Nigerian Godpunk Comes of Age with Shigidi

It has taken ten years and many false starts for Talabi to weave a fascinating world filled with gods, monsters and cosmic entities who are all driven by complex motives to intervene and interfere in the mortal world. Shigidi was first published as a collaborative short story published on the now-defunct Alchemist’s Corner column on the Naked Convos in 2013, and Talabi revisited the story over the years, expanding the core idea until it evolved into its current iteration.

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Duty puts Shigidi, the book’s titular character, in the path of Nneoma, a secretive succubus whose own history spans the entirety of human existence. He is a lower-level deity, a nightmare god trapped in a dead-end job where he fulfils a specific variety of prayer requests on behalf of the wasteful and nepotistic elder Gods in his canon-corporation, the Orisha Spirit Corp. Prayer is an article of faith, used to express belief and faith is currency in the spirit verse. As a god forgotten by the modern and confined to the rules of the spirit corp, Shigidi can no longer directly inspire worship, and as such, he must subsist on crumbs from the table of his masters who have remained relevant and worshipped in Yoruba land. Shigidi and Nneoma are at first in opposition to each other, but Nneoma realizes that Shigidi’s heart is not in his duty. His true desires, though suppressed, mirror hers. She sees her opportunity and takes it.

‘You are not happy, are you?… With your life, I mean?’

She helps him articulate those secret desires, desires that could get him punished or worse, sundered. With her help, Shigidi breaks ties with the Orisha corp and ascends to a higher level of divinity, he becomes a free agent, a divine being with no pantheon, beholden only to himself.

For Shigidi to survive this new reality, he must find worship in other ways. Shigidi and Nneoma forge a practical alliance where she teaches him how to survive as an independent deity and in return, he offers her protection and companionship. It is a simple enough arrangement, until it is complicated by their growing affection for each other. That affection is a blindspot that is exploited when Shango, current CEO of the Orisha Corp, sends his trusted wives and an old friend of Shigidi to exterminate the duo. Sango is slighted by Shigidi’s mutiny and eager to send a message to other lower deities within the pantheon about the supremacy of the hierarchical order in the Orisha Corp. A surprise intervention from an unexpected player foils Shango’s assassination attempt and puts the duo in the debt of a very old and very powerful creator when Nneoma’s call to an old familiar is corrupted by Shigidi’s longing for his spirit home.

‘I was trying to find us an escape, open a channel to the domain of an older power as a last resort… but you called out Olorun, you reached for him in the darkness and corrupted my call.’