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Dead Men’s Path
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dead Men’s Path, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Modernity and Progress
Chinua Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path” tells the story of Michael Obi, a “young and energetic” educator who accepts the position of headmaster of the Ndume Central School. Ndume is an “unprogressive” institution (presumably in British-ruled colonial Nigeria), and Obi is appointed specifically because of his outspoken rejection of “the narrow views” of older teachers. His wife, Nancy, shares his passion for the “modern methods” and decides almost immediately that everything in the new…
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Education as a Colonial Weapon
Education is a recurring point of contention in Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path,” a story that centers around the Ndume Central school and its zealous new headmaster, Michael Obi. Readers’ first introduction to the Ndume school prefaces what is to come later in the short story. Achebe presents the school as markedly “unprogressive,” and later as a school that is “backward in every sense of the word.” For this reason, the school is of particular…
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Cultural History and Identity
For much of Chinua Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path,” the cultural practices of the villagers are under attack by Michael Obi, the new headmaster of Ndume Central School, and his wife, Nancy. While Nancy does not directly involve herself with the running of the school, she models herself and her actions after the British while scorning the customs of the villagers. Likewise, Obi, zealous in his endeavor to make the school into a place…
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