Dead Men’s Path

While Nancy Obi is only described as young, the reader can imagine her as an attractive and educated woman who is best described as superficial. Her first thought when hearing that her husband will be headmaster at a village school is to think about how they will make a beautiful garden and everything will be “just modern and delightful (70-71). She never thinks about the children who will be educated and how they, the village, and the country might benefit from the improvements to their old and “unprogressive” school (70). While she did not originally share her husband’s passion for modernizing schools, she became “infected” during their two years of her marriage. She is now comfortable dismissing the local teachers as outdated or “superannuated” and more suited to selling goods in a market than teaching in a modern school (71).

Her superficiality can also be seen in how she imagines interacting with teachers’ wives, seeing herself as a trendsetter and admired as “the queen of the school” (71). When she learns that the teachers are all unmarried, she is at first upset. Then she looks at her husband, whom she acknowledges is energetic and “not unhandsome,” and she decides not to allow this “little personal misfortune” to “blind her to her husband’s happy prospects” (71). Instead, she chooses to quote a trite saying from a British woman’s magazine she was reading. Nancy is not involved in the rest of the story’s drama, indicating that she lives a life apart from the villagers.

The village priest is the other main character in the story and serves as Michael Obi’s antagonist, as well as a symbol of all the positive qualities of traditional life and culture in Nigeria. The priest, an old and stooped man, visits Obi in the school compound, and although he carries a “stout walking-stick,” he never uses it to threaten Obi. Rather, he uses it to emphasize “each time he made a new point in his argument” (73). With this, the priest exudes quiet strength in the face of Obi’s insulting comments, remaining strong and confident in explaining to Obi the path’s importance to the villagers’ daily life and belief system. Unlike Obi, he displays great social and emotional intelligence, acknowledging at one point that what Obi says “may be true” (73), but he is unshakeable in his adherence to his own belief system and his ancestors’ practices (73). This is in contrast to Nancy, who became “infected” (as if with a disease) with the practices of colonial modernization.

He is the priest of Ani, a female deity who rules over the underworld and holds deceased ancestors in her womb. Ani is a figure simultaneously of life and death, of the ancestors and the unborn, and a deity connected to the journey of the path. This duality reflects the story’s assertions that both cultures can live in harmony. The priest explains to Obi that the path represents life’s journey and is how the dead depart, the ancestors visit, and the unborn children arrive. This last point is an example of foreshadowing and is even marked by an ellipsis, which suggests that the priest has left something unsaid. He does, however, wish to resolve the situation, drawing on the strength of the local proverb and suggesting a solution that will allow both parties to coexist. Obi, however, ignores the priest’s wise advice.

Although only mentioned in the last paragraph of the story, the supervisor plays a crucial role in the story’s denouement. As an unnamed character known only by his role in the colonial mission schools, he functions as a symbol of British colonial rule and can be considered a kind of “stock” or stereotypical character. He is the unbending colonial administrator, responsible for overseeing the schools, who is ready to blame the “inferior” African teacher for the school’s problems. He also perceives the Indigenous people as prone to violence. His report to have been written without speaking with Obi and represents the negative stereotypes that the colonial masters had toward even the most loyal of their “mimic men.” At the same time, his analysis of the situation and Obi’s role in causing it is astute—the tensions, which he exaggerates as a “tribal-war situation,” are caused in part by Obi’s “misguided zeal” (74).

The unnamed teacher plays a small yet significant role in the story. He is the one who first informs Obi about the path’s meaning in the village’s traditions and daily life. He also warns him about the “big row” that occurred the last time the teachers tried to prevent access to the path. This warning foreshadows the damage that is done to the school and its grounds after Obi blocks the path with wooden stakes and barbed wire. The teacher is subordinate to the headmaster and is described as speaking “apologetically” and shrugging his shoulders as he answers, “I don’t know” (72). The teacher is so insignificant to Obi that his presence is not even needed in the conversation, as Obi walks away while continuing to speak on the topic. Obi’s failure to understand the teacher’s significance and heed his warning leads directly to his own downfall.