Nigerian legendary writer, Wole Soyinka has threatened to leave the United States of America should Republican Party candidate win the presidential election.
Professor Wole Soyinka may be apparently pitching his tent with United States Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton, as the presidential election draws nearer.
The Nigerian Nobel-winning author, now living in the US, tells Oxford students that it is up to young people to stand against ‘ultranationalism’ – in a speech that also took aim at Brexit and Bob Dylan.
The Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka has told students that if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States next week, he will leave the country according to the Guardian.
“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,” said Soyinka, who is scholar-in-residence at New York University’s Institute of African American Affairs this autumn.
“The moment they announce his victory, I will cut my green card myself and start packing up.”
The Nigerian playwright and poet, who was imprisoned in Nigeria during its civil war, later fleeing the country and receiving a death sentence in absentia, urged young people to stand up against oppression.
Giving a seminar to students at Oxford University, he also laid into Brexit, saying it was a “ridiculous decision”, and part of an international rise in what he called “ultranationalism”.
"It’s a constant fight to try to get a nation to recognise its own noble persuasions … the loftiness of human possibility
“What is happening in Europe shouldn’t surprise any of us … It has happened before,” he said. “We were here when Enoch Powell was leading his thugs out to drive blacks from here … it’s a constant fight to try to get a nation to recognise its own noble persuasions, its own persuasions of the loftiness of human possibility.
It’s for young people like you to say no to them whenever that happens.”
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