LAGOS, Nigeria — Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says the United States has revoked his visa and banned him from entering the country, in what he described as a baffling diplomatic move.
Speaking at a press conference in Lagos on Tuesday, the 91-year-old author said he received an unusual message from the US consulate requesting that he bring his passport in so his visa could be cancelled “in person” after unspecified new information came to light.
“I call it a rather curious love letter from an embassy,” Soyinka told reporters. “I have no visa. I am banned.”
The US embassy in Nigeria declined to comment, saying it does not discuss individual visa cases.
Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, has enjoyed long-standing ties with the US academic world, holding teaching appointments at several universities over the past three decades.
He once held permanent US residency but renounced it in 2016 after Donald Trump’s election, symbolically tearing up his green card in protest.
“That green card fell between the fingers of a pair of scissors and got cut into a couple of pieces,” he said on Tuesday, joking about the incident.
The playwright and political activist suggested his recent criticism of the former US president might have played a role in the visa decision.
“When I called Donald Trump Idi Amin in white face, I thought I was paying him a compliment,” Soyinka quipped. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”
Idi Amin ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and is remembered for one of Africa’s most brutal regimes.
Soyinka, a vocal critic of authoritarianism across the world, has clashed with governments both at home and abroad for decades.
Asked if he would seek to return to the US, he responded with a dry laugh: “How old am I?”
His comments come months after Washington tightened visa rules for citizens of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia and Ghana.
The July policy change reduced non-diplomatic visa validity from up to five years to just three months, and limited them to single-entry permits.
