Can we cross African boundaries through books? Head of Amalion Publishing, Sulaiman Adebowale’s interview with Laura Angela Bagnetto on RFI’s “Africa: Stories in the 55” program believes in the role of languages in making it happen.
Adebowale explains Amalion’s multilingual path and the decision to work across languages as a condition predicated on the situation of the continent. In order to broaden our knowledge and understanding of Africa, discussions on Africa cannot be monolingual because the continent and its peoples are not. Moreover, he argues that to promote better thinking on issues and challenges confronting Africa, we have to work beyond restrictive language boundaries and dichotomies of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Arabophone Africa. Finally, Adebowale gives a glimpse of a forthcoming publication The Culture Conspiracy and Development Planning in Africa, a collection of essays by scholars and practitioners on the debate around the culture and development nexus.
The full interview with Sulaiman Adebowale can be found here
Laura Angelo Bagnetto also interviewed Kevin Eze, the Nigerian novelist and author of The Peacekeeper’s Wife recently published by Amalion on his short story “Eating Bitter”, which explores the world of Chinese merchants in Dakar and published in Safe House, the Commonwealth nonfiction anthology. In the interview, Eze talks about his need to grasp reality better in a non-fiction way and how he managed to gain the trust of the Chinese community. Furthermore, he notes that one of the aims of his first novel is to give a greater voice to women in Africa.
The full interview with Kevin Eze can be found here