Recipient of the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 for his literary career, Nigerian writer and critic Chinua Achebe is known as the “Father of Modern African Literature.” His short story “Dead Men’s Path” raises issues central to many works of postcolonial writing such as modernity versus tradition, urban versus rural life, and Christianity versus Indigenous religion, as well as the overall effects of European colonization on life in his native Nigeria. Originally published in 1953 while Achebe was still an undergraduate, the story later also appears in a collection of short stories entitled Girls at War (1972). Although an early work that predates his most renowned novel Things Fall Apart (1958) by several years, the themes and conflicts of this story are ones Achebe grappled with throughout his career. The story also points more broadly to the human condition, the dangers of hubris, and the need for cultural tolerance and respect.

This guide refers to the 2010 Anchor Canada publication of Chinua Achebe’s short story collection Girls at War: And Other Stories.

The story opens with an unnamed, omniscient narrator introducing the setting and main character of the story. It is January 1949, and a young Nigerian man, Michael Obi, has been sent by the Church Mission authorities to modernize an “unprogressive” rural school. He had been marked as a special or “pivotal teacher” by the authorities, and he is enthusiastic about the opportunity to put his progressive ideas into practice and erase what he views as the “narrow views” of those with less than his “sound” secondary school education (70).

His fervor for “modern methods” and denigration of those who are more traditional or uneducated is shared by his wife Nancy, who is already imagining herself beautifying their new home with gardens and becoming a local celebrity, or “queen of the school” (71). While temporarily disappointed upon learning that there will be no other wives to admire her, she quickly returns to her enthusiasm in support of her husband’s “happy prospects” (71). The narrator then reveals more about Mr. Obi (as he is called), this time about his physical appearance. He appears older than his 26 years and is frail and round-shouldered yet “not unhandsome.”

The next paragraph finds the couple at the “backward in every sense” (72) Ndume school, where they work hard to satisfy two aims: Imposing a high standard of teaching and beautifying the school compound. Their success is marked visibly by the flower beds, which separate the cultivated school gardens from the surrounding wild bush. Mr. Obi is dismayed to find that this separation is not respected by the villagers when he spies an older woman crossing through the flower beds on what he discovers is an infrequently used path.

On confronting the other teachers for allowing this, he is timidly told that the path connects the village shrine with burial grounds and seems to be important to the villagers. Although he is warned that there was a problem in the past when access to the path was blocked, Mr. Obi is more concerned about what the colonial government supervisors will say during the nearing inspection than any effect on or backlash from the “pagan” villagers (73). He has the path blocked with wooden stakes and barbed wire to create a visual and physical barrier.

Three days later, the village priest of Ani (the goddess of morality who rules the underworld in the local Igbo religion) visits the headmaster and tries to explain to him the importance of the path, which has existed since the time of the ancestors and is religiously vital to the community. Not only does it link the village to their deceased, but it is also the path by which newborn children enter the community. Mr. Obi receives this information with a smug attitude, telling the priest that he has come to rid the community of these fantastical and ridiculous beliefs.

The priest, unlike Mr. Obi, seeks a compromise and uses a proverb to explain his solution: “Let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch” (74). Mr. Obi suggests that the villagers create a new path that goes around the gardens and even tells the priest that the schoolboys can help make it. The priest does not agree and tells Mr. Obi that he has nothing more to say.

When a young woman dies in childbirth two days later, the villagers are told by a diviner they must make major sacrifices to appease the ancestors, who have been offended by the fence. Mr. Obi awakens the next day to find major damage has been caused not only to the fence but to the garden and even one of the school buildings. Later that day, the supervisor (identified for the first time as white) comes to inspect the school and writes a “nasty” report about the disaster he finds and his more serious concerns about mounting local hostilities. A quoted line from his report describing a “tribal-war situation developing between the school and the village, arising in part from the misguided zeal of the new headmaster” ends the story (74).