Gods for Sale: Religious Appropriation and Capitalism in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods Inc.

ABSTRACT

This paper reads Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods Inc. (2014) as a postcolonial postsecular novel in which the concepts of religious appropriation and capitalism as a faux religion are used to explore the commodification of indigenous gods. I draw on Rebekah Cumpsty’s theory of postcolonial postsecular literature, Liz Bucar’s idea of religious appropriation and Michael Löwy’s argument that capitalism is a type of religion. These three positions frame my reading of the novel’s concerns with religion, Western capitalism and transnationality in ways that, as I argue, represent Western capitalism as a type of religion that the novel’s protagonist aspires to be part of, despite Western capitalism’s exclusionary standards. Foreign Gods Inc., the novel’s eponymous store, is guided by an American capitalist agenda that commodifies non-Western cultural symbols and artefacts for an elite clientele, disregarding these artefacts’ original cultural significance. Indigenous religions and their artefacts are appropriated in the West and made to conform to its capitalist religiosity. As a postcolonial postsecular novel, Foreign Gods Inc. acknowledges and subverts the binaries between the religious and the secular. It does so by exploring the worship of indigenous gods on one hand, and detailing their commodification on the other. Religious appropriation thus occurs alongside Western capitalism’s potential as a substitute religion. This relationship may be explained by postsecularist ideas that argue that the sacred and secular are interconnected in postcolonial literature.

KEYWORDS:

• postsecularism
• religious appropriation
• Nigerian literature
• idolatry in Africa
• religious syncretism
• postcolonial mobility
• Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods Inc. (2014) is a novel about religious appropriation; it explores the religiosity of capitalism through the commodification of gods. The novel follows Ikechukwu Uzondu, who struggles to integrate and participate in United States society (or American – I will use the two terms interchangeably) because of his foreign identity. Frustrated and exhausted by his financial and relational problems in New York, he returns home to Utonki in Nigeria to steal the village’s war god, Ngene, and sell it to an exclusive eponymous store for what he hopes will be a staggering, life-changing price. Once Ike’s plan to steal a god commences, the novel alternates between present and past. In the era that precedes Ike, we learn how Ngene, the war god, thwarted Christian missionaries’ attempts to convert Ike’s ancestors: Ike’s present and past are informed by tensions between Western and Nigerian cultures, a tension perpetuated by Ike in his attempt to sell his culture’s heritage. Ike’s connection to Utonki is the advantage he needs to sell to Foreign Gods Inc., which, as its name indicates, is in the business of buying and selling indigenous gods to an affluent market ‘for sheer decadence’ (Ndibe 62). Ike’s narrative illustrates the West’s fetishization of foreign, generally Third-World, indigenous artefacts and religious symbols in a way that suggests religious appropriation. The commodification of these artefacts subverts their sacredness within their cultural contexts.

‘Religion’ is a notoriously difficult term to define. Liz Bucar offers a broad definition: religion concerns ‘everyday human practices that are connected to histories of interpretation, systems of ethics, and broader metaphysical and cosmological claims’ (22). Kathryn Tanner speaks of religion as embodied: ‘religious beliefs, whether of obviously practical import or not, are meant not just to be believed but to be lived, to orient behaviour, attitudes and actions toward oneself and others’ (6). There is also something to be said of religion’s materiality. To expand on and adapt these definitions of the term, we may understand religion, or, perhaps more accurately, religions (in the plural) as communal practices characterized by a dependence on or belief in a supreme entity that is often signified through rituals, artefacts or symbols which support, inform and transform the believers’ behaviours. Pluralizing certain terms, especially those that speak to paradigms that define the lives, behaviours and beliefs of millions across the world, often seems inevitable, as Luther Martin suggests when he uses the term ‘Christianities’ to affirm the tenuous nature of religion and argue against the idea of a singular, uncontaminated system of belief (282). Any reference to a singular ‘Christianity’ or ‘Nigerian/Igbo indigenous religion’ in this analysis is not to disregard the heterogeneity of these terms.

This paper is not concerned only with religion per se, but also ‘faux religions,’ an understanding of which lies in their heterogeneity. To develop the term, I focus, for the most part, on the novel’s context to conceptualize the idea, which could then be altered and adapted to other cultural contexts and narratives as far as it may apply to those. The novel represents Western capitalism (henceforth, simply, ‘capitalism’) as a faux religion that seeks to ‘shape people in its own image’ (Tanner 8) as far as they strive to conform to its standards and ‘doctrine’. Ike’s primary motivation for stealing and selling a god pivots on his aspirations to conform to capitalist culture to acquire what he believes is freedom, belonging, and, to an extent, transcendence. Ike’s financial woes and dreams of accumulating wealth position him to trade the symbol of his religion for the money that could grant him the status he seeks in New York. Ike trades one religion (his own) for another (capitalism).

Rebekah Cumpsty’s ideas on postcolonial postsecularism are helpful in framing my reading of the novel, especially as Cumpsty’s views consider the ‘intricate negotiations between [religion and secularism]’ (Postsecular Poetics xii), a thematic concern that permeates the novel. As a concept, postsecularism affords this study the vocabulary required to explore capitalism’s potential as a faux religion, especially in contexts such as the commodification of indigenous gods. Wealth, and the blind pursuit thereof, assumes the position of the sacred within the context of capitalism, with the accumulation of large amounts of wealth offering something akin to religious transcendence. Cumpsty argues that Ndibe’s novel ‘figures both the embodied and spatial mediation of secular and religious experience’ by eliminating the boundaries between ‘modern life’ and the ‘terrain of enchantment’ (9). The novel, for Cumpsty, reads capitalism as a ‘terrain of enchantment’ that, as colonial Christianity has previously done, seeks privilege ‘over other forms of religious belief’ (Postsecular Poetics 8).

In Foreign Gods Inc., Ike’s desires for material and financial wealth are driven by his promise to provide for his mother, who lives in his home village, Utonki, Nigeria. This commitment adds pressure to his existing debts while he lives in New York. Although Ike has a degree in economics, he has ‘worked as a driver for thirteen years, ever since graduating from Amherst College, cum laude’ (13). He is barred from participating in the American economy, at least to any significant degree, because of his identity as a Nigerian immigrant: his thick Nigerian accent makes him an undesirable candidate for the jobs for which he is otherwise qualified (22). Ike is left desperate, destitute and disillusioned by his hopes for success in America, and so he turns to questionable means of accumulating wealth.

Ike has a relational connection to his home village: his uncle, Osuakwu, is the war god Ngene’s chief priest, and Ike possibly his uncle’s successor. This lineage becomes the means through which Ike gains access to financial freedom and wealth in the United States. He becomes an integral character through which to explore the commodification of indigenous gods. In the following sections, I will explain how the religion of capitalism creates the sort of conditions that compel Ike to steal a god that is otherwise priceless to his community, especially his uncle. I will then explore how religious appropriation, which is Ike’s supposed ticket out of economic and cultural exclusion, perpetuates capitalism’s hegemony as an exclusive and elusive standard.

Religious Capitalism

In an interview with Cumpsty, Ndibe says, ‘Ike inhabits that strange place where in the US he’s seen as “foreign”, and in his natal community in Nigeria he’s regarded as American’ (Cumpsty, ‘Humour and Spirituality’ 28). He adds that the fate of immigrants, as with Ike’s, is ‘dependent on the ever-shifting exigencies of the capitalist market’ (28). Ike’s desperation results in a strange mix of capital and the sacred, as Cumpsty comments:

Endless consumption makes us devotees of capital; extending the commodification to sacred artefacts highlights the absurdity and excesses of unbridled accumulation, where, yes, those who can afford to trade in god-objects become the arbiters of a capitalist theology. (‘Humour and Spirituality’ 29)

From the onset, the novel illustrates the type of excess and ‘unbridled accumulation’ that American culture inspires in Ike. When he first visits Foreign Gods Inc., Ike sees a woman with ‘black high-heeled shoes’ that are ‘riveted with nodes of diamond’ (2). She leaves with a new god in a ‘gleaming black BMW’ (2). The prices of some of the gods in the gallery’s catalogue range from $171 455 to $1.13 million (3), creating an air of exclusivity cultivated not only in the prohibitive prices, but also in the shop’s layout: there is a secluded section upstairs called ‘heaven,’ which is only accessible by invitation – it is available to ‘a small circle of long-term collectors or their designated dealers’ (2). This exclusivity underscores the business’s allure as well as its effectively unattainable requirements for assimilation, setting up most potential participants for failure. With its promises of an exclusive heaven, coupled with the kind of escapism, or transcendence, that overconsumption may afford the wealthy, Foreign Gods Inc. provides a buying experience that fosters a capitalist quasi-theology. Ike buys into and perpetuates this. His perception of what it takes to succeed in America hinges on his desperation for what may be described as salvation from his financial difficulties.

The idea of capitalism as a religion is overtly expressed in our attitudes to capitalism’s materiality. In an article that draws on Walter Benjamin’s theorization of capitalism as a (Christian) religion, Michael Löwy expands on some of the finer details of Benjamin’s ideas. Paper money, for example, Löwy explains, occupies the same position as saints do in religion; that is, money within capitalism becomes an object of adoration. Money, at least to Ike and other characters in the novel, is both the means to an end and the end itself: money affords one the access to the culture that depends on it, and, at the same time, its acquisition becomes an endless goal regardless of which needs are met in the process. For Max Weber, this striving for money

becomes understood completely as an end in itself – to such an extent that it appears as fully outside the normal course of affairs and simply irrational, at least when viewed from the perspective of the ‘happiness’ or ‘utility’ of the single individual. Here, people are oriented to acquisition as the purpose of life; acquisition is no longer viewed as a means to the end of satisfying the substantive needs of life. (17)

This never-ending pursuit of money sustains itself because capitalism encourages its believers ‘to see what they are doing – what they must do to get ahead – as meaningful, valuable or simply inevitable’ (Tanner 10).

The absurdity of Ike’s plan to steal and sell an indigenous god is motivated by his desperate hopes that ‘his bills would be paid off, with lots of cash to spare’ (Ndibe 270). His optimism roots itself in the status that trading foreign gods affords those that are already part of that culture. As the practice gains ground as ‘a new diversion for the wealthiest of the wealthy’ (71), Ike cannot help but be filled with the ‘welcoming waft of crisp dollar notes’ as he carries the war god, Ngene, away from its shrine in Utonki (270). Ike plays into the ‘marketing of exoticism’ (Gurr 4) that makes Foreign Gods Inc. a successful enterprise. Ike executes his plan without considering the long-term repercussions of stealing Ngene.

Löwy explains another way that capitalism functions as a religion: both capitalism and religion operate in infinite timescapes, where every day is sacred, venerated and orchestrated toward celebrating the power of the practice or ideology (64). Both capitalism and religion endure. The owner of the store, Mark Gruels, explains that ‘in a postmodern world, even gods and sacred objects must travel or lose their vitality; any deity that remained stuck in its place and original purpose would soon become moribund’ (64). Gods, in other words, must be in a perpetual state of travel if they are to remain valuable. The god-object’s value is predicated on perpetual flux: capitalism’s success depends on unsettling things. Movement and value speak also to Ike’s circumstances as an immigrant. As though he is living by Gruels’ principles of movement and worth, Ike as immigrant must move across the world multiple times (back and forth between Nigeria and the United States) to sustain his self-worth, and, as Ike believes, increase his value. Immigrants, defined as such by their movement, their displacement, are treated in similar ways. Ike laments his failure in American capitalism, determining that others use the superficiality of his accent as grounds for exclusion: ‘“They’re certainly selling stuff to me, to lots of people who speak the way I do. But I apply for a job and I’m excluded because of ‘my accent’ … . It’s worse than telling me outright I’m a foreigner, I don’t belong”’ (57).

Despite Ike’s movements, despite playing by the rules of capitalism, he ultimately perishes. Mark Gruels' maxim, ‘travel or perish,’ is conditional, articulated from a position of privilege; for Ike, the maxim shifts to travel and perish. Of course, Gruels’ assumption of the relationship between movement and the value of a thing ignores the fact that Ngene’s place before reaching America had been permanent, yet he was still valued; but this value, of course, did not adhere to capitalist standards. Ngene’s removal from the village reduces the object’s inherent value to only a ‘“thousand bucks”’ (325) and therefore the god’s vital worth perishes in a market in which ‘“African gods are no longer in vogue”’ (322). The fickle way in which god-objects gain and lose value within a capitalist system speaks to their expendability, and, as Ike discovers, the same applies to immigrants living in America.

Ike’s disillusionment speaks to some counterarguments to Afropolitanism’s tendencies to romanticize mobility and global interconnectedness. Emma Dabiri is wary of the term’s ‘collusion with consumerism’ (104). Dabiri contests Afropolitanism’s support of the commodification of African and African diasporic cultures and cultural artefacts and the fact that it seemingly measures African progress ‘by the extent to which it can reproduce a Western lifestyle, now without having physically to be in the West’ (106). Dabiri’s perspective is validated by Ike’s visit to Tony Iba’s house, an acquaintance in Utonki who also prefers to be called ‘Tony Curtis’. When Ike visits his house, people are watching a recorded NBA Championship game, and when Ike asks them how they would spend their money if they were paid like basketball players, one of them responds: ‘“I’ll buy lots of shirts like this one. Tommy Hilfiger, FUBU, Calvin Klein. Then I’ll buy four – no, ten – big cars. Hummer, Navigator, Bentley, Mercedes, Rolls-Royce”’ (Ndibe 246). Evidently, wealth within Africa parallels American culture and its status symbols. Birgit Neumann and Gabriele Rippl are also aware of how (social and spatial) mobility in an Afropolitan context means something different to different social sectors. They question whether the ‘celebration of mobility and glamorous life-style can do justice to those who live in places not of their choosing and who experience mobility as a site of radical uncertainty rather than a liberating jet-setting experience’ (164). Essentially, the romanticization of mobility renders it an elusive yet alluring idea that perpetuates marginalization. So, Gruels’ advocacy of movement and mobility is advice that benefits only him in his position of power; while others move, Gruels, and the consumerist capitalism that he represents, remains stable in his wealth and influence.

Stability and movement are not valued equality in African and Western contexts, and this applies to movement in time as well. Capitalism’s commodification of non-Western cultures and their artefacts necessitates that these ‘Other’ cultures be relegated to a permanent past. Mathias Nilges explains that, under capitalism, African cultures and artefacts (as well as all indigenous culture and artefacts generally) are ‘associated with a constitutive pastness that collapses into a-historical timelessness’ (168). From this, Africa becomes ‘devoid of change’ (143). This gives these artefacts their aesthetic appeal and value. Osuakwu, Ike’s uncle, agrees, reflecting that, upon their arrival, ‘“the oyibo [the Westerner] has come and turned today into yesterday”’ (201). Osuakwu understands that Westerners, specifically white missionaries, replace the villagers’ today with the past, excluding them from contemporaneity and disregarding the fact that Ngene’s value extends beyond his pastness. In capitalist terms, the god-object’s value is located in its past and only its past; removing the object from its primary place is to ignore its value now for a people here.

Löwy continues his reading of capitalism as a religion: both, according to Löwy (who reads Weber and Benjamin in this regard), produce rather than expiate guilt or debt. Löwy draws parallels between God and the market, where all who participate are indebted to them: those who have much are indebted to multiply their possessions; those who have nothing are guilty of not having accumulated anything to contribute to the system (65). Whether (morally, spiritually, materially) rich or poor, the system is set up such that one is in a constant state of debt. This debt, in turn, generates feelings of guilt – a kind of emotional debt. Debt and guilt are simultaneously at the forefront of Ike’s motivations for stealing and selling Ngene: he has debts to pay to both his mother and American society, and, as a consequence, he experiences guilt from both his theft and having accumulated these debts.

Likewise, Pastor Uka insists that ‘God will unleash blessings’ in Ike’s life, but only for a fee. Pastor Uka subjects his congregation to the same prosperity-preaching logic, repeating to them that ‘God blessed the generous giver’ even though their faces are covered with a ‘hope worn thin’ from ‘repeated disappointments’ (154) after continuously giving and not seeing their efforts matched in blessings. Pastor Uka capitalizes on the continuation of his congregation’s hope, where their hope endures because they are in an enduring state of lack – a state of debt.

Postsecularism and Religious Appropriation

Cumpsty’s Postsecular Poetics (2023) ‘reads the dynamic of sacred and secular experience as a condition of postcolonial or neo-colonial contexts’ (xii). The significance in Cumpsty’s work is observing how postsecular literature includes ‘characters that are seen to be negotiating their spiritual or secular condition’ (8). According to Cumpsty, ‘Ngene [the war god] is the sacred centre of the novel that undermines any simplistic oppositions between religious and secular, enchanted and disenchanted, urban and rural’ so that, consequently, ‘easy identifications of a “secular Western” experience’ are destabilized (11). Vacillation between these binaries is illustrated in several ways throughout the text. Gruels, incredulous as he is about the value of the god, is convinced of its enchantment after Ike sells it to him. And Ike assumes that he escapes the calling that he must be Ngene’s next priest because he retreats to the United States; but the calling of his sacred duty follows him there when he experiences the same madness that Reverend Stanton was subjected to several decades before. Ike, by the novel’s end, embraces the sacred, a part of which seemed to have always been inside him, inherited, it is implied, through his uncle.

Ike also has a personal experience dictated by the god’s power that he cannot readily ignore. Whenever there is a storm, Ike becomes prone to fainting spells that, according to his paternal grandmother, were once an ordeal his uncle went through before becoming Ngene’s priest (17). These episodes, as the narrator calls them, indicate his connection to Ngene as his potential succeeding priest. Although he prematurely usurps his uncle’s position, Ike performs the same libations and rituals that his uncle did for the wooden statue:

I’ve become a chief priest. The thought brought him to the edge of an ironic smile.

When he came back, he dropped drumsticks of Jamaican jerk chicken and grains of rice on the floor next to the statue. Then he spilled drops of whiskey on the floor as well. (307)

Ike conforms to his uncle’s traditions and expresses his belief in the necessity of offering libations to Ngene, even if he does not believe that the god is still relevant and powerful after a long sabbatical from wars. Ike acts out of reverence for tradition and custom more than out of reverence for a god whose power arouses his scepticism.

Before Ike travels to Nigeria to steal Ngene, there is a warning that a confidant gives him. Without knowing precisely what it is that Ike plans to buy and sell, Big Ed, ‘his Jamaican neighbor and fellow cab driver’ (15), says to Ike, ‘“so long you’re not selling people for make the money”’ and ‘“so long you’re not selling the ancestors”’ (51). Selling Ngene in this case is likened to the crime of selling ancestors and people; Big Ed underscores the historical period in which people, now their ancestors, were sold to slavers. Ike’s engagement in this historical re-enactment recalls what Paul Gilroy refers to as the ‘the fragmentation of self … which modernity seems to promote,’ especially in a (post)slavery context in which black people attempt to make sense of their identity after experiencing a collective degradation (188). Ike is torn between his loyalty to his uncle, and by extension to his cultural homeland, and his desire for social mobility and material wealth in American capitalist terms.

In Kwame Anthony Appiah’s seminal In My Father’s House (1992), we learn that ‘what we have seen in recent times in the United States is not secularization – the end of religions – but their commodification’ (145). What is treated as secularization in the West, the ‘dying away’ (145) of religion and spirituality, is only a transfer from one type of religiosity to another. Bucar adds to this, arguing that the secular and the sacred are connected by lucrative appropriation from the part of the dominant culture against the welfare of the appropriated culture. Religious appropriation refers to instances ‘when individuals adopt religious practices [or symbols] without committing to religious doctrines, ethical values, systems of authority, or institutions, in ways that exacerbate existing systems of structural injustice’ (2). Ike participates in the commodification and appropriation of gods only insofar as he steals and delivers an indigenous god to the store; the profits and recognition that he desires eludes him, and he is ultimately deprived by the dominant group.

The capitalist economy that appropriates these gods presumes these religious symbols have ‘value, but in this case the value is assumed to be independent of its religious context’ (Bucar 9). This results in ‘profoundly offensive’ repercussions that are ‘an affront to [the community’s] core values and sense of self’ (Bucar 15). Religious appropriation concedes that this recognition of the sacred does not negate the power dynamics that perpetuate the commodification of gods at the expense of those that venerate them sincerely. This explains why Gruels can simultaneously acknowledge Ngene’s power while also introducing Ngene into the capitalist market, a context foreign to the god’s purpose.

In their introduction to Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction (2017), Helga Ramsey-Kurz and Melissa Kennedy argue that there is a ‘capitalist drive for profit that lies at the heart of the empire’ (1). The Western world ‘has so far failed to shape a new narrative of success that is not capitalist and materialistically aspirational in nature’ (10). In other words, the standards and definitions of value are determined by the same culture that shapes the narrative of success, and, therefore, those who seek to be a part of this culture must conform to its narrative. Appiah suggests that the value of an indigenous artefact is decided ‘by the construction and the marking of differences’ (143). For indigenous artefacts to be considered valuable, they must exude ‘aesthetic mystification, racial ritual, erotic fetishisation’ (Janis 7). So, the more ‘authentic’ the god-objects are, the more fashionable they will be, and so more appealing and valuable. In the appropriation and sale of god-objects, the market relies on distinct difference.

Yet the capitalist market is also what determines these differences. Walter D. Mignolo posits that capitalism relies on a ‘control of knowledge’ (110). The knowledge that capitalism controls is used to determine the ‘idea of one’s superiority and the other’s inferiority, for it is difficult to exploit an equal’ (107). Therefore, the ‘differential in economic wealth goes hand in hand with the racialization of differences, and both are foundational for Western capitalist civilization’ (107). That capitalism derives its wealth and success from difference may be seen in the literary marketplace as well, especially when it concerns postcolonial writers. Jens Martin Gurr writes that ‘the “spicing-up” of fiction with a few indigenous expressions just unusual enough to add ethnic flair but not jarring enough to impede immediate understanding and easy consumption’ pertains to ‘the commodification of ethnicity and difference to increase saleability’ (4). Gurr’s concern is that, in this market, ‘the commercial mainstream will incorporate and thus defuse voices of dissent’ and that, simultaneously, ‘voices of dissent actively make use of the system themselves in order to become audible as voices of dissent’ (8–9).

This insight of the literary market is adaptable to Ike’s plight as far as he similarly looks to capitalism for acceptance and recognition while his significance as an individual, including his history and that of his natal community, is defused in the process. For instance, rather than emphasise the idols’ significance as the sacred vessels of formidable deities, Gruels understands the gods as caricatures of personality types. Marketing a god to one of his clients, he tells her not to pick a particular one because it is ‘too feisty' and would probably ‘jibe with her acquisitions’ (Ndibe 5). The process of selling indigenous gods to Western buyers lacks any veneration for the gods themselves. Gruels sells idols that would diffuse into a Western domestic space, thus negating any power latent within the god-object. Concerning African art and artefacts, a Western curator or buyer is ‘permitted to say anything at all about the arts of Africa because he is a buyer and because he is at the center.’ In contrast, the African artist ‘who merely makes art and who dwells at the margins, is a poor African whose words count only as parts of the commodification’ (Appiah 138).

Interestingly, Foreign Gods Inc. prides itself in having ‘a process of authentication, and it’s fairly rigorous. The gallery’s policy is to insist on things that are written down’ (Ndibe 10). Yet the store’s request for written authentication is not for the sake of venerating the artefact but to decide its monetary and aesthetic value. Within such a system, Mignolo reminds us, a ‘cosmopolitan world order that is dictated from above has all the features of global imperial designs where a set of institutions or countries determines the rules to be followed for the rest of them’ (101). So, in a culture that displays ‘this passion for Foreign Gods [that] has emerged as a visible and powerful cultural current and force’ (Ndibe 71), Ike feels compelled to sell a god whose power and importance he, unlike Gruels, personally knows.

When Ike arrives in his New York apartment with Ngene, there is a malevolent force that causes him to hallucinate and experience delirium in becoming Ngene’s ‘chief priest with no apprenticeship, no induction into the god’s protocols’ (Ndibe 307). He feels the urge to ‘clear his head, which had fallen prey to a ceaseless churn of memories and sounds, the worst being the constant whir of silence’ by having ‘A drink, a drink!’ (305). Ike’s anxiety is aggravated by Ngene’s odour, which ‘appeared sinister’ and which Ike could feel ‘swelling, thrashing about the room’ (305). Through this experience, the novel subverts both Gruels’ and Ike’s impressions of Ngene as a mere commodity, while highlighting the god’s power. Osuakwu, Ike’s uncle, describes Ngene as a god whose ‘“fart is thunder”’ (261), and Gruels tells Ike that the statue ‘“stank up the store”’ because it ‘“farted storms from its rump”’ (332). After enduring Ngene’s supposed torment, Ike regrets his decision to sell it to Foreign Gods Inc. and tries to get the god back, albeit too late. When Gruels speaks to him, he tells Ike that one doesn’t ‘“sell stuff and then ask for it back. That’s not business; that’s some crazy children’s game”’ (331). The commodification of Ike’s village’s god is irreversible, his bills remain unpaid, and although Gruels’ pronunciation of ‘Ngene’ has improved since Ike first pitched the god to him, Gruels remembers Ike primarily for his accent (330); Ike remains excluded from America’s powerful classes.

Yet Ngene’s potency as a god is not diluted in the ways that the indigenous gods market would assume it to be. Whereas the novel portrays, at first, ‘a change from a need for symbolic value to a desire for commodity value’ (Cumpsty, ‘Humour and Spirituality’ 29), it then again flips and undermines commodity value in favour of symbolic value in Gruels’, Reverend Stanton’s and Ike’s recognition of Ngene’s inherent power, especially through Reverend Stanton’s and Ike’s hallucinations and disillusionment. In this subversion at the novel’s end, Ngene himself resists the games capitalism imposes on him.

Conclusion

When Appiah argues that religion is not transferred to the West to die but to be commodified, he explains that this process occurs by the decision of Western buyers based on their aesthetic tastes and material appetites. Ndibe’s Foreign Gods Inc. anticipates the tensions in transnationality, religion and capitalism through a narrative in which the protagonist, Ike, resorts to stealing and selling an indigenous god on a lucrative market. In this postsecular narrative, concepts of the sacred and the secular are underscored, challenged and intertwined so that notions of the sacred infiltrate the secular, and vice versa. This negotiation between these two parts is connected by the West’s appropriation of indigenous religions and their symbols, not to adopt the religions as they are but rather to repurpose them, therefore perpetuating the very power dynamics that exclude Ike from Western elite classes while they implore him to pursue them.

The novel achieves two things, essentially: in portraying Ike’s obsession with wealth-acquisition and status, Ndibe highlights and contests the religiosity of capitalism as the simultaneous cure-and-cause of his protagonist’s circumstances. At the same time, Ndibe contests capitalism’s authority in the novel by foregrounding Ngene as a somewhat autonomous entity that challenges the West’s (Gruels’ and Reverend Stanton’s) incredulity towards enchantment and the sacred so that religious appropriation gives way to postsecularism.

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Thobekile Masombuka

Thobekile Masombuka is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). She completed her MA Creative Writing degree at Rhodes University, through which she developed an admiration for short-form prose and flash fiction. Her doctoral thesis in English Literature (UJ) focuses on the representations of religious syncretism in four postcolonial Nigerian novels. Her research interests include religion and spirituality in postcolonial literature, speculative fiction and cultural studies.