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.
Themes
Tradition Versus Modernity
The story is a struggle between tradition and modernity with the village priest and the old woman representing tradition and Michael Obi and his wife representing modernity. Obi is enthusiastic about modernizing and beautifying the mission school, and he is so absorbed in his ambition and hubris that he fails to understand the importance of traditional life and culture to the villagers. This leads not only to his personal downfall but his failure to implement the new colonial curriculum in the village school. Additionally, the villagers react with increased hostility to British colonial rule.
In this struggle, Obi and his wife assert the superiority of colonialism and modernity over the traditional Indigenous culture early in the story. At the end of the first paragraph, the reader is told that Obi “was outspoken in his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and less educated” headmasters found in the mission field who had not been designated as “pivotal” like he had (70). This indicates not a belief in colonial supremacy but his delight in succeeding within this system. Nancy wants things to be “beautiful,” “modern,” and “delightful,” (70-72) as she has embraced both the “modern methods” espoused by her husband and his “denigration” of those deemed old-fashioned or obsolete. Nancy also expresses her desire to be “queen of the school” (71), revealing a desire to perpetuate imperialism within the school’s microcosm; she and Obi are faithful subjects, and they will rule within the school.
At first, the couple seems successful; they plant beautiful gardens, although ironically, the reader is not told anything about changes to the curriculum. Central to Obi’s actions is his lack of care or concern about local traditions and beliefs, which he believes (as he tells the priest) should be ridiculed by the village children.
Although the story is told from Obis’ point-of-view, their arrogant dismissal of anything that is not “modern” fails to convince the reader of their mission’s righteousness. This is deepened when the villagers’ beliefs are revealed, first by the unnamed teacher and then later in more detail by the village priest. Notably, these customs are described with more nuance than Obi’s Christianity, evoking empathy. The value of these traditional beliefs is asserted by linking the path to the natural life cycle. When the expecting mother dies in childbirth because the path is blocked, the split is made clear; modern values are concerned with superficial propriety and aesthetics, while tradition is concerned with life and death.
While tradition’s value is emphasized in the story, the priest doesn’t assert its supremacy so much as the two cultures should coexist. By quoting “[l]et the hawk perch and let the eagle perch” (74), the priest compares the two cultures to two equally powerful birds of prey. With this, the story demonstrates the value of tradition within modern life, and that there needs to be tolerance so they can coexist. This is a common thread in Achebe’s work, which asserts that the tension between the modern and traditional can be resolved by respecting Indigenous values.
The Danger of Hubris and the Importance of Tolerance
While the story is set within colonial Nigeria and focuses on the role of and problems caused by mission schools in the countryside, it is also a story with more universal themes and messages. Michael Obi can be seen as a tragic hero whose character flaw is hubris or excessive pride. He lacks empathy for others, and his fervor for modernizing the mission school makes him oblivious. With this, he is hampered by his belief in his own superiority, not only over the villagers and their “pagan” belief system but over the other Christian, educated headmasters and teachers, who share his modernizing goals. While Obi and other “native informants” like him (which, used in the most derogatory sense, means an Indigenous person who is considered a collaborator with colonial powers) are never condemned in the story. What is condemned is the lack of respect for local beliefs and traditions, including the tolerance of others.
Mr. Obi’s arrogance can be seen at the start of the story when he compares the other headmasters in the mission system unfavorably to himself, as they were not named “pivotal teacher[s]” in the official records (70). He sees the school’s teachers as obsolete and better suited to sell goods in a market, an attitude parroted by his wife. He also shows no empathy toward his wife’s concern that there will be no other wives at the village school, caring only that the teachers there will dedicate all their time to the success of his goal. When he questions a teacher about the path, his tone is close to bullying, shaking his head in disbelief and amazement at what “you people” (72), as he calls the other teachers, have allowed to continue. He becomes ruder and more abusive in his conversation with the village priest, declaring that he will teach the students to laugh at their ancestral beliefs, which he had earlier referred to as “pagan,” a decidedly derogatory and colonial way of naming pre-Christian Indigenous beliefs). These interactions demonstrate Obi’s intolerance of traditional, Indigenous cultures, as well as his inflated sense of self and his ability to change everything around him.
The village priest is Obi’s foil and demonstrates that tolerance is both rational and valuable. In their conversation, he offers him another way to approach the problem of the ancestral path by using a proverb: “Let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch” (74). This proverb compares the traditional and colonial ways to two equally powerful animals, advocating for the school and the ancestral path to coexist. But Obi is too so prideful that he ignores the advice and warnings of his teacher and the priest. He has become a mimic man, copying the attitudes of the colonizer toward the colonized, but he has forgotten that he is nothing but a “mimic man,” a subordinate copy of the white colonial original.
The damage of this pride and intolerance manifests physically with the school’s destruction. This also teaches another valuable lesson about intolerance; one cannot expect the oppressed to not fight back. The result of this situation is that Obi is fired and denigrated in his supervisor’s report, which shows that he is nothing but a puppet for their “civilizing mission.” This makes his pride in their initial esteem of his abilities and his eventual downfall tragic and pathetic at the same time. Ironically, while colonialism is a violent and oppressive force, the supervisor here indicates that Obi’s intolerance caused damage at the school. This implies that even imperial powers maintain peace by striking bargains with their subjects on occasion.
The Consequences of a Colonial Mission School Education
This story offers a glimpse at the consequences of colonialism and colonial mission education on the educated class by tracing the meteoric rise and fall of Michael Obi. Obi is a young man who has had a modern education in British colonial schools. He is idealistic, enthusiastic, and eager for his country to embrace the modernization that British colonialism has brought to its shores. While this energy and idealism are characteristics of youth, he demonstrates an utter lack of humility and is willing to denigrate his own culture and tradition, presumably lessons he learned in colonial schools. Obi would be seen by many as a “native informant,” someone who assists Europeans by acting as a translator of language and culture at best or a willing servant of imperialism (per Edward Said) at worst. Obi seems to have become the worst of these, someone who is willing to do the empire’s dirty work of destroying and eradicating traces of non-Western culture.
In many cases, the consequences of colonialism and especially a colonial mission education can result in a sense of being fragmented or divided between the ancestral language and culture and that of the new colonial patriarchy. This, in turn, can lead to a sense of alienation in which the character no longer fits entirely into his own culture but will never entirely fit into the colonizer’s, which Homi Bhabha describes as “almost the same, but not quite” in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (October, Spring 1984, p. 126). At the beginning of the text, Obi demonstrates none of this existential angst or alienation, as he unquestioningly and completely absorbs the ideology imbued in him by his colonial education. As the mission school system became more directly controlled by the British colonial government, it moved away from religious education and reform and toward Westernizing colonized populations. These are the “wonderful ideas” (70) that Obi wishes to put into practice in the village school where he is sent. To do this, he must erase the Indigenous culture and replace it with modern and Western ideas imported from Europe.
With this, the path and Obi’s interventions—first the flowerbeds and later the fence—represent the long-established Igbo Nigerian culture and practices and the imposition of colonial oppression and cultural erasure. First, Obi tries to force a change by putting something beautiful on top of the path. The villagers, however, cannot be swayed by aesthetics; they are deeply loyal to their traditions and ancestors, so they use the path and trample the flowers. Confronted with this, Obi turns to force, a standard tool of empire. The fence he erects symbolizes colonization because it forcibly creates new borders. The barbed wire that tops it symbolizes the violence with which these borders are created and enforced, and this fence being built on school property links this colonial violence to the mission school system.
In the end, Obi is shown to be an alienated character after all. He rejects his own heritage, but the supervisor’s note shows that he will never be fully accepted by his new masters, who cite Obi’s “misguided zeal” (74) as a hazard for the mission school’s imperial project. Despite being a model employee, Obi does not ascend his role as colonized subject, indicating that the role of the mission school is not to create equal citizens but compliant, second-class colonists.
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