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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Path
The path is an important symbol that works on several levels in the story. It is an actual trail that cuts across the school compound, physically connecting the village shrine to ancestral burial grounds. On a spiritual level, it is the route taken by the dead to depart the village, by the ancestors to visit the village, and most critically by newborns coming to be born. It suggests that in the villagers’ religious beliefs, there is no clear separation between the past, present, and future, or between the ancestors and the unborn. Rather, they are all part of a continuum.
The path, which represents tradition, cuts across the land and boundaries of the modern school compound, which has been imposed on the pre-existing village. The presence of the path without Obi’s knowledge (until he spies the old woman crossing the compound) suggests that tradition and modernity can coexist, but Obi’s response to learning of the path’s existence is to block it with sticks and then barbed wire. This signifies that he is not open to peaceful coexistence. Thus the “Dead Men’s Path” of the title becomes not only the track linking the living and the dead, but it also symbolizes the path Obi insists on taking with his arrogant and inflexible actions. This second path leads toward his downfall.
The Garden
To both Obi and his wife, the school gardens are the ultimate symbol of the mission school’s beautifying and civilizing mission. Nancy dreams of it when she first hears of Obi’s appointment, and he often admires the gardens and hedges that bloom after the rains as they represent his hard work and the contrast between the “civilized” school compound and the “rank neighbourhood bushes” (72). The garden is populated with colorful flowers, which are named and described in more detail than most other elements of the story. The flower beds have been placed over the path itself, in the same way that the European school and culture have been imposed upon the older culture of the villagers.
While the garden represents the young couple’s dream of modernization, the old woman who steps on the flowers as she follows the ancestral path does not share that same dream. When another woman dies in childbirth, the villagers destroy the garden to appease their angered ancestors. They destroy not only the garden that blocks the path but the hedges that surround the compound itself. With this, the couple’s dream of modernizing and beautifying the school is trampled beneath the villagers’ feet. The next generation of colonized youth that the school seeks to cultivate, like the flowers in the garden, can also have colonial ideas undone by the villagers.
The garden can also be seen as a kind of “failed” Garden of Eden, in which Obi’s ignorance (of the path’s existence and the value of tradition) leads to his disgrace and expulsion from the school compound.
The Barbed Wire
The Biblical reference suggested by the garden can also be seen in the barbed wire that Obi uses to prevent the villagers from using their ancestral path. It is something that he adds to reinforce the barrier between the school and the surrounding bush that is delineated first by the surrounding hedge and then by the “heavy sticks” (73) that blocked the path’s entrance and exit. Barbed wire is often used to entrap animals or protect domesticated animals from the dangers of wild beasts; thus, it could suggest the students are tamed or “civilized” creatures that must be protected from the “uncivilized” Indigenous culture.
Barbed wire can also refer to the Bible verses Isaiah 18:14-15. The King James Bible is most likely the official version used in Protestant or Anglican mission schools in Nigeria. The verses read:
14 The Holy can be either a Hiding Place or a Boulder blocking your way, The Rock standing in the willful way of both houses of Israel, A barbed-wire Fence preventing trespass to the citizens of Jerusalem.
15 Many of them are going to run into that Rock and get their bones broken, Get tangled up in that barbed wire and not get free of it.
The meaning of the lines in the Bible, as well as barbed wire’s use in the story, are somewhat ambiguous. They may assert that either the villagers or the mission teachers will be destroyed, or that they assure each other’s destruction if they cannot peacefully coexist, as in both houses of Israel in the verse.
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By Chinua Achebe
