Civilization And Tribalism In Dead Men's Path By Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe once said, “As a child, […] you automatically identified with the good people, with the missionaries […] because that 's the way the story was arranged. Now, the moment you realize that you were […] of the party of the savages […] that 's the moment when you knew that a new story had to be written.” Growing up in Nigeria as the British Empire put its territories through a bleaching process, removing any forms of religion, culture, and thought that diverged from their own British values, Achebe knew that in order to stay relevant as an African author, he would need to get political and write realistic representations of his world. In his short story, “Dead Men’s Path,” we see a historical accuracy within his characters, representing those indigenous peoples of Nigeria who were forcibly assimilated, such as Michael Obi, symbols like the path that represent not only the differences between religious beliefs, but also create division within race, and themes that highlight the battle between modernization and tribalism of the 1950s and continue …show more content…
Obi himself thinks of the path, and its worshippers, as absolutely ridiculous, theorizing, “The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.” The path itself represents the rest of the continent, along with the Americas and Asia, as the battleground for these two powers, the colonists and indigenous peoples, to fight over. The heavy sticks and barbed wired that were put up so quickly and used to block off the path from the villagers represent the factories and rapid industrialization that the British were trying to hard to push on what they considered to be “third-world countries.” The images of flowers and hedges are beautifully crafted by Achebe are destroyed by the end of the story, representing the white man’s attempt to “civilize” the