“Dead Man’s Path”, is a short story with juicy words and hooks that make you want to read on. This story was written by Chinua Achebe, a well educated African man who grew up mostly in Africa. His skilled writing soon led him up to his creative stories and his characters.
His first character or the main character is Michael Obi. Michael Obi is a young man who has just got promoted to become headmaster to a school in Ndume Central School. In the story, he is described as, “stoop-shouldered and looked frail. But he sometimes surprised people with sudden bursts of physical energy. In his present posture, however, all his bodily strength seemed to have retired behind his deep-set eyes, giving them an extraordinary power of penetration. He was twenty-six, but looked thirty or more. On the whole, he was not unhandsome.” The second character is the Priest. He is just described as an old man.
In the beginning, Michael is talking with his wife, Nancy, about how successful the new school will be and what his plans are to make the village more modern. As time goes on, the school has new buildings and a beautiful garden. One day a woman goes straight through a single marigold bed to open up a path. Astonished, he closed off the path with sticks and barbed wire. Three days later the Priest comes to confront Obi. After for a bit of bickering, Obi sill refuses to open up the path; in return irritates the Priest. This being the main conflict.
In the end, Obi found himself in a predicament. All of his ‘hard work’ torn to the ground and crushed. His school houses were completely demolished and his flower beds were smashed and ripped out of the ground. Everything was destroyed. After that, the school inspector came and wrote
a “nasty report” about the school and was later classified as a tribal war.
In conclusion, the school was destroyed and Michael was ashamed to let this happen. All of these actions in the story come together with the last few sentences saying this, “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.” Showing that you should not get too confident in your work that you don’t worry about others as well.
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