The concepts of coherence and cohesion have both been widely studied in linguistics and scholars are in no disagreement that they are both principal ingredients in creating a text. By text we mean a piece of utterance, whether spoken or written, whose parts have been put together to form a unified semantic and syntactic whole. The former refers to a semantic property of discourses based on the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences, while the latter refers essentially to the relations of meanings generated by the coming together of clauses and sentences within a discourse. But our focus in this paper is on cohesion, which encompasses the relations obtaining among the components of a discourse. The discourse here is a piece of written literary text. In the present study we explore the use of both lexical and grammatical cohesive ties in the award-winning iconoclastic, epistolary masterpiece of Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter. At the end of the study, it is shown clearly that the novel, though the first by the author, was largely successful due to the smoothness, simplicity and accessibility of the language occasioned by the brilliant and appropriate deployment of the cohesive ties, most especially referential ties and the repetitive nature of language.