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Dead Men’s Path is a short story by a Nigerian-born writer called Chinua Achebe. The main character, Michael obi, is promoted to be the headmaster of Ndume Central School, an unprogressive school. With the support of his wife Nancy, this energetic and modern man decides to transform the school into a modern one by planting beautiful gardens on the fields and closing a path that villagers use to cross from their shrine to the burial site. The move backfires as villages destroy the garden and school property in detest. An education inspector visits the school and writes a negative report, citing tribal war caused by Obi’s “misguided zeal” (Achebe 12). Therefore, the central theme is the collision of cultures of the local people and the progressive headmaster. Achebe uses symbolism to illustrate the differences between these cultures and the related issues. Chinua’s Achebe’s Dead Men’s Path uses the path and school gardens to contrast the native locals’ culture from the progressive one brought about by Michael Obi.
The most prominent and easily recognizable symbol is the village path connecting the shrine to the burial site. The path represents the villagers’ connection with their historical culture. A teacher who has been at Ndume School for three years explains to Obi that the path is significant to the villagers for reasons he could not tell. Obi does not listen to him and proceeds to close the path using hedges and barbed wire fence. Even with the hedges, a village woman does not mind the trouble of navigating through to locate the old path. The village priest visits Obi to talk him out of closing the path. He explains that “the whole life” of their village is dependent on the path (Achebe 12). Therefore, the path provides identity to villagers and supports their very existence.
The path also links the village to its ancestral past and the future. The priest tells Obi that the villagers’ “dead relatives depart by it” and that ancestors use it to visit the village (Achebe 12). The priest notes the most important role of the path is assuring the villagers of a future, stating, “it is the path of children coming in to be born” (Achebe 12). After Obi refused to open the path, a woman died during childbirth, and villages attributed it to angry ancestors, forcing them to take action. They destroyed the school gardens and pulled down one building, leaving the school in ruins.
The school gardens symbolize progressive and modern culture introduced to the village by Obi and Nancy. They use beautiful gardens to represent sophistication and elegance as required by missionary authorities. In addition, the gardens separate the modern from the unprogressive, demarcating the school from the village. When answering the priest, Obi argues, “the whole purpose of our school … is to eradicate just such beliefs as that” (Achebe 12). This statement indicates that Obi is determined to set the school against the people’s culture. Destruction of the gardens by the villagers at night symbolizes the failure of modernity to replace the villagers’ cultural identity. It also implies that the dreams of Obi and Nancy were dashed as the headmaster also received a negative report from the inspector.
Some readers could argue that the villagers’ adamant to change is an illustration of backwardness and inability to embrace new ideas. While it is true that they rejected the transition, any change that scorns one’s culture is not acceptable. Additionally, losing one’s cultural identity would cause instability in several life aspects. Therefore, Obi should have sought practical and non-disruptive methods of blending modernity with the villagers’ culture.
In conclusion, Achebe uses symbolism to demonstrate how culture change can be disastrous and rejected. Attempts to close the path were perceived as angering ancestors and cutting off the villagers’ communication with their past and future. Obi and Nancy sought to delineate the school from the village, positioning it as modern and sophisticated. They erred in their approach of introducing modernity by forcing people suddenly to abandon their beliefs.
Work Cited
Achebe, Chinua. “Dead men’s path.” (1953). Web.
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