Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon’s debut play, ‘The Great Delusion’, arrives with a deliberate, unsettling calm. Shortlisted for the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) 2025 Prize for Drama, it reads at once as an allegorical narrative and a forensic account, a theatrical lamp held over the hidden scaffolding of white supremacy, exposing how the world built on Black labour, intellect, and creativity crumbles when Black agency is withdrawn.
The work has also been selected to feature at the forthcoming Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) BookTrek.
|
|
At its core is a single, imaginative provocation: what happens when the people whose labour and ingenuity have long underpinned an empire withdraw that labour, deliberately and collectively? Majekodunmi stages this withdrawal as an Afrocession, and tracks the consequence.
Without the Black inventors, builders, and thinkers who made its systems run, the White supremacist world begins to fail: hospitals falter, bridges shudder, technologies stall. The result is as plain as it is devastating. The stage becomes a slow-motion reveal of dependency.
|
|
|
|---|
The drama centres on Deep, a White supremacist patriarch, and the circle around him: Margaret, his wife, and a following self-styled the Blind Majority. Left to manage the machinery they once took for granted, they fumble; the devices and infrastructure that once served them become sources of farce.
Majekodunmi’s satire is precise, not gratuitous mockery, but an insistently calm exposure of absurdity: the systems are fragile because their makers were disrespected.
While the play’s immediate power lies in its satirisation of collapse, its deeper significance is conceptual. The Great Delusion is a corrective to a long-standing pattern in global storytelling, especially the familiar templates produced by Hollywood, where Black life is too often framed chiefly as trauma: slavery, suffering, victimhood, and dominated by the white saviour trope.
Majekodunmi refuses that framing. Instead, he offers two interlocking ideas—Afrocession and Episteresurrecism—that recast agency as active and sovereign. Episteresurrecism, in particular, asks that we dig for the buried archives of African thought and practice, not as nostalgic salvage, but as living resources for Black narrative authority.
That shift goes beyond theory. Onstage, it operates practically: the withdrawal is strategic, collective, and dignified. Black characters are not presented as passive recipients of history’s harm, nor as props for white redemption. They are, instead, the architects of their own absence—and, paradoxically, the authors of the reckoning that absence forces upon a complacent world.
The play’s intellectual scaffolding is strengthened by the involvement of scholars. Dr. Vibert Issa White of the University of Central Florida, United States, contributes a foreword that situates the play in a broader historical frame; Dr. Omowumi Bode Ekundayo of the University of Benin, Nigeria, lends editorial rigour.
Their participation grounds the playwright’s imaginative leap in research and critique, so the work reads as both art and argument.
The Great Delusion asks its audience a simple, hard question: who makes our world run, and what happens when they stop? The answer is staged with patience and a dry, measured satire, the sort that lingers after the lights go down. In doing so, Majek does not offer only a critique of existing representational habits, but a new dramaturgy for Black storytelling: refusal over pleading, excavation over apology, reclamation over pity.
This is a play that does something seldom attempted on contemporary stages. It lays bare the senselessness of structures that claim self-sufficiency while depending on denied labour.
It does so without melodrama, without reticence, and with an argument that will compel conversation long after the curtain falls.
Official Launch Announcement
The official launch of The Great Delusion is scheduled for Tuesday, 4 November 2025, at HOMEF’s Ikike Gardens, No. 30, 19th Street, Off Ugbowo–Lagos Road, Benin City, Edo State, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
READ ALSO: Nigerian Army announces donation of 3,000 exercise books to displaced pupils in Benue
The event will be chaired by Dr. Nnimmo Bassey, renowned environmental advocate and Executive Director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), with the keynote address delivered by Distinguished Professor G. G. Darah, a preeminent scholar of African Literature, Folklore, and Cultural Sciences.
The theme of the occasion is ‘THE STOLEN ARE BACK — A Celebration of Return, Reclamation, and Renaissance’, reflecting the play’s central exploration of Black agency, memory, and cultural resurgence.
