BETWEEN ROOT AND ROUTES: UNDERSTANDING AFRICANNESS AND AFROPOLITANISM IN “SO THE PATH DOES NOT DIE” BY PEDE HOLLIST

Abstract

This paper explores the concepts of Africanness and Afropolitanism as represented in “So The Path does not Die” (2012) by Pede Hollist, a diasporic narrative that engages with issues of identity, migration, and cultural negotiation. The novel chronicles the experiences of Finaba Marah, a Sierra Leonean woman whose journey from Freetown to the United States foregrounds the tensions between traditional African values and modern transnational identities. Hollist situates Africanness within the framework of communal belonging, indigenous customs, and gendered social expectations epitomized by the female initiation ritual that marks Finaba’s passage into womanhood. Conversely, Afropolitanism emerges through Finaba’s encounter with cosmopolitan spaces that challenge fixed notions of identity and enable new forms of hybridity and self-definition. The paper argues that Hollist’s narrative resists monolithic constructions of African identity by presenting Africanness and Afropolitanism being fluid and intersecting than mutually exclusive. Drawing on the theoretical insights from Achille Mbembe, Simon Gikandi, and Taiye Selasi, the study situates the text within broader debates on African modernity, diaspora and postcolonial subjectivity.Ultimately, Hollist’s text reimagines the African woman’s journey not as a linear movement from tradition to modernity, but as a complex negotiation between rootedness and global mobility-a testament to the evolving meanings of being African in the twenty –first century.