As with much of his work, Chinua Achebe's short story "Dead Men's Path" depicts the friction between Africans and colonizing Europeans. The story concerns Michael Obi, who is made the headmaster of a school that he plans to modernize. This entails closing off a path that runs through the school grounds, despite the concerns of the teachers and the scorn of the village priest. Colonization is full of such stories, in which traditional beliefs are trampled by colonizers like Obi. He says that if the path is allowed to remain, "the villagers might ... decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual." The word "pagan" is well chosen on Achebe's part, as it conveys a blanket dismissal of any traditional beliefs or customs. Obi doesn't know anything about these beliefs, nor does he care to.

The erosion of traditional culture by colonization was often a subtle, invisible process. In this story, though, it is made starkly literal. As Obi surveys the school grounds, he "[finds] faint signs of an almost disused path from the village across the school compound to the bush on the other side." This path has been cut into the earth by time, by people walking that same way over and over again. It is hard to think of an image that better conveys tradition. In order to erase the path and the traditional beliefs connected to it, "heavy sticks were planted closely across the path at the two places where it entered and left the school premises. These were further strengthened with barbed wire." It is not enough to simply barricade the two sides of the path; there must also be an implicit threat for anyone who may transgress.

As so rarely happened in actuality, here the colonizer gets his comeuppance. The morning after meeting with the priest, Obi awakes to find this:

The beautiful hedges were torn up not just near the path but right round the school, the flowers trampled to death and one of the school buildings pulled down.

It is not clear who did this, but Achebe seems to suggest it was the spirits of the villagers' ancestors who took their revenge. All of the attempts to "modernize" the school that Obi and his wife took are now gone. Perhaps most crushingly for Obi, though, the school supervisor comes to visit and sees the grounds in this disrepair. Obi does not respect the villagers' traditional beliefs, but he does respect the institutional authority represented by the supervisor. Obi's aspirations can be tracked through his attempts to impose himself on the landscape. His downfall comes when the landscape itself rebels.