🔗 Share this article

The American administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author who has been outspoken about Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.

“I want to assure 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 discarded 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 led to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka noted 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 document from the consulate addressed to Soyinka, officials have cancelled his visa, invoking 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 quite peculiar love letter from an embassy,”

he lightheartedly stated 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, indicated it could not comment on individual cases, citing confidentiality rules.

The present US administration has made visa revocations a hallmark of its wider restrictions 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 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 commented. “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 called 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 accepting 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 emphasized. “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 troubles me.”

The ongoing immigration crackdown has seen security forces deployed to US cities and citizens temporarily detained as part of targeted actions, as well as the limiting of legal means of entry.