From Bullets to Business: Distilling Entrepreneurial Lessons from Chinua Achebe’s “Civil Peace”

The focus of this paper is to investigate how the close study, analysis and exploration of entrepreneurial themes from relevant literary texts can be fruitfully used to complement the efficient teaching and learning of entrepreneurship in Nigerian tertiary institutions. In this regard, the paper applies insights from a combination of the edutainment theory of arts and the pedagogic theory of arts to the close analysis of the entrepreneurial themes ensconced in Chinua Achebe’s “Civil Peace” where the entrepreneurial -protagonist, Jonathan Iwegbu, deploys his amazing entrepreneurial skills, such as innovation, resilience and resourcefulness to overcome the harsh economic challenges brought about by the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970. The study attempts to answer such challenging questions as: What are the entrepreneurial lessons that can be distilled from the character of Jonathan Iwegbu, the protagonist in “Civil Peace”? And how can such entrepreneurial lessons are creatively and effectively used for the teaching and learning of entrepreneurship in Nigerian tertiary institutions? Answers to these questions will help to highlight the urgency of, and need to encourage the teaching and learning of entrepreneurship in Nigerian tertiary institutions from literary perspectives. The study will be carried out through a library-based, analytical - cumqualitative research model with the focal point beamed on the entrepreneurial skills exhibited by Jonathan Iwegbu and the lessons therein. In the main, then; this study is interdisciplinary in form and orientation. The paper concludes that insights from literary texts can be gainfully deployed for the teaching and learning entrepreneurship in Nigerian tertiary institutions.