Ebhohon’s ‘The Great Delusion’ launched, wins ANA drama prize, to feature at LABAF 2025
By Editor
THE revolutionary play, The Great Delusion, by Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon, has won this year’s Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) top prize for drama at its 44th annual convention in Abuja. The play has also been listed among the featured books at this year’s Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) 2025 that will take place from November 10 – 16, 2025 at Freedom Park, Lagos.
Now in its 27th year, the festival, which has as theme ‘Change: Imagining Alternatives’, will bring together writers, artists, filmmakers and scholars from across Africa and the diaspora for a week-long discussions, exhibitions and performances. It will also mark the 20th anniversary of the Green Festival, which focuses on art and environmental awareness as well as children’s festival.
The Great Delusion will be featured in a performance and panel session examining its themes of history, memory and cultural reclamation. In keeping with LABAF’s vision of reimagining change, the play dramatizes a world where white supremacy finally fulfils its long-desired fantasy—a global North and the Americas without Black people. In a sweeping movement that Ebhohon calls ‘Afrocession,’ Black communities across continents from the African homeland withdraw their intellect, labour, and creativity and return to Africa in a collective act of defiance.
What follows is the unravelling of the world they leave behind: economies, infrastructure and social super-structure collapse, and technology grinds to a halt. The play reveals an uncomfortable truth, that the very civilization built on Black exploitation cannot survive without Black ingenuity. With poetic force and political urgency, The Great Delusion exposes the illusion of white supremacy and celebrates Black genius as the unseen foundation of human progress.
Founded in 1999 by the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), Lagos Book and Art Festival is one of Africa’s longest-running literary gatherings. The maiden edition, held in 1999, was conceived to commemorate Nigeria’s return to democracy and revive the country’s declining reading culture after years of military misrule.
Often described as ‘Africa’s biggest culture picnic,’ LABAF has since grown into one of the continent’s leading literary and arts gatherings. Organisers say this year’s edition will serve as “a space for renewed imagination and bold rethinking of Africa’s place in a rapidly changing world.”
The official launch of The Great Delusion held on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, at HOMEF’s Ikike Gardens, 19th Street, off Ugbowo-Lagos Road, Benin City. Organised by the Institute of Episteresurrecist Arts (IEA), in collaboration with the Community and Culture Desk of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), the event was headlined by cultural icons Prof. G.G. Darah and Dr. Nnimmo Bassey.
With ‘The Stolen Are Back — A Celebration of Return, Reclamation and Renaissance’ as theme, the launch of The Great Delusion featured readings, performances, and critical conversations on the play’s engagement with African cultural resurgence and epistemic renewal.
