In this month’s Africa: Stories in the 55, we speak to a writer and a publisher, both based in Dakar, Senegal. Sulaiman Adebowale is the founder and head of Amalion Publishing, a niche publisher who aims to unite Africa through books. Kevin Eze, whose novel, The Peacekeeper's Wife, was published by Amalion, speaks about "Eating Bitter", his latest foray into creative non-fiction with the Safe House anthology, published in conjunction with Commonwealth Writers.

 

Amalion Publishing, headed by Sulaiman Adebowale in Dakar, Senegal, aims to reach across the Africa’s colonial language divide to foster discussion by publishing academic texts and novels in both French and English—with a view to bringing local languages on board. “We cannot restrict ourselves to the phony boundaries of francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone, Arabophone Africa. If you don’t work across the languages, you will end up losing the interesting stuff,” says Adebowale.

Author Kevin Eze deftly maneuvers between fiction and non-fiction as a Nigerian writer living in Dakar, Senegal. His latest piece was commissioned for Safe House: An Anthology of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. Eze speaks about his short story, “Eating Bitter”, about the Chinese community in Dakar, and on writing about a woman's world for his novel, The Peacekeeper's Wife.