🔗 Share this article

The American administration has revoked the visa for Wole Soyinka, the celebrated Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author who has been critical about Trump since his initial presidency, Soyinka disclosed on Tuesday.

“I want to inform the consulate … that I’m very content with the termination of my visa,” Soyinka, who was awarded the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, addressed a news conference.

Soyinka once had 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 caused offense and led 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 letter from the consulate sent to Soyinka, officials have cancelled his visa, citing 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 stated while presenting the letter aloud to journalists in Lagos, Nigeria’s financial capital. 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, said it could not comment on individual cases, referencing confidentiality rules.

The existing US administration has made visa revocations a defining feature of its wider clampdown on immigration, notably focusing on university students who were expressive about Palestinian rights.

Soyinka mentioned 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 acting 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 satire about corruption in Nigeria, was published in 2021. Soyinka referred to 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 continued: “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”

He went on to condemn the escalated arrests of undocumented immigrants in the country.

“This is not about me,” Soyinka declared. “When we see people being detained arbitrarily – people being hauled up and they are held for a month … old women, children being separated. So that’s really what troubles me.”

The recent immigration crackdown has seen national guard troops deployed to US cities and citizens briefly held as part of intensive operations, as well as the curtailing of legal means of entry.