Cassava Republic Press – serie

A companion volume to the widely-acclaimed anthology She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak (2018), Love Offers No Safety challenges society at large to re-think its idea of what being a man entails, and how such concepts limits men and women’s freedom to be, to live and to understand each other. Love Offers No Safety demonstrates that queer men and straight men are very much alike in how they respond to societal pressure and the definition of what a man should be.The selected narratives, from over 25 contributors, show some queer men, like their straight counterparts, hold on to sexism, toxic masculinity and patriarchy as a way to justify their masculinity within a society that prescribes such a role and expectations.

How many lies can you tell yourself before looking away becomes complicity?In the fictional African state of Zambuena, Katmé enjoys a life of privilege as the wife of an ambitious politician. Her closest friend Samy is an artist who refuses to play by the same rules, using his work to expose the inequality and corruption beneath the regime.When Samy’s provocative new exhibition makes him a target of the authorities, Katmé is caught between the friend she loves and the political establishment that protects her comfortable life. As the pressure mounts, the compromises she has learned to live with become increasingly impossible to ignore.Moving from sharp satire into something altogether darker, The Aquatics is a fierce, unsettling novel about friendship, self-deception and the price of looking away.

A woman on trial. A marriage built on silence. A culture that demands endurance.Sali, a working mother of three, is on trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. Accused of shooting him after a fight in their bedroom, she pleads not guilty and must rely on an overworked legal aid lawyer as a courtroom hungry for judgement looks on.Fourteen years earlier, Sali’s life was shaped by a different kind of violence. The pressure to conform, to endure, to shipikisha. When an affair with a wealthy, married man ends in sudden death, she enters a loveless marriage to escape the shame of unwed motherhood. What follows is a life marked by infidelity, financial strain, postnatal depression and quiet suffering, until endurance finally gives way.Told through a braided narrative moving between past and present, The Shipikisha Club is a powerful literary novel about marriage, motherhood and the devastating cost of silence in contemporary Zambia.