31 pages • 1 hour read
Chinua AchebeDead Men’s Path
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Chinua Achebe
Achebe is a key figure of English-language postcolonial writing and is often referred to as the “Father of modern African literature.” Born November 16, 1930, in the Igbo (Ibo) region of then Colonial Nigeria, he was a renowned writer of prose, poetry, and critical essays. In many ways, his life reflected the changes that his country was undergoing, such as the impact of British colonial rule on Indigenous languages, cultures, and religions. His father was a teacher and an early convert to Christianity, and variations of this figure appeared throughout Achebe’s writing, including in the short story “Dead Men’s Path.”
Achebe showed early promise as a scholar, and although he originally went to the country’s first university to study medicine, he soon shifted to English literature. As a student, he was troubled by the negative and stereotypical images of Africans he found in European texts, notably Joyce Cary’s 1939 Mr. Johnson, which Achebe deemed a “superficial” look at Nigerian life, and Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness, which Achebe famously rebutted in his 1988 essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” He somewhat controversially chose to write in English, the language of the colonizer, a decision that he believed was necessary to gain the widest reach in multilingual Nigeria. However, his writing did not simply use British English but a “new” English that incorporated Igbo phrases, syntax, and proverbs to create an authentic voice that reflected and valued local oral culture and traditions.
Cultural Context: Mission Schools in Nigeria
Mission (or missionary) schools were used throughout the colonized world as a means of Westernizing local populations, and they were instrumental in promoting the European colonizer’s “civilizing mission.” While the schools were set up by European missionaries to convert colonized people to Christianity and teach them English so they could read the Bible and say their prayers, these schools became an integral part of the colonial project, controlling and subduing the local population.
The “civilizing mission” of the Europeans (including the British who colonized Nigeria) was a pernicious blend of four large ideologies: the Enlightenment; Christianity, including pre-destination; white supremacy; and Liberalism. The narrative that came to underpin the “civilizing mission” while simultaneously promoting and justifying imperialism (the exertion of military, political, and economic power of one nation over another) was that Indigenous peoples were biologically and culturally “inferior” to white European Christians. As such, it was the colonizer’s religious and moral duty to bring Western culture to these so-called inferior races, who needed to be brought out of ignorance just as a parent might educate a child. Thus, the general attitude of mission schools, which can be seen in “Dead Men’s Path,” is the desire to eradicate local beliefs because they are considered inferior to those of Western people.
As British rule in Nigeria became more formalized in the late 1800s, more attention was given to standardizing mission school curricula to ensure that they were producing the local functionaries and workers needed to help run the imperial project. The curriculum focused on academics, character, and conduct. This often had disruptive effects on the Indigenous population, as the youth were being actively encouraged to abandon and even disparage the languages and cultures of their ancestors. In “Dead Men’s Path,” Mr. Obi is sent not only to improve the academics in the local school but also to beautify or “civilize” it, rescuing it from the surrounding wild bush and protecting it from the community’s beliefs. He is unyielding in his decision to destroy the community’s path, refusing to compromise on a solution that allows the community to keep this sacred space. This parallels the totalizing approach of British imperialists, though Achebe shows in this story that such efforts are met with community resistance.
Critical Context: Postcolonial Literature
Postcolonial literature has two distinct yet interrelated meanings; it can refer to literature that is written after the end of colonialism (a mainly historical meaning), or it can mean literature that challenged European colonialism during colonial rule or examines the colonial period’s lasting consequences. Although Achebe’s 1953 short story “Dead Men’s Path” was written while Nigeria was still under British colonial rule (which lasted from 1882 to 1960), the story’s context and themes fit into the second definition of postcolonial literature.
The term “postcolonial” has expanded from its earlier historical meaning to a field of study that engages in cultural and literary criticism and often intersects with interrogations of race, gender, identity, and diaspora. One of the key figures in postcolonial studies is Palestinian theorist Edward Said, whose work Orientalism (1978) revolutionized the field. The main argument is that European colonizers defined and depicted the colonized “Other” in deliberately stereotypical ways that supported the colonial or imperial project.
In the story, readers see that Michael Obi has adopted the attitude described by another important postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha as a “mimic man.” The colonizer desires to make a copy of himself in terms of language, behavior, and beliefs, and at first, this seems to describe Mr. Obi accurately. His mission (and that of the mission schools) is to “eradicate” local culture and religions through the imposition of European language and learning. Ultimately, this would enable the British to better control the colonized Nigerians, who, like Mr. Obi, would participate in their own colonization. But as Bhabha notes, there is an “ambivalence” or lack of certainty in this mimicry, for the colonized subject is almost but not quite the same. Ironically for Mr. Obi, his desire to become the same as his colonizer makes him oblivious to the value of local traditions and is interpreted by his white supervisor as a mark of his “inferiority” or “Otherness.”
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