Illustrative image | Wole Soyinka. (Photo: Andreas Rentz / Getty Images for Grey Goose) | US President Donald Trump. (Photo: Christopher Dilts / Bloomberg via Getty Images) | Undated file photo of Idi Amin, the former president of Uganda. (Photo: EPA / The Star) 
To paraphrase South Africa’s disgraced former president Jacob Zuma, it seems that “clever blacks” from Africa are not welcome in Donald Trump’s America. Or to paraphrase Trump, intellectuals from “shit-hole countries” are not welcome.
Wole Soyinka, the acclaimed Nigerian playwright and novelist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature, revealed this week that his US visa had been revoked.
“I have no visa. I am banned,” Soyinka, 91, reportedly told a news conference in Lagos this week.
Soyinka may be an affable nonagenarian who could hardly count as a credible threat to US national security — but as the old maxim goes, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword.
And the blade that Soyinka has eloquently wielded over the course of his long and distinguished career has clearly cut through Trump’s notoriously thin skin — or at least the skin of his toadies in the State Department who pay attention to what critics of their Dear Leader are saying.
Idi Amin
Soyinka pointedly noted that he had recently compared Trump to the late former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin — the one who dubbed himself the “Last King of Scotland” — and it seems that may have sliced a bit too close to the bone for the jesters in the court of the man who aspires to be King of the United States.
“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 was quoted as saying.
Trump to Amin on The Daily Show, and who knows, maybe he’s also on the list.
Soyinka has long been a fierce Trump critic and in 2016 destroyed his Green Card after the Republican was first elected to the White House.
Soyinka has also long been a critic of many governments and states, including those that have ruled the roost in his Nigerian homeland.
His latest novel — Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, published in 2021 — is a deliciously satirical take on corruption in Nigeria. I highly recommend it.
Grey-haired dotage
And now, in his grey-haired dotage, Soyinka finds himself banned from entering Trump’s America.
He is hardly alone and visa revocations have become a routine weapon deployed by the Trump administration to silence dissent. In the firing line have been critics of assassinated far-right influencer Charlie Kirk, and foreign university students who have expressed views about Palestinian rights.
Closing the doors to foreign critics is a closing of the American mind, and in this case also highlights the transparent racism of the Trump administration.
Soyinka was the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and that point would not have been lost on the visa revokers.
It’s a move rife with ominous symbolism from an administration that wants to rewrite American history by dispatching slavery and racial injustice down the memory hole — and also wants to welcome white South Africans with open arms because of its lingering nostalgia for apartheid.
Indeed, a Trump “refugee plan” reportedly in the works would prioritise white South Africans and white Europeans allegedly “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties”.
No dog whistles here folks. The message is clear: US critics, especially those from regions like Africa, are being shut out while the door is being opened for white nationalists.
This also speaks to the anti-intellectual tradition that has long been wired into the far right’s DNA in the US, and is a key part of the wider Maga Christian movement that embraces climate change denial and the teaching of “creationism” in schools.
And who knows, maybe Trump just resents other Nobel Prize winners because he has yet to win the Peace Prize that he clearly covets. He clearly isn’t going to win the literary prize for The Art of the Deal. DM