A Nobel Prize winner, who criticized Donald Trump and compared him to one of history’s most brutal dictators, has thanked the administration for revoking his visa.
Wole Soyinka, the 91-year-old Nigerian author and playwright who became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, revealed that his permanent residency visa has been suddenly revoked.
There was no reason given for the ban, but Soyinka thinks it might be down to him saying Trump resembled a white Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator who massacred 300,00 civilians.
Speaking to reporters in Lagos, the author said he had received a “rather curious love letter from the embassy,” which instructed him to turn up at the U.S. consulate with his visa and passport so it could be voided.
“I like people who have a sense of humour, and this is one of the most humorous sentences or requests I’ve had in all my life,” he said of the request.
“Would any of you like to volunteer in my place? Take the passport for me? I’m a little bit busy and rushed,” he quipped.
Although the reasons for the revocation have not been made public, Soyinka thinks it may be down to remarks he made earlier this year when he said Trump resembled a “white Idi Amin,” the notorious dictator known as “The Butcher of Uganda,” who ruled from 1971 to 1979.
“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 joked, and said Trump should “be proud” of the comparison. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”
But the author, who regularly attends literary festivals and teaches at top U.S. universities, told any organisations hoping to invite him to the States not to waste their time. “I have no visa. I am banned,” he said.
Although he left the door open for a return to the U.S. under a future administration, Soyinka said, “I wouldn’t take the initiative myself because there’s nothing I’m looking for there. Nothing.”
“I want to assure the consulate… that I’m very content with the revocation of my visa,” he added.
Soyinka, a titan of African literature, has been a longtime critic of the Trump administration, denouncing the administration for the “brutal, cruel, and often unbelievable treatment being meted out to strangers, immigrants.”
In 2017, Soyinka told The Atlantic he had destroyed his green card in protest of Trump’s first inauguration, telling the magazine, “As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a regular visa with others.”
Reflecting on his relationship with Amin, whose 1986 satirical play about the dictator, A Play of Kings, helped earn him his Nobel Prize. “Maybe it’s about time also to write a play about Donald Trump,” he quipped.
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