Michael Obi is appointed the headmaster of the Ndume Central School by the Mission authorities, a religious colonial and gubernatorial organization. The Ndume Central School is still considered unprogressive and has yet to modernize, prompting the Mission Authorities to see Obi’s youth and energy as an advantage to the struggling school. Obi carries the weight of this responsibility with arrogance and sees his own secondary education as a point of pride that will ensure his success as the headmaster of the school.
Obi’s wife, Nancy, celebrates his promotion and together they make plans to modernize the school by planting gardens and beautifying the school grounds. Nancy and Obi also deride the older educators who do not share their progressive mindset while preparing to lead the school towards a new modern direction; they view these old educators as unsophisticated and unfit for teacher positions. Meanwhile Nancy daydreams of being the revered “queen” of the school and prepares to lead it by example.
Obi and his wife eventually lead the school by emphasizing high-quality teaching and planting beautiful gardens on the school grounds. However, one evening Obi sees an old woman from the village walk through the school compound and through the school gardens. Upon following her footsteps, he finds a little-used path that leads from the school to the village. Obi confronts another teacher about the path, who tells Obi about its importance to the villagers and notes that there was a huge outrage last time the school tried to close down the path. Nevertheless, Obi decides to construct a fence to prohibit the path from further use in fear that the Government Education Officer will see signs of its use during a coming inspection.
A few days later, the village priest visits Obi to try to get him to change his mind about the path, citing the path’s importance to the culture and history and explaining that it is because of the path that their ancestors can visit them and new children can be born. Obi refuses to reopen the path, emphasizing that it is his job to “eradicate” beliefs and actions that are pagan in nature and go against the modern goals of the school—in fact, he wants his students “to laugh at” pagan beliefs.
Two days later, a woman dies during childbirth, which the villagers see as their punishment for the closing of the path. A diviner reveals that “heavy sacrifice” will be necessary to satisfy the ancestors angered by the path’s closing. Obi wakes up the next morning to see that his gardens and much of his school grounds have been utterly destroyed. That day, a white Supervisor visits the school for the inspection. He writes a scathing report about the school grounds and the “tribal-war situation” that has sprung up between the school and the villagers, largely due to Obi’s “misguided zeal.”
