Education as a Colonial Weapon Theme Analysis

Education is a recurring point of contention in Achebe’s “Dead Men’s Path,” a story that centers around the Ndume Central school and its zealous new headmaster, Michael Obi. Readers’ first introduction to the Ndume school prefaces what is to come later in the short story. Achebe presents the school as markedly “unprogressive,” and later as a school that is “backward in every sense of the word.” For this reason, the school is of particular importance to the Mission authorities, the religious colonial body that spearheaded the school’s creation and which appoints the “young” and “energetic” Michael Obi as its new headmaster. Obi assumes his responsibility with the pride and zeal of someone who is intent on re-making the school into a “place of beauty” with “high standard teaching,” modeled after his own “sound secondary school education.” Together with the Mission authorities and his wife, Nancy, Obi dreams of the school not as a place of objective academic instruction, but as an extension of their colonial education. In other words, the school is meant “to instruct,” rather than “to educate,” the next generation of colonial subjects; the story implies that it will teach them what to think rather than how to think for themselves. The story thus reveals how, when controlled by a colonial power, educational institutions can be used as a weapon—namely, as a means to remake colonial subjects in the image of the colonizer.

By setting the story in a school and centering a teacher as its protagonist (or, perhaps, as its villain), Achebe establishes educational institutions as foundational to the spread of colonialism, foregrounding the major and controversial role colonialism will play in village. Eager to please his superiors, Obi thus comes to the village with a rigid sense of how things will be done. He and Nancy attempt to remake the school from the ground up in order to make it a more respected institution, one that adheres strictly to colonial ideas despite villagers’ protests. As a result, Obi and Nancy’s views about how the school should be run are arrogantly limited. Indeed, he and his wife are scornful of the teachers who do not share Obi’s ideas about how to instruct the children. Obi is especially eager to become a respected educator in a field he feels is oversaturated with “old and superannuated people […] who would be better employed as traders in the Onitsha market.” This suggests that he believes that those unwilling to embrace the dictates of colonialism shouldn’t be teachers at all. Ironically, Obi—the man tasked with managing the school—is distinctly uninterested in learning from or adapting to his circumstances and fails to ever question or meaningfully interrogate his own orders. This strongly suggests that the school Obi runs will not be a site of active learning, but rather one in which students are spoon fed unchallenged colonial ideology. At the same time, the fact that Obi and Nancy themselves are presented as such prideful, misguided characters serves as an implicit critique of the colonial educational system at large, which is clearly utterly disconnected from its students.

Because the school is meant to be a place to further colonial ideology at the expense of indigenous practices, Obi and the villagers’ diverging views become glaringly obvious once Obi prohibits the villager’s use of an ancestral footpath. That he scorns this path as being an inappropriate use of the school grounds emphasizes his narrow and limited view of education; he has come to tell villagers how things will be rather than to participate in an active exchange of ideas. This is further reflected by the fat that, instead of listening to the protests of other teachers who advise against the path’s closing, Obi worries only about what the Government Education Officer would think if he were to find the footpath open during his visit. Additionally, Obi is scandalized by the thought of what would happen if the villagers, invigorated by their illicit use of a prohibited footpath, “decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.”

Both thoughts show that Obi centers the thoughts of the Education Officer and the Mission authorities more than the villagers in his decision to close the footpath because they are the colonial agents that his curriculum aims to emulate. Despite the fact that the school is supposed to serve the village as an educational institution, it is in fact a weapon of the colonial authorities who rule it through Obi from the shadows. Furthermore, when the village priest appears later to make an appeal for the footpath, Obi dismisses him in much the same way he dismissed the previous teachers. This time, however, he says that he will not reopen the footpath because “the whole purpose of our school is to eradicate just such beliefs as that […] our duty is to teach your children to laugh at such ideas.” Obi’s commitment to giving his students a “sound” colonial education is especially evident here. He envisions education as a mechanism through which the children learn to scorn anything that does not adhere to British colonial values and teachings.

Obi’s conflict with the members of the village community plainly reveals the tensions that stem from his singular and often miscalculated way of educating the students. His educational goals for the community take their cues from colonial figures like the Education Officer and the Mission authorities, who have a vested interest in seeing Obi’s students educated in ways that will make them more acceptable in the eyes of other colonial institutions. Obi’s prohibition of the path makes sense in light of this; he sees it as a threat to the success of the Mission’s goal of instructing the community to respect and laud colonial practices alone.