A critic’s impression of Ebhohon’s ‘The Great Delusion’
By Omowumi Bode Ekundayo
I read the manuscript of The Great Delusion (Ofuname Waves Nigeria Ltd, Benin City; 2025) by Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon some time in the first quarters of 2024 and its innovative style and literary features struck me keenly. I reached the young author to make an effort to standardise and publish it for public consumption soon after one of the literary foreshadows in the play started manifesting in the second emergence of Donald Trump as the President of America.
The contributions of Africa to Arts, Science and Technology at home in Africa or in diasporas, are often deliberately inhumed in the grandiloquent verbiage, ‘buga’ pontifications and lopsided narratives of world histories and civilisations by biased and racist western scholars and philosophers.
The Great Delusion melodramatically exhumes Black Africans’ contributions to modern advancement and demonstrates how inordinate racism and the fallacy of racial hubris and superiority complex, stretched unnecessarily too far to its nadir, cause the disintegration of the socio-technological foundations and structures of a racist White community.
Reading the film or cinema in the play topples the mind. The admixture of poetry, prose, suspense-packed scenes, compelling literary coinages and contrasts, accessible language fluidity and predictive dialogues and scenes, among other fascinating features, showcase the literary wealth and promise in The Great Delusion and its playwright.
Ebhohon foresees a future in which Africa, free at last and highly advanced, grants international aids in cash and kind to Europe and America. After all, one good turn deserves another, or doesn’t it? I agree with the playwright that while racism is a great delusion, the imminent rise of Africa with true love for humanity is an enticing afflatus, a possibility in the realm of reality, not a great delusion.”
* Dr. Ekundayo teaches at the Department of English and Literature, University of Benin, Benin City
