The Trump administration is seemingly no-holds-barred when it comes to cracking down on immigration. They are now using their visa revocation authority to revoke over 6,000 international student visas in 2025 alone. And now, one history-making Nigerian Nobel Prize winner’s U.S. visa has also been revoked.
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During a speaking engagement in Lagos on October 28, Nigerian author and playwright Wole Soyinka confirmed that his non-resident United States visa had been revoked. The 91-year-old author made history in 1986 as the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Speaking to the press, Soyinka said the decision was likely tied to comments he made comparing President Donald Trump to the late-notorious Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who served as the country’s president from 1971 until he was overthrown in 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 said. “He’s been behaving like a dictator.”
This wasn’t the first shot Soyinka has fired at President Trump. In 2017, he destroyed his green card in a sign of protest against Trump’s first election, claiming it “fell between a pair of scissors.”
Soyinka says he has no plans to visit the United States anytime soon but plans to continue speaking up for human rights globally.
“It’s not about me, I’m not really interested in going back to the United States,” he said. “But a principle is involved. Human beings deserve to be treated decently wherever they are.”
Soyinka is no stranger to speaking truth to power. His body of work includes plays, poems and novels that address injustice in Africa and the role Western nations have played. His 2021 novel, “Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth,” centers around political corruption in Nigeria.
One of Soyinka’s most well-known plays, 1984’s “A Play of Giants,” is a satirical look at African dictators gathered at a New York embassy while their countries are collapsing around them. More than 40 years later, the award-winning writer thinks the current political climate in America could inspire the plot of his next work.
“Maybe it’s about time also to write a play about Donald Trump,” he said.
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