Wole Soyinka, Longtime Trump Critic, Reports American Visa Cancellation
The American authorities has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the celebrated Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical about Trump since his initial presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.
“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who received the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, informed a news conference.
Soyinka formerly possessed 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 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 summoned him for an interview to review his visa, which he said he would not attend.
According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have cancelled his visa, referencing American government regulations that authorize “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 commented while reciting 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, indicated it could not comment on individual cases, referencing confidentiality rules.
The current US administration has made visa revocations a signature of its wider clampdown on immigration, notably affecting university students who were expressive 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 giving him praise,”
Soyinka said. “He’s been conducting himself as a dictator.”
The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has lectured 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 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 left the door open to considering 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 emphasized. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being hauled up and they disappear for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”
The current immigration crackdown has seen military personnel deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of aggressive raids, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.
