Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Outspoken Trump Critic, Reports US Visa Revocation

The US administration has cancelled the visa for Wole Soyinka, the renowned Nigerian Nobel prize-winning playwright who has been critical about Trump since his earlier presidency, Soyinka announced on Tuesday.

“I want to tell the consulate … that I’m very content with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, informed 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 suggested that his recent comments comparing Trump to the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin might have caused offense and led to the US consulate’s decision.

Soyinka said earlier this year that the US consulate in Lagos had requested his presence for an interview to review his visa, which he said he would not attend.

According to a document from the consulate sent 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 quite peculiar love letter from an embassy,”

he lightheartedly commented while presenting the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic centre. 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 declared.

The US embassy in Abuja, the capital, stated it could not comment on individual cases, pointing to confidentiality rules.

The existing US administration has made visa revocations a signature of its wider crackdown on immigration, notably affecting 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 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 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 most recent 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 remained 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 declared. “When we see people being arrested publicly – people being hauled up 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.