Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Longtime Trump Critic, Reports American Visa Termination
The United States administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the renowned Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author who has been outspoken about Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.
“I want to tell the consulate … that I’m very satisfied with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who received the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, addressed a news conference.
Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he discarded his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.
Soyinka surmised that his recent remarks comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have struck a nerve and played a role in the US consulate’s decision.
Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had requested his presence for an interview to reassess his visa, which he declared he would not attend.
According to a letter from the consulate directed at Soyinka, officials have terminated his visa, citing US state department regulations that permit “a consular officer, the secretary, or a department official to whom the secretary has delegated this authority … to revoke a nonimmigrant visa at any time, in his or her discretion”.
“This is a quite peculiar love letter from an embassy,”
he lightheartedly stated while reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s financial capital. He also told any organizations hoping to invite him to the United States “not to waste their time”.
“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka declared.
The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, stated it could not comment on individual cases, pointing to confidentiality rules.
The current US administration has made visa revocations a signature of its wider restrictions on immigration, notably focusing on university students who were vocal about Palestinian rights.
Soyinka said he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he remarked Trump “should be proud of”.
“Idi Amin was a man of international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was giving him praise,”
Soyinka explained. “He’s been acting like a dictator.”
The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honours top US universities including Harvard and Cornell.
His most recent novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka called the book as his “gift to Nigeria”.
In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.
Soyinka left the door open to entertaining an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but added: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”
He went on to condemn the increased arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.
“This is not about me,” Soyinka declared. “When we see people being arrested publicly – people being hauled up and they vanish for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”
The recent immigration crackdown has seen security forces deployed to US cities and citizens briefly held as part of intensive operations, as well as the limiting of legal means of entry.
