Meeting Toyin Falola: A cross-generational alliance
By Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon
AT the 14th Toyin Falola International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC 2025), held at Osun State University, Osogbo, I had the distinct honour of presenting my debut play, The Great Delusion, to Emeritus Professor Toyin Falola, Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, US and a preeminent historian and global authority on African and diasporic thought. The Great Delusion is a revolutionary satire in which Black people across the world withdraw their cultural and intellectual ingenuity, thereby collapsing white supremacy by exposing its dependence on what it devalues and the people who built their society.
Rooted in Ifá epistemology, the play dramatizes several Odùs, with each character’s name embodying cosmological principles from the Yoruba divinatory system. In this way, it affirms Professor Falola’s long-standing advocacy for the centrality of indigenous knowledge in African education and epistemic sovereignty.
The play also resonates with his enduring call for continental unity, digital literacy, and the prioritization of STEM as strategic imperatives for Africa’s global relevance. Through dramatization, The Great Delusion engages the very historical, cultural, and philosophical concerns the iconic scholar has championed for decades.
Meeting him immediately reveals a rare confluence of genius and humility. Despite his towering stature, his simplicity dwarfs language in its pedagogy. His tireless commitment to the global repositioning of African knowledge systems is—in itself—a living professorship in intellectual devotion.
During the recess, I observed him listening more than he spoke, a striking gesture that I noted as integral to understanding the essence of his being.
Prof. Toyin Falola (right) and Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon
If I must choose—however difficult—the most memorable moment with Prof. Falola, it would be when he gently patted my back and, with an infectious smile, called me, ‘The Benin man.’ He understood that I had journeyed from the ancient city of Benin to ‘touch his garment’. While that may have been his reference, to me it felt like something far deeper: beyond recognizing a young pen in search of the ancestral blessings of the Feather—the sacred quill that preceded ink caged in plastic—it felt as though he was acknowledging the historical grandeur of the ancient Benin itself, and by extension, the broader movement of repatriation and recognition now unfolding as the world begins, slowly but surely, to reckon with the incontrovertible truth that it’s Afro o’clock!
Perhaps, I am reading too much into a simple ‘The Benin man’—a phrase likely uttered casually from the noble mouth. But then again, isn’t that what the aura of daring geniuses like Professor Toyin Falola awakens in us? That deep, unsettling urge to ask what one’s name is before Name itself was named?
I remain deeply grateful for the moment of encountering Prof. Falola, for his gracious acceptance of my book, The Great Delusion, and for the privilege of standing before a legacy made flesh.
May Emeritus Professor Toyin Falola’s legacy continue to inspire generations of thinkers, writers, and dreamers committed to Africa’s episteresurrecism. Asé!
* Ebhohon is a poet, playwright and author of The Great Delusion (sankara101010@gmail.com/www.towncrier.com.ng)
