Dead Men`s Path

 

At first when our group read this story, we had problems with understanding the hole meaning of “ Dead Men’s Path”. It was a bit challenging at first, but we understood further the more we talked about it.

The main theme of the story is mainly about a conflict in one school named Ndume in Nigeria. The main character is Mr.Obi, the new headmaster of Ndume Central School,

he is eager to turn the school into a place of beauty, along with his supporting wife Nancy. His two aims is a high standard of teaching, and that the school compound should be turned into a place of beauty.They both look forward to introducing modern ways to this old-fashioned school, but they soon learned that everyone is not as eager as them.
Obi is scandalized one evening, when he finds out that the villagers is using a path, that goes right across the school compound, which Nancy had put a lot of time and effort into creating

.
The next day Obi tries talking about this, to one of the teachers working there. 
Obi could not understand why they allowed this to happen. The teacher said that the path appeared to be very important to the villagers and that it connected the village shrine with their place of burial. The teacher also said that they had attempted to close this path before, with no luck.
Obi decides to close this path once and for all.
The village priest called on the headmaster later and told that this could not be, their ancestors depended on the path and so on.
Obi would not believe this, the hole purpose of the school was the complete opposite of their believes.  Dead men do not require footpaths, he said.
Obi suggested that they could construct another path somewhere beyond the schools premises. He even suggested help if it was needed.
Two days later a young woman in the village died in childbed, a diviner consulted and prescribed heavy sacrifices to propitiate  ancestors who where insulted by the path no longer to use.
Obi woke up the next day to find ruins of his work. Everything was destroyed, and that very day the white supervisor came to inspect the school. He wrote a nasty report and more seriously about the tribal-war situation developing between the school and the village, which he wrote was the misguided zeal of the new headmasters fault.What do you think of, when you read this story?
Can you compare this story, with Nigeria’s situation?