Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Trump Critic, Reveals American Visa Termination
The US administration has terminated the visa for Wole Soyinka, the renowned Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author who has been outspoken about Trump since his initial presidency, Soyinka stated on Tuesday.
“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, addressed a news conference.
Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.
Soyinka suggested that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have provoked a reaction and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.
Soyinka noted earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had called him in for an interview to review his visa, which he stated he would not attend.
According to a letter from the consulate directed at 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 jokingly stated while reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre. 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, indicated it could not comment on individual cases, referencing confidentiality rules.
The current US administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider clampdown on immigration, notably affecting university students who were outspoken about Palestinian rights.
Soyinka revealed 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 showing him respect,”
Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving 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 latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, a satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka referred to 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 considering an invitation to the United States should circumstances change, but continued: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”
He went on to denounce the increased arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.
“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “When we see people being detained arbitrarily – people being apprehended and they are held 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 curtailing of legal means of entry.
