Speaking at Oxford University in the UK, Mr Soyinka said it was unlikely that Mr Trump would win but if he did then the "first thing he’ll do is to say [that] all green-card holders must reapply to come back into the US…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.

He also laid into Brexit, saying it was a “ridiculous decision”, and part of an international rise in what he called “ultranationalism”.

“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.”

Soyinka was Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature, winning in 1986 for writing that “in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence”.