dead men's path by chinua achebe summary
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Summary
At the beginning of the story, a twenty-six-year-old zealous man named Michael Obi becomes the headmaster of the Ndume Central School. He is portrayed as an extremely intolerant man who wishes to eradicate traditional beliefs and customs while simultaneously promoting "modern methods." Michael Obi views the local villagers with contempt and believes they are superannuated people with outrageous customs and rituals. His main goals as headmaster of the Ndume Central School are to promote and teach modern methods, eradicate traditional beliefs, and maintain the beautiful gardens on the school's grounds.After Michael Obi notices that an ancestral footpath travels through his compound, he orders the path to be barricaded so that villagers cannot travel on it. The village priest, Ani, then visits Michael Obi and petitions him to reopen the ancestral footpath, explaining its significance to the villagers. Ani tells Michael Obi that the spirits of their ancestors and unborn children travel along the footpath to visit them, which is a belief that Obi finds amusing and ridiculous. Michael Obi refuses to reopen the footpath, and a woman dies during childbirth that night. In response to her death, the villagers destroy the beautiful school grounds the next day. When a white supervisor visits the Ndume Central School, he witnesses the destruction and writes a scathing report regarding the tribal-war situation developing as a result of Michael Obi's misguided zeal.Michael Obi’s ambition is fulfilled when, at age twenty-six, he is appointed to whip into shape an unprogressive secondary school. Energetic, young, and idealistic as he is, Obi hopes to clean up the educational mission field and speed up its Christianizing mission. Already outspoken in his denigration of “the narrow views” and ways of “superannuated people in the teaching field,” he expects to make a good job of this grand opportunity and show people how a school should be run. He plans to institute modern methods and demand high standards of teaching, while his wife, Nancy—who looks forward to being the admired wife of the headmaster—plants her “dream gardens” of beautiful hibiscus and allamanda hedges. With Nancy doing her gardening part, they will together lift Ndume School from its backward ways to a place of European-inspired beauty in which school regulations will replace the Ndume village community’s traditional beliefs.So Obi dreams and plans until one evening when he discovers a village woman cutting across the school gardens on a footpath that links the village shrine with the cemetery. Scandalized by her blatant trespassing, Obi orders the sacred ancestral footpath fenced off with barbed wire, much to the consternation of the villagers. The local priest then tries to remind Obi of the path’s historical and spiritual significance as the sacred link between the villagers, their dead ancestors, and the yet unborn. Obi flippantly derides the priest’s explanation as the very kind of superstition that the school is intended to eradicate because “dead men do not require footpaths.” Two days later the hedge surrounding the school, its flower beds, and one of its buildings lie trampled and in ruins—the result of the villagers’ attempt to propitiate the ancestors whom Obi’s fence has insulted. After his supervisor issues a report on this incident, Obi is dismissed.
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Answer:
The author of “Dead Men’s Path,” Chinua Achebe, is a native born Nigerian. Born in 1930 to missionary schoolteachers, Achebe was raised in a strong Christian home. He was one of the first to attend the University College at Ibdan and later finished his schooling and earned a B.A. in English at London University. Upon his graduation, he returned to Africa and went through many years of turmoil as his country was split in two by civil war. Achebe is best known for his novels, and although he has not written many short stories, he is known to “stand among the finest short fiction modern Africa has produced” (10). Upon reading the author’s perspective at the end of the story I was caught on the author’s intrigue with different cultures. I, too, love to learn about and experience different cultures, especially ones that I’ve never heard of or experienced before. This was my basis for picking this short story.
The short story, “Dead Men’s Path,” is the story of a “modern method” (10) African headmaster who takes on a new job in a village where the people are superstitious and cling to traditional tribal ways. The story addresses the cultural conflicts between “new” British ideas and “old” African customs. The story takes place at Ndume Central School in Africa in January of 1949. There is really only one fully developed character. The headmaster, Michael Obi, is a man who strives to be made modern and make everything in his path modernized. In doing so, he alienates the villagers by putting up barricades in front of their sacred ancestral path. The path happened to lead right down the middle of the school grounds. The villagers blame Obi for the death of one of their women who died in childbirth, as the path that was blocked connected the village shrine to their place of burial. The dead relatives of the villagers used this path to depart from the village and their ancestors used the path to visit them. Most importantly, the path allowed children to come into the village to be born. By blocking the path, the child was not allowed to enter the village, and both the mother and child did not survive. As a result, Michael Obi woke up one morning to find his once perfectly constructed school premises in ruins.
Initially I picked this story because I think we Americans live in a very ethnocentric society and this topic interests me greatly. I’m fascinated with different cultures and beliefs and was highly interested in this story. Chinua Achebe does a great job in portraying this ethnocentric idea, and it made me realize that not just industrialized nations experience ethnocentrism. Little villages in Africa experience it too, but in a different way. Because of the ending, and the way Achebe showed how Obi was so close-minded and had to have things his way really allowed me to enjoy the story. I’m not saying I like horrid and depressing endings, but I do like when an author shows a point that is so good that it gets the point across without any case of misunderstanding it.