Nobel laureate and Trump critic Wole Soyinka says US revoked his visa

Nigerian Nobel Literature Prize winner Wole Soyinka says the United States has revoked his non-immigrant visa issued last year.

Speaking to reporters in Lagos on Tuesday, the 91-year-old author said he had received what he jokingly described as a “rather curious love letter” from the US Consulate General in Nigeria informing him of the cancellation.

The letter, dated 23 October, cited US State department regulations allowing it “to revoke a non-immigrant visa at any time.”

Soyinka said the consulate had called him in earlier this year for an interview to reassess his visa. The US Embassy in Nigeria has refused to comment on the move.

The author will now have to reapply for a visa if he wishes to visit the US but this destination does not seem to be at the top of his travel list.

“I want to assure the consulate… that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” he told a news conference.

Soyinka became the first Black writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. A prolific author, he is mostly known for his plays, including his 1959 anticolonial piece “The Lion and the Jewel.”

A vocal Trump critic

He is also a fervent activist for human rights and social justice and has spent two years in prison for opposing the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s.

In recent years, Soyinka has become a vocal critic of US President Donald Trump.

The writer previously held permanent residency in the US but he destroyed his Green Card after Trump first won the presidency in 2016.

He has recently compared Donald Trump to Idi Amin, the brutal dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and became known as the 'Butcher of Uganda.'

Amin’s cruel regime is said to have killed between 100,000 and 500,000 people, according to most estimates.

Soyinka speculated these comments may have contributed to his visa cancellation.

“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 said ironically. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”

The playwright has periodically held teaching posts at renowned American Ivy League universities like Harvard and Yale in the past decades.

On Tuesday, he told organisations hoping to invite him to the US “not to waste their time.”

"I have no visa, I am banned obviously from the United States and if you want to see me, you know where to find me.”