It seems the thinking was that a less ambiguous ending made the story more suitable. I didn’t completely edit the ending but I did make the moral of the story less subtle. That is where the sales are significant enough to make publishing books for children a profitable venture.Ī few years ago a publisher of one of my earlier titles asked me to, “make the girl suffer at the end of the story so that the reader gets the message.” It was before I started to say no. The reality of most publishers on the continent (and I am talking mainly Anglophone sub-saharan Africa), is that to survive as publishers of fiction, they have to depend on the ministry of education or whichever department funds reading material for school children. I am also very aware that to a large extent the main client of these publishers determines what gets published and what doesn’t. This is because I know that the biggest customer for children’s and young adult fiction in most of the countries in which I have been published is biased towards stories with morally sound versus morally devoid characters and storylines that have a clear cut lesson.

However, I confess to feeling trepidation for refusing to change the story line – the character un-inebriated would have had implications for the whole plot. But having had my fiction for children published by various publishers on the continent of Africa, I felt the time had come to stand my ground for creative fiction that portrayed society without any air brushing. In the past, I probably would have changed the plot for the sake of getting published.

Patchwork by Ellen Banda-Aaku