reaching a mutual compromise for the sake of harmony. When he remarks to Nancy, “I was thinking what a grand opportunity we’ve got at last to show these people how a school should be run”, one gets the feeling that this is no teacher willing to help but a condescending person who would wield the tool of colonial education to carry out an egoistic project to establish mastery over a people who do not share his views.
The colonized subjects often resort to their most foundational myths and legends and use them as a weapon to create a sense of identity in the face of the various cultural impositions from the colonizers. Though thinkers like Fanon did caution that such a strategy might lead to other unwanted phenomena like essentialism or jingoism, this practice is found necessary by many, even by Fanon in some cases. W. B. Yeats, for instance, famously made use of Irish folktales and myths to make clear his Irish roots and allegiance. Similarly, resistance here comes from the people of the village when they decide to act out against the colonizer’s essentially homogenizing move against their philosophies of life and death.
Also, the story brings out several ironies of the colonial situation. Obi, a non-white person, largely disowns the beliefs of his native culture in a bid to be a better servant to the colonization carried on by the whites. This is the anxiety that many educated colonized people have torn between their native cultures and the lucrative prospects offered by the colonizers. The irony is that at the end of the story, the white man labels Obi’s efforts ‘misguided zeal’. Obi may have renounced his roots but he is still an outsider to the white person.
CHARACTERS IN THE STORY
Michael Obi: recently appointed headmaster of the Ndume Central School. He is the face of the colonial version of modernity in the story. He has contempt for the backward ways of the people of the village and would like to ‘correct’ them. His heavy-handed treatment of the native customs results in violent resistance from the villagers.
Nancy: Obi’s vain wife. She has high ambitions concerning her future as the headmaster’s wife. However, she is happy when her husband is happy, even when there are not many chances of all her ambitions coming to fruition.
The priest: the voice of native traditions in the story. His dialogue with Obi highlights the ideological angles of the culture clash between the colonizer and the colonized.
