Wole Soyinka, Outspoken Trump Critic, Reveals American Visa Revocation
The American administration has terminated the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning playwright who has been critical about Trump since his earlier presidency, Soyinka stated on Tuesday.
“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, informed a media gathering.
Soyinka once had 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 remarks comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have provoked a reaction and played a role in the US consulate’s decision.
Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had summoned him for an interview to reevaluate his visa, which he stated he would not attend.
According to a communication from the consulate directed at Soyinka, officials have cancelled his visa, referencing American government 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 humorously remarked 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 said.
The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, said it could not comment on individual cases, pointing to confidentiality rules.
The current US administration has made visa revocations a defining feature 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 global standing, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,”
Soyinka said. “He’s been acting like a dictator.”
The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at 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 commentary 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 criticise the escalated arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.
“This is not about me,” Soyinka declared. “When we see people being arrested publicly – people being apprehended and they are held for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what worries 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.