Wole Soyinka, Trump Critic, Reports US Visa Revocation
The United States government has terminated the visa for Wole Soyinka, the celebrated Nigerian Nobel prize-winning writer who has been critical about Trump since his initial presidency, Soyinka stated on Tuesday.
“I want to tell the consulate … that I’m very pleased with the cancellation of my visa,” Soyinka, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, addressed a media gathering.
Soyinka once had 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 statements comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have caused offense and contributed to the US consulate’s decision.
Soyinka mentioned earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had summoned him for an interview to review his visa, which he stated he would not attend.
According to a document from the consulate directed at Soyinka, officials have revoked his visa, invoking US state department 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 lightheartedly commented while presenting 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 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 hallmark of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably affecting university students who were vocal about Palestinian rights.
Soyinka revealed he had recently compared Trump to Uganda’s Amin, something he said 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 paying him a compliment,”
Soyinka explained. “He’s been conducting himself as 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 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 stated: “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 emphasized. “When we see people being picked off the street – people being taken away and they are held for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what concerns me.”
The current immigration crackdown has seen security forces deployed to US cities and citizens briefly held as part of intensive operations, as well as the limiting of legal means of entry.
