Nigerian Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka says U.S. visa revoked after Trump criticism

Nigerian writer and Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka says the U.S. government revoked his visa, and he believes it’s in retaliation for comments he made criticizing former President Donald Trump.

Soyinka, 91, became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Over the decades, he has taught in the United States and previously held a U.S. green card — which he cut up in 2017 to protest Trump’s first term, joking that it had “an accident and fell between a pair of scissors.”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Oct. 28, Soyinka said he received a letter from the U.S. Department of State informing him that his visa had been revoked because “additional information became available after the visa was issued.” The letter did not specify what that information was.

The author suspects the decision is linked to his recent remarks comparing Trump to Uganda’s late dictator Idi Amin. “I have no visa. I am banned, obviously, from the United States,” Soyinka told NPR. “If you want to see me, you know where to find me.”

He said he was advised to reapply if he wished to return to the U.S., though he expressed little interest in doing so. “Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are,” he said, adding that immigration policies should be based on principle, not politics.

A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on specific cases, saying only that “visas are a privilege, not a right,” and can be revoked at any time at the discretion of the U.S. government.