Novelist Okey Ndibe stands tall among a new breed of African diaspora writers who offer fresh perspectives on African identity in the 21st century. In Foreign Gods, Inc., Ndibe succeeds in capturing perhaps the worst of both worlds of the African immigrant who navigates a marginalized existence in America. Foreign Gods Inc. is a bold and riveting story of Ike Uzondu, a Nigerian immigrant whose success is crushed against the dark underbelly of the American dream. Although he graduated with honors in Economics from Amherst College, no one will employ him because of his Nigerian accent. His spirit and determination are ravaged over time by a bleak and meager existence as a taxi driver in New York for thirteen years.

In Foreign Gods Inc., Okey Ndibe unfolds a masterfully-woven tale of human frailty and moral ineptitude as financial demands from Ike's family in Nigeria, mounting debt, a gambling obsession and failed marriage plunge him into a downward spiral of crippling desperation. To escape his plight he decides to steal the statue of Ngene, a war god from a shrine in his village and sell it to Foreign Gods, Inc. a gallery that deals in religious artifacts. The commodification of foreign gods represents the Western obsession with the exotic yet primitive and irresistible art from cultures cast as the other. Ike tells the gallery owner how ancient and powerful the god is and that in the olden days, ‘the deity led the warriors to wars, and they never lost one’ (9). The ill-conceived plan drives the pace of the work and foreshadows how things began to fall apart for Ike and the family that he cannot save in Nigeria.

A compelling feature of the novel is the successful linkage of the past with the present, in a way that skillfully echoes the legacy of Ndibe's mentor, the late Chinua Achebe. Similar to the clash of cultures trope in Things Fall Apart, a lengthy, italicized section connects Ngene to the legendary past of Utonki through an account of the intrusion of Christianity and the divisive impact on the villagers. Although many converts are won, Reverend Walter Stanton succumbs to ill health, madness and ultimate demise that symbolize imbalance, seeds of discord and conflict in the village of Utonki in the past as well as the present.