Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Outspoken Trump Critic, Announces US Visa Cancellation
The United States administration has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the celebrated Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been vocal about Trump since his earlier presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.
“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the cancellation of my visa,” Soyinka, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a media gathering.
Soyinka formerly possessed permanent residency in the United States, though he tore up 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 caused offense and led to the US consulate’s decision.
Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had summoned him for an interview to reassess his visa, which he stated he would not attend.
According to a communication from the consulate directed at Soyinka, officials have terminated his visa, invoking American government regulations that allow “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 somewhat unusual love letter from an embassy,”
he humorously remarked while reading the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s financial capital. He also informed 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 existing US administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider restrictions on immigration, notably focusing on university students who were vocal 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 worldwide recognition, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was showing him respect,”
Soyinka explained. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”
The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has worked for and been awarded honours 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 described the book as his “gift to Nigeria”.
In February, the Crucible theatre in Sheffield staged Death and the King’s Horseman.
Soyinka did not rule out 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 criticise the ramped-up arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.
“This is not about me,” Soyinka said. “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 concerns me.”
The current immigration crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens briefly held as part of targeted actions, as well as the limiting of legal means of entry.
