Liberia: Five things Trump should know and why they speak 'good English'
Founded by freed slaves
Liberia was founded by freed African-American slaves in 1822 before declaring 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 heavy African-American influence.Ten of Liberia's 26 presidents were born in the US.
The capital is named after a former US president
Liberia's capital, Monrovia, was named in honour of America's 5th President, James Monroe, who was a strong supporter of the American Colonization Society (ACS).The ACS was the organisation responsible for resettling freed African-Americans in West Africa - which eventually led to the founding of Liberia.Not surprisingly 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.
Nearly identical flags
The flag of Liberia closely resembles the American flag. It features 11 alternating red and white stripes and a blue square with a single white star.The white star symbolises Liberia as the first independent republic in Africa.The US flag, in comparison, has 13 stripes representing the original 13 colonies and 50 stars, one for each state.The Liberian flag was designed by seven black women - all born in America.
Ex-president's son plays for US football team
Timothy Weah, the son of Liberia's former President George Weah, is an American professional soccer player who plays for Italian club Juventus as well as the US national team.The 25-year-old forward was born in the US but began his professional career with Paris St-Germain in France, where he won the Ligue 1 title before moving on loan to the Scottish team, Celtic.His father, George, is a Liberian football legend who won the Ballon d'Or in 1995 while playing for Juventus's Italian rivals AC Milan. He is the only African winner of this award - and went on to be elected president in 2018.
Former president won the Nobel Peace Prize
Liberia produced Africa's first elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.She was elected in 2005, two years after the nation's bloody civil war ended, and served as president until 2018.Sirleaf has a strong American background as she studied at Madison Business College and later went to Harvard University where she graduated as an economist. She has received worldwide recognition and accolades for maintaining peace during her administration.Her story is pitted with remarkable feats of defiance and courage. In 2011, along with Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karmān, she won the Nobel Prize for Peace for her efforts to further women's rights.In 2016, Forbes listed her among the most powerful women in the world.
More about Liberia from the BBC:
Why Trump invited five African leaders to the White HouseLiberian president killed in coup gets state funeral after 45 yearsHow President Joseph Boakai hopes to rid Liberia of its problemsLiberia's war and peace: Lessons from 30 years' reporting
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
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Trump faces MAGA revolt on his own social media platform after defending Pam Bondi amid Epstein files debacle
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The National
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'Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state and a threat to democracy', say others. What's certainly in no doubt is that Trump has propelled ICE into America's best-funded law enforcement agency. As the Financial Times (FT) US national editor Edward Luce, recently highlighted, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB) signed into law by the president on July 4, lifted ICE's budget to an estimated $37.5 billion a year, a sum higher than Italy's entire defence budget and just below Canada's. Writing a message of 'THANK YOU!' to the ICE workforce over the Independence Day holiday, Trump made clear that the BBB spending commitment would give the agency 'ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History'. The money set aside for ICE is eyewatering. 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CBP controls the borders, while ICE operates inside the country and it's this operation across America that has become the focus of controversy. According to the agency's own website, ICE, along with its ERO officials, are tasked with identifying, arresting, detaining, and removing immigrants without authorisation in the US. Back during his 2024 presidential campaign, when outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants, Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But since entering office, this has rapidly widened to include anyone without legal status, ICE officers, often masked and not wearing uniforms or displaying badges, have now been arresting people outside courtroom hearings, during traffic stops in workplace sweeps, and even from hospitals. The agency's aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout America's immigrant communities, especially in Democrat-run cities. 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Numbers matter here, for ICE is under tremendous pressure to make more arrests to meet quotas set by senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown. Miller set an aggressive quota of 3000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal have pushed ICE officers into more communities and businesses. Not everyone within the ranks of ICE are happy with this and other aspects of the policy. According to The Atlantic magazine's immigration writer Nic Miroff, who has interviewed many current and former ICE agents who spoke on condition of anonymity, many described 'a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more'. READ MORE: Patrick Harvie: 'Never again' seems to not apply to Palestinians Some ICE employees according to Miroff 'believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe'. With deportations becoming a top domestic priority for the Trump administration, some Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) officers along with those from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have been put on immigration enforcement duties. It's a shift in duties many do not agree with. One veteran HSI agent complained to Miroff that his division which usually focuses on cartel drug-trafficking operations have had agents moved to immigration-enforcement arrests as part of ICE operations. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' the agent told Miroff. 'It's infuriating,' adding that he is thinking of quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners'. But complain as some ICE agents do, many Americans currently reserve their sympathies for those being targeted by the agents. Stories emerging from detention facilities where those arrested by ICE are being held are only adding to that sympathy as well as a sense of outrage. Earlier this month, Trump held a tour of one facility that's been dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz'. Its name is a reference to both the local reptile population and the former maximum-security Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California. An aerial view of the migrant detention centre dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' (Image: Chandan Khanna/AFP) Constructed in a little over eight days and meant to accommodate up to 3000 detainees, since then accounts and reports from the facility point to appalling conditions. They suggest too that the design of the site is flawed and will compromise the safety of people being held there. Stories relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in the makeshift Florida detention centre for migrants in the Everglades made for grim reading about the conditions detainees endure. 'Toilets that didn't flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys,' were among some of the accounts detailed by the Miami Herald. The newspaper also told of lights being left on inside the facility 24 hours a day, with detainees saying there are no clocks and there is scant sunlight coming through the heavy-duty tents, making it difficult for them to know whether it is day or night. Currently, ICE is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, even though funding until the latest boost was available for only 41,000 detention beds. This means that processing centres are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells. Worrying as such reports are, it's the growth of ICE, its increasingly politicised role and the fact that it appears beyond accountability that concerns many Americans. Earlier this year, ICE's in-house watchdog was scrapped and for the time being, America's lower courts are hamstrung in their efforts to rein it in. As the FT's national editor Edward Luce recently observed, given that the Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping immunity from 'official' acts he takes as president … 'that makes ICE Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state'. Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making, insist some experts on authoritarian regimes. Lee Morgenbesser is an associate professor with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane, and fellow with the Australian Research Council. Having studied historical and contemporary secret police forces, Morgenbesser says they typically meet five criteria. First, they're a police force targeting political opponents and dissidents. Second, they're not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator. Third, the identity of their members and their operations are secret. Fourth, they specialise in political intelligence and surveillance operations. And finally, they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, disappearances and torture. In a recent article in the online platform The Conversation, and using these criteria to assess how close ICE is to becoming a secret police force, Morgenbesser concludes that 'overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria". While ICE has yet to target political opponents, which Morgenbesser defines narrowly as members of the Democratic Party, and it is not directly controlled by Trump, he maintains that ICE's 'current structure provides him with plausible deniability.' In short, he says that while ICE is 'far from resembling history's most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates'. 'When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism,' Morgenbesser warns. As ICE makes its presence felt in a growing number of American communities, the controversy over its role is likewise certain to escalate. While a majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children or who arrived many years ago to stay. Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov in mid-June showed that only 42% viewed ICE favourably – an eight percentage-point drop from February and the start of Trump's term. For now, the ICE men continue to cometh and America, a nation of immigrants, faces an altogether different reckoning over its future democratic credentials.
The National
3 hours ago
- The National
Ian Murray panned for ‘disgraceful' U-turns as past motions resurface
The Scottish Secretary signed Early Day Motions on a range of topics while Labour were in opposition, including demanding full compensation (and free bus passes) for the Waspi women, membership of the EU's customs union and unilateral nuclear disarmament. They have all now ditched by Labour after coming to power. A motion that Murray backed in 2019 also took aim at the record of US president Donald Trump, including his "misogynism, racism and xenophobia'. READ MORE: Octopus Energy to pay £1.5 million for prepayment meter billing errors It also called on the then UK Government to rescind the offer of a full state visit to President Trump. Now as Scottish Secretary, Murray has said he would 'meet Donald Trump off the plane'. It also comes as Trump is reportedly expected to touch down in Scotland to visit his golf courses at the end of July or the beginning of August. The SNP have now hit out at Murray, saying that the U-turns are 'disgraceful' – also taking aim at what they said was his previous 'uncharacteristically strong' support for Palestine and gender reform. (Image: NQ) The party pinpointed a motion in 2017, which Murray supported, raised concerns over the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinian children while another from 2011 called for the UK Government to officially recognise a Palestinian state – the new Labour Government has not yet done so. Murray also supported a motion in 2017 which said gender identity "includes those who do not identify as either male or female, identify as both, a third gender or are fluid in their identity". But as Scottish Secretary, he refused to rule out lifting the Tory-imposed veto on the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. "Labour's Secretary of State for Scotland's transformation from backbench idealist to Cabinet loyalist is not just disappointing, it's disgraceful,' SNP MSP Gordon MacDonald told the Sunday National. 'From Palestine to pensioners, nuclear weapons to the EU, he has abandoned almost every principle he once claimed to champion. 'His constituents, and Scotland, deserve better than a minister who has traded his principles for power - as ever, Scotland is an afterthought for Labour politicians.' Scottish Labour have been approached for comment.
