Dead Men's Path - Chinua Achebe

This story is basically a lesson of "never forgeting your roots" so to speak, or not knowing your past may affect your future. There are countless analogies that basically lead to one main point, and this story of "Dead Men's Path" is yet another. It's a story about a small time teacher, turned headmaster, turned dreamer "Obi", as he heads a new school with his equally ambitious wife. He, with new visions of grandeur,  soon forgets the traditon and ancestry of his people, which in turn will strike him later on. It is said he closes a certain "path" that leads into a sacred "burial ground", Obi not heeding the warnings of tradition and merely shrugging it off as baloney, continues the developement of the school, sealing the path, later on dealing with the karma brought upon him by himself when the school is razed and destroyed. This story basically teaches us not to forget our culture, tradtion as it were, because no matter how advance and how so called "modernized" we are it is our past that made us. In my case, growing up in a, shall we say mixed family, my cousins are full or quarter blooded eurasians including myself, it would be quite hard to pinpoint our "tradition", since out tradition just so happens to involve numerous countries. I personally, still "mano po" to my elders on both sides of the family, or I simply bow down to them whenever a family reunion is taking place. This story can perhaps me a great lesson for people and especially for me, I for one would like to marry a Korean girl, Koreans if I can say so myself are very traditional, even if appearance wise they are one of the most modern in the world today, they are essentially "asian", i.e very culture based, so we (I) must learn  how to respect that fact.