“Our ways among strangers”: tradition and late modernity in Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die

Abstract

Questions of modernity, globalization, and transnationalism have occupied the thematic focus of African literature in the past three decades. In this paper, I argue that the adverse consequences of modernity, globalization, and transnationalism are at the heart of risk and uncertainty in Pede Hollist’s novel So the Path Does not Die. I pursue Ulrich Beck’s understanding of the consequences of the victories of modernity as risks in the novel. Risks in the novel can be read at macro-levels of normative values and the socio-psychological frame of collective fear, that derive from choosing from multivariate mediating institutions, traditions, and social standards; on the meso-level of family or group disarray; and on the individual level of existential anxiety. In these three stages, the novel deals with the questioning and changing status of tradition in the social order and the transnational problems of risk in a world in which individuals have to share the consequences of dangers and threats that may have been produced elsewhere through policies and social frameworks. This novel interlinks the complexities of postcolonial fictionality with ongoing late-modernity dynamics to depict the risks of late modernity.