Obi himself thinks of the path, and its worshippers, as absolutely ridiculous, theorizing, “The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.” The path itself represents the rest of the continent, along with the Americas and Asia, as the battleground for these two powers, the colonists and indigenous peoples, to fight over. The heavy sticks and barbed wired that were put up so quickly and used to block off the path from the villagers represent the factories and rapid industrialization that the British were trying to hard to push on what they considered to be “third-world countries.” The images of flowers and hedges are beautifully crafted by Achebe are destroyed by the end of the story, representing the white man’s attempt to “civilize” the
Obi himself thinks of the path, and its worshippers, as absolutely ridiculous, theorizing, “The villagers might, for all I know, decide to use the schoolroom for a pagan ritual during the inspection.” The path itself represents the rest of the continent, along with the Americas and Asia, as the battleground for these two powers, the colonists and indigenous peoples, to fight over. The heavy sticks and barbed wired that were put up so quickly and used to block off the path from the villagers represent the factories and rapid industrialization that the British were trying to hard to push on what they considered to be “third-world countries.” The images of flowers and hedges are beautifully crafted by Achebe are destroyed by the end of the story, representing the white man’s attempt to “civilize” the