Soyinka told me that he has now rendered his Green Card “inoperable,” without going into further detail. “I don’t have strong enough fingers to tear up a Green Card,” he added. “As long as Trump is in charge, if I absolutely have to visit the United States, I prefer to go in the queue for a regular visa with others,” he said. “I’m no longer part of the society, not even as a resident.”

His self-described “Wolexit” from the United States is an act of protest against what he views as Trump’s xenophobic campaign rhetoric regarding specific ethnic, racial, and religious groups, including blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims. It’s a statement by a man who in the past has warned of humanity’s terrible tendency toward “[p]olarizations within various micro-worlds—us versus the inferior them.”

“Trump’s wall is already under construction,” Soyinka recently told The Interview magazine in Nigeria. “Walls are built in the mind, and Trump has erected walls, not only across the mental landscape of America, but across the global landscape.”

But Soyinka is not necessarily urging others to follow his example and join the resistance to Trumpism. He appears to be withdrawing from the political dysfunction he denounces instead of trying to resolve it. He has characterized his decision as a “personal” and “private” one, to which “[n]o one else is invited.” (Soyinka vowed to tear up his Green Card in a question-and-answer session with students at Oxford University, not in some showy press conference, and he hasn’t much welcomed the media attention surrounding his move.)

In discussing that choice, he casts himself as an aging activist seeking tranquility—rather than the next cause to champion—in a tumultuous world. After a long career of outward struggle, he seems to be turning inward. In tampering with his Green Card, Soyinka told me, “I delivered myself from uncertainty, from discomfort, from internal turmoil.”

“As one grows older, one becomes more sensitive about such things, especially as one is inclined to close the world around one as much as possible … and therefore devote one’s time and energy to activity in congenial spaces,” he said. “The U.S. for me, watching that election—it was no longer congenial.”

“There is inevitably some kind of apprehension when someone rides to power on what one considers a negative outlook on a multinational society like America still is today,” Soyinka explained. “What horrified me was not so much the individual demagogue, but to watch … [the] swelling numbers of his followers—to expect, for instance, that listening to that kind of rhetoric [from] a would-be leader of peoples, that crowds would diminish. But they did not. … It’s like seeing a people in a different light for the first time.”

Soyinka recalled his interactions with leaders of black-power movements in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s: “I witnessed the assertion of the black peoples. And one was encouraged by that beginning transformation, which attained its apogee with the election of the first black president of the United States, and [the first American president with] African [heritage] for that matter. One didn’t thereby imagine that racism would die or anything of the sort. But I think that that temporary summit of black equality, this symbolic ascendancy of Obama, [suggested] that social consciousness in a progressive way would be the norm. Mr. Trump’s campaign was a sharp, deliberate reversal, almost as if Barack Obama had just been tolerated all along.”