11 Dead Men’s Path
Chinua Achebe (1953)
Michael Obi’s hopes were fulfilled much earlier than he had expected. He was appointed headmaster of Ndume Central School in January 1949. It had always been an unprogressive school, so the Mission authorities decided to send a young and energetic man to run it. Obi accepted this responsibility with enthusiasm. He had many wonderful ideas, and this was an opportunity to put them into practice. He had had sound secondary school education which designated him a “pivotal teacher” in the official records and set him apart from the other headmasters in the mission field. He was outspoken in his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often less educated ones.
“We shall make a good job of it, shan’t we?” he asked his young wife when they first heard the joyful news of his promotion.
“We shall do our best,” she replied. “We shall have such beautiful gardens, and everything will be just modern and delightful . . . ” In their two years of married life she had become completely infected by his passion for “modern methods” and his denigration of “these old and superannuated people in the teaching field who would be better employed as traders in the Onitsha market.” She began to see herself already as the admired wife of the young headmaster, the queen of the school.
The wives of the other teachers would envy her position. She would set the fashion in everything. . . Then, suddenly, it occurred to her that there might not be other wives. Wavering between hope and fear, she asked her husband, looking anxiously at him. “All our colleagues are young and unmarried,” he said with enthusiasm which for once she did not share. “Which is a good thing,” he continued.
“Why?”
“Why? They will give all their time and energy to the school.”
Nancy was downcast. For a few minutes she became skeptical about the new school; but it was only for a few minutes. Her little personal misfortune could not blind her to her husband’s happy prospects. She looked at him as he sat folded up in a chair. He was stoop-shouldered and looked frail. But he sometimes surprised people with sudden bursts of physical energy. In his present posture, however, all his bodily strength seemed to have retired behind his deep-set eyes, giving them an extraordinary power of penetration. He was only twenty-six but looked thirty or more.
On the whole, he was not unhandsome.”
A penny for your thoughts, Mike,” said Nancy after a while, imitating the woman’s magazine she read.
“I was thinking what a grand opportunity we’ve got at last to show these people how a school should be run.”
Ndume School was backward in every sense of the word. Mr. Obi put his whole life into the work, and his wife hers too. He had two aims. A high standard of teaching was insisted upon, and the school compound was to be turned into a place of beauty. Nancy’s dream-gardens came to life with the coming of the rains and blossomed. Beautiful hibiscus and allamanda hedges in brilliant red