The experience of the African immigrant, in the Diaspora or returning to the continent, has been integral to the fiction of Pede Hollist from the inception of his career as a writer. The preoccupation is evident in his first four short stories, as implied in the titles: ‘Going to America’, ‘Foreign Aid’, ‘BackHomeAbroad’ and ‘Resettlement’. His novel, So the Path Does Not Die, is probably the most profound in its handling of the issues surrounding immigration and return, not merely because as a novel it is more expansive but because the popular theme of biculturalism is interwoven with highly controversial ideas, including ideas on female circumcision – dangerous ground for any man to tread. Fortunately controversy can be accommodated since African literature is not static. As the literary critic, Ernest Emenyonu, states in ‘The African Novel in the 21st Century’, ‘new voices are emerging from all parts of the African continent not only to reinforce the voices of the generations before them, but also to reveal the new realities, visions and concerns of Africa and its people’ (xii).

Emenyonu's statement foregrounds a primary intention of many new African writers, which is to keep the past in the present. The objective is to ‘reinforce the voices of the generations before them’ at the same time as they ‘reveal the new realities, visions and concerns’ (xii, emphasis added). In effect, they need to look backward and forward simultaneously. This phenomenon is pronounced in So the Path Does Not Die, where the backward glance, in particular, is incisive. So the Path Does Not Die has an unusual reliance on repetition and return, demonstrating in several ways the author's bid to both reinforce and reveal. The Palestinian-American critic, Edward Said, elaborates on the achievability of this in a discussion on the eighteenth-century philosopher and historian, Giovanni Battista Vico, in The World, the Text and the Critic. Expounding on Vico's theory of the cycles of human history, Said employs an example from music that demonstrates how repetition and originality, reinforcement and revelation, can successfully happen together: