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The gardens in the school represent Nancy and Michael Obi’s “modern” hopes for the school, which are grounded in guidelines from the colonial government. They plant the gardens to add beauty and sophistication to the school grounds and because it complements their “progressive” plans due to their identification of it as a thing of elegance. Eventually the gardens and the hedges are set up so that the school is clearly separated from the rest of the village, effectively demarcating the sophisticated part of the community from the unsophisticated, lowly, and “rank” parts. However, after the conflict between Obi and the villagers reach an impasse, the gardens are ruined due to Obi’s unwillingness to open up the villagers’ ancestral path. The ruined gardens at the end of the story visually represent the dashed dreams of Nancy and Obi. Furthermore, it represents the failure of the type of modernity that Nancy and Obi championed, a modernity built on abusing and discarding one’s cultural identity in favor of colonial codes of conduct.
Gardens Quotes in Dead Men’s Path
The Dead Men’s Path quotes below all refer to the symbol of Gardens. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Dead Men’s Path
Quotes
“We shall do our best,” she replied. “We shall have such beautiful gardens and everything will be just modern and delightful...” In their two years of married life she had become completely infected by his passion for “modern methods” and his denigration of “these old and superannuated people in the teaching field who would be better employed as traders in the Onitsha market.”
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Obi woke up next morning among the ruins of his work. The beautiful hedges were torn up not just near the path but right round the school, the flowers trampled to death and one of the school buildings pulled down… That day, the white Supervisor came to inspect the school and wrote a nasty report on the state of the premises but more seriously about the “tribal-war situation developing between the school and the village, arising in part from the misguided zeal of the new headmaster.”
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Gardens Symbol Timeline in Dead Men’s Path
The timeline below shows where the symbol Gardens appears in Dead Men’s Path. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Dead Men’s Path
...teaching” and work together to make the school grounds beautiful with the rich and carefully-tended gardens of Nancy’s dreams. The flowering hedges of the gardens eventually demarcate the school compound from...
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One day, Obi sees an old woman cross the school compound, wander through the gardens, and walk down an “almost disused path.” Obi becomes angry and confronts a teacher about...
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Obi wakes up the next morning and sees the school in shambles: the gardens, the hedges of the school, and even a school building have been destroyed
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