The King Who Hurts the World

Question: So, what's Shapona's place in the Orisha?

A nonexistent one; we're about 99.99999% sure Shapona is a Titan Avatar.

Shapona - or Shakpanna, or Sopona, or Babalu Aye, or Omolu and sundry other variations thereof - is just a seriously unpleasant and injurious dude. He is almost always depicted as grisly and hideous, covered in oozing sores, limping lamely and possessed of terrible chalk-white skin. He smites mortals with disease, originally specializing in smallpox but in the modern era branching out to become lord of more recent scourges such as AIDS, and is actively hidden from, driven away and avoided by mortals at all costs. He is also notoriously cranky and judgmental, which is a bad combination for a being that rains flesh-rot down on everyone who annoys him.

The stories of Shapona are uniformly antagonistic toward the rest of his pantheon. In one, he invents virulent disease and spreads it across the world in revenge after his fellow gods do not give him what he considers to be an equal share of their inheritance from Olodumare. In another, he responds to the gods laughing at his stumbling during a dance ritual by attempting to kill them all with diseases until Obatala succeeds in driving him away with a spear. In yet another he taunts Shango, saying that the thunder-god makes loud noises and flashy demonstrations to kill just one person while Shapona kills thousands without anyone knowing until he has succeeded, making him a more fearsome force, and in another Olodumare himself strikes him dead for breaking a taboo on sex. Basically, he does not like the Orisha and they do not like him, and none of their interactions end positively for anyone.

The interesting place where Shapona deviates from the usual Titan setup is in his strong and thriving mortal cult presence, which continues even into the present day. Most Titans don't have a strong presence in the World, but Shapona has shrines throughout west Africa and the Caribbean, which seems to make him more like a bad-tempered god. Shapona's cults, however, are completely batshit insane; most of them are dedicated to trying to convince him, either with misdirecting and begging prayers or bribery offerings at his shrines, to go away and not come around to scourge everyone with sickness and death. His priesthood has historically been prone to threatening the populace, demanding donations and special treatment lest they call down their patron on all and sundry, and furthermore they were rumored to actually intentionally spread smallpox when thwarted.

Of course, some worshipers of the god maintain that he's just getting a bad rap from British colonialists who didn't really understand the religion, and some of his aspects in the New World have moved from begging him not to give humanity diseases to believing that he can be called upon to heal diseases they already have. If a Storyteller wanted to run Shapona as a god instead of a Titan, he could probably be finessed into the role, but from our point of view he's got Titan written all over him.

In fact, McClelland goes so far as to call him "the embodiment of hatred directed against the whole pantheon and mankind as well". If that's not a definition of a Titan, we don't know what else would be.