Wole Soyinka, Longtime Trump Critic, Announces American Visa Revocation
The United States administration has terminated the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning playwright who has been vocal about Trump since his initial presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.
“I want to tell the consulate … that I’m very satisfied with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who received the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.
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 speculated that his recent remarks 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 called him in for an interview to reevaluate his visa, which he declared he would not attend.
According to a letter from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have terminated his visa, invoking United States 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 rather curious love letter from an embassy,”
he humorously remarked while reciting the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub. 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 said.
The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, indicated it could not comment on individual cases, pointing to confidentiality rules.
The current US administration has made visa revocations a signature of its wider crackdown 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 international stature, a statesman, so when I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was giving him praise,”
Soyinka said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”
The 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has lectured at 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 critique 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 remained 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 condemn 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 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 aggressive raids, as well as the restricting of legal means of entry.
