Loaded for Bear: Trump regime bares its racism by revoking Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka’s visa

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