True to his bohemian and eccentric nature, the United States President Donald Trump last week threw one of his usual undiplomatic diatribes, causing a spasm of diplomatic ripples across the world.
It was at a White House luncheon with a group of African leaders last Wednesday. Some of the African leaders had addressed the gathering but Trump picked on the Liberian President,Joseph Boakai, immediately.
“Liberia is a longtime friend of the United States and we believe in your policy of making America great again,” the Liberian leader had said at the event before advocating for US investment in his country. He concluded: “We just want to thank you so much for this opportunity.”
Trump was impressed by the mellifluous American accent in Boakai’s voice and, in his usual abrasive inclination,inquired where Boakai got his language skills.
“Such good English,” Trump said. “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?”
Boakai, trying to conceal his obvious embarrassment, merely released what looked like a smirk.
“In Liberia?” Trump pressed further despite the Liberian leader’s awkward visage arising from the unexpected curve from Trump. “Yes sir,” Boakai replied like a school boy before his domineering principal.
“That’s very interesting,” Trump said. “I have people at this table who can’t speak nearly as well.”
Trump made the last remark to the consternation of several West African Francophone leaders who were seated with him, most of whom are not so ardent in spoken English!
Trump’s rather exuberant remarks were probably supposed to be an innocuous presidential compliment but viewed through a diplomatic lens,they were actually a gratuitous insult; an oblique, unctuous diplomatic infraction.
It amounts to an infernal diplomatic gaffe for the sitting president of a sovereign nation to have so literally heckled the sitting president of another sovereign nation, as if Liberia, a nation said to have been forged by Black Americans, were a linguistic aberration.
However, if the audience, who included top officials from several African nations,noticed this, they did not show it in the seemingly conspiratorial silence and sheepish smiles that greeted the American president’s diplomatic harakiri.
What, however, was obviously lost on Trump was that Liberia shares a unique and long-standing connection with the US. English is the country’s official language and many Liberians speak with an American accent because of those historical ties to the US.
Liberia was founded by freed African-American slaves in 1822 before gaining independence in 1847. Thousands of black Americans and liberated Africans, rescued from transatlantic slave ships, settled in Liberia during the colonial era.
Former US President Abraham Lincoln officially declared Liberia’s independence in 1862 but the country retained a lot of US heritage and it remained in the American “sphere of influence” during the colonial period. Due to this integration, Liberian culture, landmarks and institutions have a strong African-American influence.
The descendants of these freed slaves, known as Americo-Liberians, were said to have dominated the country for more than 100 years, a development that was resented by some indigenous Liberians. The last president from that community, William Tolbert, was overthrown and killed in a coup in 1980.
President Boakai is said to belong to the Kissi ethnic group and so would have spoken that as his mother tongue, before learning English.
Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was named after America’s fifth President, James Monroe, who was a strong supporter of the American Colonization Society (ACS), the organisation responsible for resettling freed African-Americans in West Africa, which eventually led to the founding of Liberia.
It is revelatory that the early architecture of the city was largely influenced by American-style buildings. Many streets in Monrovia are named after colonial American figures, reflecting the city’s founding and historical ties to the US. The city’s main hospital is also named after John F. Kennedy Medical Center (JFKMC), a former US president.
Again, among other amazing Liberia’s affinities with America is the country’s flag, which closely resembles the American flag. It features 11 alternating red and white stripes and a blue square with a single white star.
Hence, it is no accident that President Boakai and any other well educated Liberian could speak with American accent fluently. And it is befuddling that Trump ostensibly knows little or nothing about these striking affinities which Liberia shares with his country, for him to have so undiplomatically harried President Boakai.
But that is vintage Trump. A mercurial, mulish, uncouth and quite loquacious personality, Trump has scant regard for diplomatic niceties and his impish attitude towards African nations and their leaders is legendary. An inveterate racist, the American president in January, 2018 at a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, during his first term, had ignited a global outrage when he described El Salvador, Haiti and certain African nations as “shithole” countries.
The pejorative comment engendered global shock and reverberated across the diplomatic circles, prompting many countries in Africa and around the world to summon US diplomats for formal reproach.
The 47th US President Trump is on the seventh month in his second current term, having been inaugurated on January 20, 2025. Trump, whose election was described as the miracle of the century, having shamed all the bookmakers’ predictions, is also causing an uproar in his country.
Trump has upended many entrenched US traditions and practices that have ordinarily been regarded as largely inviolate for centuries. Americans are now whingeing, wondering what has hit them in the 21st century.
The Liberian President’s case is another in the line of his incivilities against African leaders. Boakai’s experience is, in fact, a child’s play compared to what Trump put the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, through.
The South African leader had jetted to Washington in May, this year, to mend his country’s strained relationship with the US after Trump had canceled much-needed aid to South Africa, offered refuge to white minority Afrikaners, expelled the country’s ambassador and criticized its genocide court case against Israel.
But it was a different ball game as the American president confronted him with false claims of white genocide and land seizures during the White House meeting, which was tense throughout.
The South African leader had hardly settled down on his seat when Trump, in a carefully choreographed Oval Office onslaught, literally pounced on him, taking him to task about the alleged treatment of white South Africans, which he punctuated by playing a video and leafing through a stack of printed news articles that he said proved his allegations.
With the lights turned down at Trump’s request, the video, played on a television that is not normally set up in the Oval Office, showed white crosses, which Trump claimed were the graves of white people and opposition leaders making incendiary speeches.
The claims were said to be latently false as the video was made in September, 2020, five years earlier, during a protest after two people were killed on their farm. The crosses also did not mark actual graves. An organizer of the protest told South Africa’s public broadcaster at the time that they represented farmers who had been killed over the years. And most of them were blacks.
But the unfeeling Trump was unfazed. “We have many people that feel they’re being persecuted, and they’re coming to the United States,” Trump said. “So we take from many … locations, if we feel there’s persecution or genocide going on,” he added, referring specifically to white farmers.
He continued: “People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety. Their land is being confiscated, and in many cases, they’re being killed.” But he was echoing a once-fringe conspiracy theory that has circulated in global far-right chat rooms for at least a decade with the vocal support of his ally, South African-born Elon Musk, who was in the Oval Office during the meeting.
Ramaphosa, sitting in a chair next to Trump and remaining poised, vehemently rejected the American leader’s claims.
“If there was Afrikaner farmer genocide,” he countered, “I can bet you, these three gentlemen would not be here,” Ramaphosa countered, referring to golfers Ernie Els, Retief Goosen and billionaire Johann Rupert, all white, who were present in the room. That still did not move stroppy Trump.
“We have thousands of stories talking about it,” he thundered back angrily, “and we have documentaries, we have news stories. It has to be responded to.”
Ramaphosa mostly sat expressionless during the video presentation, occasionally craning his neck to look at the screen. He said he had not seen the material before and that he would like to find out the location. Trump then displayed printed copies of articles that he said showed white South Africans who had been killed, saying “death, death” as he flipped through them, eventually handing them to his South African guest.
Ramaphosa said there was crime in South Africa, and majority of victims were blacks. Trump interjected. “The farmers are not blacks,” he thundered back.
Ramaphosa responded: “These are concerns we are willing to talk to you about.”
The South African president cited Mandela’s example as a peacemaker, but that still did not dissuade Trump whose political base includes white nationalists. The myth of white genocide in South Africa has become a rallying point for the far right in the United States and elsewhere.
“I will say: apartheid, terrible,” the American strongman said. “This is sort of the opposite of apartheid.”
Ramaphosa with all vehemence, however, denied Trump’s allegations about a wave of racial violence against white farmers in his country, which had suffered centuries of subjugation under an oppressive whites’ hegemony. “There is just no genocide in South Africa,” he insisted.
The embarrassed and emotionally traumatized South African president left the tense meeting not sure if his expedition was not a total waste, as he failed to get the bullish American president to commit to anything, including a trade and investment proposal, part of which was buying liquefied natural gas from the US and critical minerals in South Africa.
Nigeria’s late former President Muhammadu Buhari had his own date with irascible Trump earlier in April, 2018 during his first term when he visited the legendary Oval Office. However, Trump surprisingly did not behave abnormally both in their private meeting and the joint press conference they both addressed after the private discussion.
The American president openly said nice things about his Nigerian guest and his country except nixing the alleged killings of Christians in Nigeria by terrorists and admonishing him (Buhari) to do something urgently about it.
However, it was after the meeting that it came to light that Trump merely pretended throughout his interaction with Buhari. He later confided in his aides that he did not enjoy the meeting one bit.
His invitation to the Nigerian leader to the White House was interpreted in diplomatic circles as a strategic move to mollify African leaders over his “shitholes” comment four months earlier, which he reportedly fessed up as a regrettable diplomatic gaffe. This explains why he did not openly utter his usually scurrilous remarks during Buhari’s visit.
But Trump was said to have told his close aides that his meeting with Buhari was rather regrettably vapid. It was later squealed in Financial Times, in an article titled, “Africa looks for something new out of Trump,” that the US leader had described Buhari, as “so lifeless.”
“The first meeting with Nigeria’s ailing 75-year-old Muhammadu Buhari in April ended with the US president telling aides he never wanted to meet someone so lifeless again, according to three people familiar with the matter,” the article in Financial Times had claimed.
All the Trump’s un-presidential gaffes and tirades against African leaders result from his scant regard for them. This is irksome and unacceptable. It is high time African leaders started earning some respect by putting a stop to their servile disposition to the US and other western powers.
Let them put up their thinking cap, develop their own resources and reduce the tendency to curry favours from the world powers, clutching the begging bowl most of the time.
They should take a cue from the ‘Asian Tigers’ or ‘Four Asian Dragons’ — the high-growth economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, which were hitherto backward but took their own destinies in their own hands.
These countries with brute determination consequently experienced rapid industrialization and high levels of economic growth from the 1960s onward, fueled primarily by exports. They are today competing with the world powers in economic self-reliance and technological advancement.
Until African leaders reduce their dependence on the world powers for everything, the likes of Trump will continue to denigrate them and debase their sovereignty.