Soyinka Goes To America A Year After Tearing His Green Card

Professor Wole Soyinka is going back to Donald Trump’s America, less than a year after he tore his Green Card following the election of Donald Trump as the president.

He will be delivering from 14-16 November the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University Centre for African Studies.

“I’ll go in as an alien, an alien from outer space. I love that designation,” Soyinka said in an interview with Financial Times of London published on Friday.

Before the emergence of Trump, Soyinka had spent much time in the US, where he taught at a number of universities and lived in California with his wife, Folake.

Donald Trump’s election marked an end to his US sojourn. In what has become known among Nigerians as “Wolexit”, he cut up his Green Card.

“To have some redneck ride into power on the steed of racism was for me too much,” he told the Financial Times.

In a statement in 2016, he detailed why he chose to drop the Green Card:

”I was in New York during the run-up to elections. I watched this face, its body language, listened to his uncouth, racist language, his imbecillic harangues, the insults to other peoples, other races, especially the Hispanics, Africans and Afro-Americans, even citing once – I was told – Nigeria as an instance of the burdensome occupation of global space. I watched and listened, disbelievingly, since this was America, supposedly now freed to a large extent – as we like to believe and have a right to expect – from its lamentable history of racism.”

NAN