In 2024, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) made headlines when they announced Pede Hollist’s So The Path Does Not Die, and Elma Shaw’s Redemption Road as set texts for their 2026-2030 exam cycle. With both authors respectively hailing from Sierra Leone and Liberia, their inclusion in the Literature-in-English curriculum was noteworthy as it marked a departure from previous years when Nigerian and Ghanaian-authored novels dominated the exam’s African Prose selection.
This kind of shake up is nothing new in Hollist’s writing career. Back in 2013, he emerged as a Caine Prize contender, disrupting what might have otherwise been an all-Nigerian shortlist with Foreign Aid, a short story centred around Logan (an Americanization of Balogun), a Sierra Leonean returnee distraught over a couple of missing suitcases and the state of affairs in his family. That year’s prize was eventually awarded to Tope Folarin’s Miracle, however, Hollist impressed literary minds with the way he combined comedic prose, eagle-eyed observation, and approximately 10,000 words to serve up an enthralling tale about reverse culture shock and hypocrisy.
A little over a decade on, Logan’s tale is preserved in BackHomeAbroad And Other Stories, a literary portmanteau of 15 short stories set across Sierra Leone, the United States and the fictional Teneria, whose mix of natural beauty and societal dysfunction qualify it as a stand-in for any West African country.
Migrant struggles are a recurrent theme in this collection, and like a social anthropologist, Hollist appears particularly interested in the impact of emigration on the family.
Resettlement tells the story of Marie and Joe Coker, Sierra Leonean refugees in the Gambia, whose family values are splintered as a direct consequence of their instability. In Outbreak At the Renaissance, a worldly neighbour encourages a codependent housewife to negotiate independence on her own terms. After her interracial marriage sours, the protagonist of Payout by the Liberty Highway grapples with her expectations of marital happiness, and in the titular BackHomeAbroad, a Sierra Leonean-American couple’s marriage is threatened by the rural poor-urban elite strife fuelling the war in their homeland.
Some authors mine their lived experiences for inspiration and indeed, Hollist’s own life has been shaped by migration. Born in Freetown, he spent part of his childhood in London, pursued postgraduate education in Nova Scotia, and is currently resident in Florida, where he is a professor of English at the University of Tampa. He might be a citizen of the world, but he remains attuned to local African realities as evidenced by stories like The Song of a Goat, which demonstrates how institutions protect the powerful at the expense of the underprivileged, Wherever Something Stands, which draws inspiration from a longstanding inter-ethnic feud in Ghana’s Upper East Region, and The Tale of the Three Water Carriers, a tragedy about three young men struggling to eke out a living amidst difficult circumstances.
Writers who deploy pathos to tug at the readers’ heartstrings often create sympathetic heroes and perfect victims. Hollist dispenses with this kind of characterisation, choosing instead to hold up a mirror to human complexity. As if in homage to Kwaku Ananse, revered in Akan culture as the god of stories, wit and trickery feature in his arsenal. He plays with humour in Going to America, and subverts readers’ expectations in Underlying Condition. In Hollist’s hands, storytelling is not just about plotting a narrative arc but taking creative risks. Mami Wata’s Daughters borrows from oral storytelling techniques, while Okonkwo’s Revenge is a postmodernist inter-textual exchange with Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s classic novel.
Overall, the stories in this book are nuanced and multilayered, qualities that make the collection amenable to rereading. The Caine Prize might have eluded him (for now), but with BackHomeAbroad And Other Stories, Hollist proves himself a master of storyteller!
***Akumbu Uche is a writer and storyteller from Nigeria. Her works have been published by thelagosreview.ng, Aké Review, Brittle Paper, Canthius, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.
