Is right to change something important to people, and just disregard their thoughts and feelings towards it, just to benefit themselves?
Dead man's Path by Chinua Achebe is a perfect example of this. The story takes place in Ndume, Nigeria, a new educated headmaster, Michael Obi, is to step in and take over. He decides to close a path that the village has been using for a long time and disregards the feelings of the village people and their traditions. In return karma bites him in the butt. His wife dies in childbirth, the school is vandalized and the then he is chastised!
An important thing to mention about the setting of this story is that it takes place in 1949, one of the main time periods of colonization ("apartheid")
Wikipedia states " Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced by the National Party governments of South Africa between 1948 and 1994, under which the rights of the majority 'non-white' inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white supremacy and minority rule was maintained."
I feel that this is why Chinua wrote this story; he wanted to get the message across that you can't just come in and change the traditions of people if they've been doing it for as long as people can remember. I also believed he wanted to show how cruel people can be towards people in a lessor power and that most the times they can just walk in and change things even if it isn't the right thing to do!
I feel this because in this story Michael Obi kind of represents the people coming in to try and colonize the Africans, he wants to change the way the people have lived even if they feel he shouldn't and the fact that he got punished was the way the Africans feel towards these higher power people. They want them to leave and let them practice their beliefs and traditions the way they always have!
Personally I believe regardless of what people think; everyone should have the freedom to believe in what they want, and to practice the traditions that they have always been doing. People need to just realize that everyone is equal and we should all live in peace, but this isn't going to happen anytime soon unfortunately
I agree with you, if a group's traditions are not harming anyone else, they should not be forced to reform them to fit someone's view of how people should live. However; if their practices were actually hurting other groups of people, then I would probably agree that maybe some aspects of traditions should be changed. But this is not the case in this story.
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