The U.S visa of Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian Nobel laureate, was revoked by the Trump administration. The acclaimed writer has been critical of Trump since his first presidency, Soyinka revealed on Tuesday.
“I want to assure the consulate … that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” Soyinka, who won the 1986 Nobel prize for literature, told a news conference.
The 91-year-old author said the US consulate asked him to bring in his passport so his visa could be cancelled in person as new unspecified information had come to light.
Soyinka previously held permanent residency in the United States, though he destroyed his green card after Donald Trump’s first election in 2016.
Soyinka affirmed on Tuesday that he no longer had his green card – and jokingly added that it had “fallen between the fingers of a pair of scissors and it got cut into a couple of pieces”.
The famed author has had regular teaching engagements at US universities for the past 30 years.
“I have no visa. I am banned,” he said on Tuesday.
He said his recent comparison of Trump to Uganda’s dictator – “Idi Amin in white face” – may have contributed to the current situation.
“When I called Donald Trump Idi Amin, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka said, “he’s been behaving like a dictator.”
Idi Amin was a Ugandan military officer and dictator who ruled the country from 1971 to 1979, infamous for his brutal regime and widespread human rights abuses.
As The Guardian reports, the 91-year-old playwright behind Death and the King’s Horseman has taught at and been awarded honors from 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 described the book as his “gift to Nigeria” in an interiview with the Guardian.