Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka has stated that he is not interested in applying for his US Green Card any time soon despite the exit of Donald Trump from the White House.
Soyinka had warned US voters not to vote Trump in as President and threatened to tear his American Green Card if Trump won the election.
On November 2, 2016, six days before the US election, Soyinka, told a student audience at Oxford University’s Ertegun House that he would hold his own, self-described “Wolexit” if Trump won, and destroy his green card.
“If in the unlikely event he does win, the first thing he’ll do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US. Well, I’m not waiting for that,” he said at the time. “The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up.”
Soyinka, the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature, was jailed twice for his criticism of the Nigerian government during the 1960s, famously composing protest poems on toilet paper from his cell in solitary confinement. In 1994, Soyinka’s passport was confiscated by the de facto president Sani Abacha after he urged Nigerians to not pay taxes, as their money would aid the military. After years of living in voluntary exile and teaching overseas, Soyinka eventually sought refuge in the United States that same year, with the help of former US president Jimmy Carter. He later received a death sentence in absentia in 1997, from the regime under Abacha.
In an interview with the Atlantic in 2017, Soyinka confirmed he had followed through on his pledge to destroy his green card if Trump won as he celebrated Thanksgiving with his family in the US.
Reacting to the exit of Trump from the White House, Soyinka in a new media interview said;
“Donald Trump and his constituency lynched George Floyd and many more of his race. Here, we lynch school pupils, traumatize them for life, sell the females – yet again – into slavery.”
“That the same unrepentant misfit should earn the votes of nearly half the votes of America’s supposedly mature, supposedly history conscious population – not counting the unsolicited votes from his Nigerian slave plantation – is too unsettling. I am already trapped in one shithole country, why should I rush to restore the duplication of my status?”
“No, I shall not be applying for restoration of the Green Card any time soon. One Green document will more than suffice!”
