Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Outspoken Trump Critic, Announces US Visa Cancellation
The American administration has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been outspoken about Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka disclosed on Tuesday.
“I want to tell the consulate … that I’m very content with the cancellation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, addressed a media gathering.
Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he tore up his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.
Soyinka surmised that his recent statements comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have caused offense and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.
Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to reevaluate his visa, which he declared he would not attend.
According to a document from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have cancelled his visa, invoking United States 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 rather curious love letter from an embassy,”
he lightheartedly remarked while reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub. 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 said.
The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, referencing confidentiality rules.
The present US administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider restrictions on immigration, notably focusing on university students who were expressive about Palestinian rights.
Soyinka revealed he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said Trump “should be proud of”.
“Idi Amin was a man of worldwide recognition, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was showing him respect,”
Soyinka explained. “He’s been acting like a dictator.”
The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has worked for and been given awards 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 stated: “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 emphasized. “When we see people being arrested publicly – people being taken away and they vanish for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what troubles me.”
The recent immigration crackdown has seen security forces deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of intensive operations, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.
