Capital G.

Capital G.

I grew up surrounded by stories.

Some were told under the moonlight in the voice of an elder, others were taught through hymnals and Sunday sermons. The stories of Òrìshà? Beings of thunder and metal, rivers and crossroads… whose presence lived in the trees, the wind, and the silence between heartbeats... these were borderline taboo. The approved fare were stories of men wearing white faces and speaking English words I could spell, but not pronounce (IYKYK), telling of a single, jealous god who raged against all rivals, and demanded not only belief but obedience.

I was too young to know it then, but a war was being waged on my imagination.

It’s taken me years to unlearn the quiet violence of monotheism. The way it colonized not just land, but thought. The way it convinced entire continents that their gods were demons, that their shrines were shameful, and that salvation required a single, foreign title. 

Òrìshà are Òrìshà. Irúnmolè are Irúnmolè. These are not simply gods in the Western sense. They are forces. Archetypes. Ancestors. Codes of conduct. To reduce them to the lowercase ‘g’ is to participate in a linguistic theft; a theft that began with gunboats and missionaries and continues in textbooks, pulpits, and polite conversation. So I write with a capital G. Not out of reverence for the colonial deity, but in defiance of the grammar he rode in on. 

If you’ve been paying attention to history (or even just to the evening news), you’ll know that the problem is not merely religion. It is the claim to oneness as the only truth. You can see it playing out from the middle east, to the middle belt of Nigeria. The myth of chosenness. The holy warrant to conquer. Monotheism, in its absolutist form, makes no room for the Other. And it is this spiritual claustrophobia that has suffocated entire civilizations. From Moses to Constantine, Dan Fodio to Crowther, we see the same script: one god, one book, one chosen people. Everyone else? Heathens. Infidels. Idolaters. Targets. The sword follows swiftly behind the scripture.

In my own family, there were prayers against ancestral spirits. Against dreams. Against drums. We were taught to fear the very things that once gave us power and purpose. It’s a strange kind of madness: to kneel before the god of your conqueror and call it grace.

In writing my debut novel, To Kill A God, I have explored these questions: what is virtue? What is true? Who decides what stories make it to the history books? How can we use lessons from the past to prepare for the future? In To Kill A God, I write about a young cyborg who has ties to Shàngó and Ògún but is minding his business, being the best lover boy ever… until he is arrested by members of the Committee of Thundergods Internationale. The fascist group had staged a coup a few years ago, exiling the ruling Òrìshà. And now, they were framing him for a crime he knew nothing about.

He is locked up in a subterranean cell. His Òrìshà core is rigged to disintegrate in a few hours, and, in desperation, inspired by his love for his girl, he summons the vengeful AI shìgìdì to come to his aid. What he doesn't know is that shìgìdì has plans of its own… It's a fine book, if I may say so myself. But I am biased, I wrote it. What it really is, however, is a metaphor for the kind of geopolitics we are seeing in real time, and the demonization of African Traditional Religions.

Read, and you'll come to understand, dear Bookwalker, that our ancestors were not godless. They were multi-godly. They lived in layered realities. They understood that divinity could not be caged into a singular name. And more importantly, they understood that to allow for many gods is to allow for many truths. That kind of spiritual agency terrifies empires.

So yes, I write Òrìshà with a capital G. Agbara with a capital G. I do so not out of nostalgia, but out of resistance. Because the colonial god… the one who demands abject submission, who sends fire when loved ones burn incense to Yemoja or kneel at the feet of Obàtálá, is not my god. 

And perhaps, in the final analysis, that is the point.

We are not reclaiming the old ways merely to perform heritage. We are remembering how to be whole. How to see the divine in more than one place, one face, or one scripture. We are rebuilding the grammar. Creating one that leaves room for thunder and river, goat and palm wine, ancestor and future.

So, yup, capital G is not a typographical choice. It is a declaration. We were never lesser. We were, and are, many. And we were, and are, enough.