Imagine one day you are enjoying peace amongst your family and a white man forces his way into your place of living, driving you to surrender your social convictions. While he discloses to you that he and his men are better finished than you, yet they are the foreigners. Simply not recognizing what’s in store, in result you end up feeling apprehensive. Presently you feel like the outsider in your own homeland that you’ve known your whole life to be yours. There are a few cases of writing on this theme such as “Dead Man’s Path” written by Chinua Achebe, considering the measure of history that was being made at the time. English colonization and imperialists greatly influenced the locals by upstarting numerous equipped clashes amongst themselves, forcing new religious practices and making them have to survive horrid life threatening circumstances.
A Dead Men’s Path epitomizes how nations have distinctive beliefs, social convictions and different religions. At the point when the British attacked less developed nations, they craved for complete control over each part of their lives including religion. Locals weren’t as advanced and their nation wasn’t either, not as compared to the British. A quick summary on “A Dead Man’s Path” to the audience who is not familiar with the story, Michael Obi’s aspiration is satisfied when, at age twenty-six when he is assigned the position of headmaster to a school which is to be considered backwards to most. Obi is said to be a young man who is vigorous and optimistic to say the least, Obi would like to tidy up the school by accelerating its goal of converting them into Christians. Obi hopes to firmly influence a great job of this terrific chance and display to individuals how a school ought to be. Intending to organize present day techniques and request exclusive expectations of educating to the people, while his spouse Nancy supports every choice he makes. Michael Obi plans to lift Ndume School from making retrogressive methods to a position of in which new school revisions will supplement the people of Ndume town’s way of living. Then came one night when Obi finds a villager cutting over the plants that his wife planted on a pathway that connects the sacred burial ground and the town altar. Completely appalled by the lady’s unmitigated invasion of school property, he then arranges the holy genealogical trail to be surrounded by gates with spiked metal tips, much to alarm the villagers that they are not welcome to use his compound as a high way for their religious nonsense.
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Too add more significance to this story, “A Dead Man’s Path” takes place in Nigeria around 1949 and it speaks to a time of social change. It was amid this time the British expanded their endeavors to change Igbo society through instruction. In particular, the familial pathway makes struggle amongst the villagers and the school. In the story a more seasoned man who happens to be a local priest appreciates customary mores, while the British including Mr. Obi sees these conventions as obsolete and superfluous. In the story, the priest speaks for his ancestors and his people contends for their social conventions to not be messed with, yet Obi unshakably stands up to only refuse and follow through with his personal goals and ideas. Because to the Imperials such acts are blasphemy, but such traditions mean much more to the people then one can think. The title of the story itself gives us symbolism, “A Dead Man’s Path” is really a symbol used to portray a loss of heritage due to rapidly increasing modern lifestyles. The path alone represents a deep heritage, and the men are the ancestors who lived it, the “dead” means that ancestry and heritage are being lost and disregarded as stupid. In the story Obi stated, “The whole purpose of our school, is to eradicate just such beliefs as that. Dead men do not require footpaths… The whole idea is just fantastic. Our duty is to teach your children to laugh at such ideas”, the path in the story represents the heritage of the African tribe. Their ancestors, their ancestor’s ancestors all walked that same path. To them it meant to remember your roots, so when they were all refused permission to visit the path, the headmaster Obi was only contributing to the loss of culture and the pathway to their elders.
All through the short story “Dead Men’s Path” a variety of examples of irony are presented to the audience, the principal example of irony begins to be displayed when Obi begins to tell his wife of the people he works with and then states that they devote their full energy to their job, she then states “A penny for your thought Mike”. That statement was very ironic due to the fact that she’s not actually going to pay him anything. The next example shown is when Michael Obi begins to discuss with another educator about blocking the ancestral pathway. “The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection”, Obi Stated. This is very ignorant of Mr Obi to state and also very ironic due to him believing that since the natives are already saying the path is being utilized by the dead ancestors, then who’s to say they should enable them to utilize the school spaces for different uses for the natives. In all reality he was just mocking these people’s tradition and ended up making it off as a joke. The best example and the most rewarding example of irony of all is that Obi and his wife had dreamed of the school compound to be surrounded by gardens of flowers, near perfect in structure and to look progressive. Only to find out on the day of Mr. Obi’s inspection, the school looked like it was trampled by a group of wild animals, all the gardens were destroyed and Mr. Obi got a horribly written review which most likely resulted in him being let go.
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