United States President Donald Trump has drawn mockery after he complimented the president of Liberia for speaking English “beautifully”, even though it is the country’s official language.
“Such good English, where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” Trump asked Joseph Boakai during a meeting with five African leaders at the White House on Wednesday.
“In Liberia?” Trump asked. Boakai seemed to chuckle before responding: “Yes sir.”
Alex Vines, head of the Africa Programme at the London think tank, Chatham House, told Al Jazeera: “President Trump’s limited knowledge of Africa was on show with his comment on President Boakai’s quality of English.”
Liberia was founded in 1822 as a colony for freed Black American slaves as white Americans sought to address what they saw as a problem – the presence of Black people in the United States once slavery ended.
Here is a potted history of the African nation:
Where is Liberia and how populous is it?
The country of five million people is located on the Western African coast and is bounded by Sierra Leone to the northwest, Guinea to the north, Ivory Coast to the east and the Atlantic Ocean to the south and west.
Liberia was founded in 1822 and became a republic in 1847. It is now Africa’s oldest republic and is seen by many as a symbol of African self-determination. Along with Ethiopia, it is the only African nation that was never colonised during Europe’s scramble for the continent.
There are officially 16 ethnic groups that make up Liberia’s Indigenous African population, with the largest being the Kpelle.
How, why and when was Liberia founded?
As the abolitionist movement against slavery gained ground in the US in 1822, a group of 86 formerly enslaved people arrived in Liberia’s present-day capital, Monrovia, the country’s largest port.
Jehudi Ashmun, a white American, was leading efforts by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to resettle free people of colour in Africa. While some chose to emigrate willingly, the organisation is known to have pressured or coerced others into relocating.
ACS was established by white Americans who believed that the presence of free Black people in the US posed a threat to the nation, as they might incite those who remained in slavery to rebel. Some also believed in the “inferiority” of Black people and thought them unable to achieve equality in American society. The organisation’s goal was, therefore, to establish a colony in West Africa that would take them in.
Liberia was proclaimed an independent republic in 1847, becoming the first African republic to achieve such status and be recognised by Western nations. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, an African American who had emigrated to Liberia in 1829 and become a politician, was elected the first president of the new country.
While Indigenous leaders resisted American attempts to purchase land, the newborn country was created after a US Navy officer coerced a local ruler to sell a strip of land to ACS. Its capital was named Monrovia after the US’s fifth president, James Monroe, who had procured government money for the project.
It is estimated that, in total, about 12,000 formerly enslaved Black Americans immigrated to Liberia between 1820 and 1861.
Who makes up the population?
African Americans and their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, dominated the government of Liberia thanks to their ties with the US government, through which they were able to conduct trade, until a military coup ended their influence in 1980.
Despite being a minority of about 5 percent of the total population in Liberia, from the start of the republic, they mostly excluded the Indigenous African population from any meaningful participation in the political life of the country.
Indigenous people who had migrated from western Sudan in the late Middle Ages constitute a majority of the population. A smaller portion also migrated from neighbouring western African states during the anti-slave-trade campaign and European colonial rule in the 1800s.
In more recent years, it has opened its doors to refugees from neighbouring countries, especially from the Ivory Coast, where civil war broke out in 2002 and 2011.
What is the official language of Liberia?
English is Liberia’s official language, though more than two dozen Indigenous languages are spoken there as well.
Americo-Liberians, who dominated political power until the military coup in 1980, imposed English as the commonly spoken language when they founded the republic in 1847.
Other languages spoken by Liberia’s Indigenous ethnic groups fall under three main groups, all belonging to the Niger-Congo language family: the Mande, Kwa and Mel languages.
What caused the civil wars in Liberia?
Liberia has endured two major civil wars in more recent decades. The country’s conflicts were deeply rooted in ethnic divisions.
Samuel Doe, a member of the Indigenous Krahn ethnic group, led a military coup in 1980, which overthrew the Americo-Liberian government and put an end to its political dominance marked by ethnic inequalities. Liberian President William R Tolbert was assassinated during the coup.
However, Doe ushered in a period of authoritarianism and human rights abuses that led to the First and Second Liberian Civil Wars.
The first war erupted in 1989, when Charles Taylor, a descendant of freed American slaves, launched an armed rebellion against Doe, which killed more than 200,000 people and displaced millions.
A second war broke out in 1999 when a rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), began a military offensive to topple Taylor’s government with the support of neighbouring Guinea.
The conflict spilled over into Guinea and Sierra Leone but subsided in 2003 with the intervention of international peacekeeping forces and Taylor’s resignation and exile.
Taylor was accused of human rights violations and indicted by a United Nations-sponsored war-crimes tribunal in 2003. He received a sentence of 50 years in prison.
What is the situation now?
Liberia has mostly experienced political stability since the second civil war ended. It held democratic elections in 2017, marking the first peaceful transfer of power since 1944.
Boakai was elected president in 2023 with 50.64 percent of the vote for a six-year term, defeating former international football star George Weah.
Vines, from Chatham House, said: “Ethnicity is less important in Liberia today and Americo-Liberians are a lot less dominant.”
“Liberians still perceive close ties with the US,” especially because of deep connections with many Green Card holders, Vines said, but the significant cut of USAID funding to the African continent earlier this year came as a shock.
During Wednesday’s White House meeting with Trump, Boakai described Liberia as “a longtime friend of the United States”.
“We believe in your policy of making America great again,” he told Trump at the meeting before advocating for US investment in his country. “We just want to thank you so much for this opportunity.”
Why did Trump meet the leaders of Liberia and other West African nations?
The five countries whose leaders met Trump – namely Liberia, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Senegal – possess untapped natural resources, including rare earth minerals. The US president saluted them as “very vibrant places with very valuable land, great minerals, great oil deposits and wonderful people”.
Vines said Boakai’s presence at the White House was “opportunistic”, as the Liberian president was already on a trip to the US, rather than a reflection of deep historical ties between the two nations.
Africa has become a battleground for global influence in the US-China geopolitical rivalry, but Trump is known for his apparently dismissive remarks about the continent.
During his first term as president, Trump caused outrage after criticising immigration to his country from El Salvador, Haiti and the African continent, which he reportedly dubbed “s***hole countries”.
The current Trump administration is also known to be seeking to deport people who have outstayed their visas or are otherwise in the US illegally to West African countries willing to receive them.
Source: Aljazeera
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