The Ozidi Saga, an epic of the Ijaw people of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, follows Ozidi as he grows to avenge the murder of his father, Ozidi the elder, killed through the treachery of rivals within his own community. Once Ozidi comes of age and takes revenge on his father's killers, the narrative does not end but instead escalates: his own accumulating power, magically enhanced by his grandmother, draws increasingly formidable supernatural opponents, and much of the epic's second half follows a sequence of confrontations with these adversaries, including plagues and monstrous beings sent to test or destroy him.
The saga has been read by scholars as exploring the moral cost of a cycle of vengeance that, once begun, generates new conflict faster than it resolves the old, since Ozidi's victories repeatedly summon fresh challenges rather than closing the story, a structure distinct from epics that build toward a single climactic resolution.
Because the cycle of vengeance the saga depicts has no single point where the narrative signals a final resolution, some performances extend the sequence of Ozidi's battles differently than others, and scholars comparing multiple tellings have treated this openness as a genuine feature of the tradition rather than a defect in any particular performer's memory or a sign of an unfinished text.