Playful Ethnography: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Nigerian Education

This paper looks at the critical and popular reception of Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart , as an authentic text offering an “insider” perspective on Igbo culture. Drawing from small magazines and university publications in 1950s Nigeria, this paper suggests that early Nigerian authors like Achebe were educated and began writing in a culture that valued a playful exploration of meaning in Western texts. These early publications express multiple uses of the texts students read in colonial school, and I read Achebe’s novel as an extension of this playfulness. Although it is generally seen as an example of the empire “writing back,” I argue that Things Fall Apart actually uses ethnographic accounts of Nigerian village life—especially G. T. Basden’s Niger Ibos and C. K. Meek’s Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe —in an open and exploratory manner. Seeing Achebe’s work in this light allows for a complex view of the novel’s presentation of Igbo life, and I argue that such a reading resituates his first novel as a playful encounter with ethnography rather than as a literary response to more traditional literary texts like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson .