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.