Soyinka vows to hold funeral wake on Trump’s inauguration

Explains why he destroyed U.S. green card

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has vowed to hold a funeral wake on the inauguration day of the United States President-elect Donald Trump.

He said this is part of ways to show his displeasure over Trump’s emergence.

Soyinka also explained why he destroyed his United States Green Card.

“I will tell you what I am going to do on that inauguration day. I am going to hold a funeral wake, a private funeral wake, but who am I mourning? What am I mourning? It is not the Americans, they can handle themselves; it is about the death of Nigerians’ common sense.

I shall hold a private wake on that day because I think that our common sense is lost, totally in Nigeria. And it is possible that because of that, I may begin a second Wole-exit when I finish with this one, which is eventually over,” he said.

In an interview with journalists on “The Green God and the Idolatry of Mutants,” yesterday at Freedom Park, Lagos, the playwright and poet, who was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, said he destroyed his U.S Green Card in protest against Donald Trump being elected the U.S. president.

According to him, his action is informed by the rhetoric that brought Trump to power, adding that his election campaigns had negative statements against blacks, particularly Nigerians and he had to respond to this in his own way.

He disclosed that even if the U.S. institutes a system that should reform what Trump had said during his campaigns, it must be noted that the president-elect has sown the seed of discord and racism in the minds of Americans, people of other races, including blacks in the diaspora, which in no time would begin to germinate.

Soyinka also lambasted Nigerians over the vituperations of his action on social media and some print media, saying he is also planning for what he called a second Wole-exit, which would include relocating his foundation from Abeokuta to outside Nigeria.

“Sometimes, I am embarrassed to consider that I am occupying the same nation with some imbeciles and I ask, ‘what am I doing within the same space with these morons, who think because they operate a blog or twitter, has the right to question how I express myself?” he said.

On the presentation of the video to show proof that he has actually destroyed his Green Card, he said he is not an entertainer by bringing a card and then cutting it in the presence of all.

“I am not entertaining anybody. You want to see evidence of anything; I will take you to Ogun shrine on which I will place the evidence because Ogun is my guiding principle. And when I say I have done something, I did it,” he said.