"Such Good English!': How Trump’s Compliment Became a Colonial Throwback in a Global English Age

By Chris Uchenna Agbedo

There are compliments, and then there are compliments that smell like mothballs from colonial attics. When U.S. President Donald J. Trump turned to Liberian President Joseph Boakai during a White House dinner for African leaders and said, “Such good English, it’s beautiful. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” - a hush of awkward awe swept the room. But across Africa, and particularly in Liberia, many did not hear admiration. They heard something older, something musty, something imperially backhanded.

For Trump, the surprise wasn't that Boakai spoke English. It was that he spoke it with elegance, clarity, and sophistication, an outcome Trump seemed to believe was unnatural for someone from Africa. And herein lies the satire-soaked tragedy. Liberia is an English-speaking country and so it has been since its founding in 1822 by freed American slaves resettled by the American Colonization Society. In fact, Liberia’s brand of English, deeply influenced by American accents, is closer in tone to Mississippi than to Manchester. Yet, to Trump, it was a miracle worth marvelling at.

And marvel he did. “That’s very interesting,” he added, before muttering something about folks at the table who “can’t speak nearly as well.” Of course, Trump is well known for confusing vocabulary with intellect, and grammar with greatness. The irony? He likely meant it as praise. But, like most of Trump’s linguistic encounters with people of colour, it was a microaggression dipped in maple syrup, that's the verbal equivalent of saying, “You clean up nice for a caveman.”

Permit a moment of foray into the linguistic compliments and the ghosts they carry. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously described language as a form of symbolic capital. In colonial and postcolonial settings, English became not just a language, but a test of belonging, a tool of exclusion (otherness), and a symbol of civilization by whose standards, you can guess. Therefore, when Trump expressed awe at an African head of state speaking fluent English, it wasn’t an isolated gaffe. It was a re-echo of empire, a renewed kind of reflexive positioning of English as Western birthright, and Africans as forever playing catch-up in the linguistic Olympics.

But while Trump was busy being linguistically startled, the real shock should be his bare-faced ignorance of contemporary linguistic scholarship, particularly, that done by Africans themselves. Enter Prof. Kingsley Ugwuanyi, Nigeria’s gift to global English. If Trump truly wants to know where beautiful English is being innovated, he should find his way to Agbamere Eha- Arụmọna, a rustic suburb of the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State, Nigeria, where the sociolinguistic wizkid - Prof. Kingsley nwa Ugwuanyị hails from.

Raised amid red earth and rhetorical rhythms, Ugwuanyi, my younger colleague at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, has risen from the village to the very citadel of global sociolinguistic reckoning, as his journey from Nsukka to Oxford, intent on rewriting English from below clearly shows. Today, he teaches at SOAS University of London, but his impact reverberates in dictionaries, academic journals, and classrooms across the world.

In January 2025, the Oxford English Dictionary, OED, updated its archives with over 20 new Nigerian English words. Who's the proverbial new kid on the block behind much of that update? Prof. Kingsley Ugwuanyi, of course. Not only did he help draft definitions for lexical items like japa, agbero, suya, sisi eko, and yarn dust, but he also recorded audio pronunciations that now accompany those entries in the OED, his own Igbo-toned English voice leading the global stage.

But his work is not merely curatorial. It is revolutionary. Ugwuanyi’s scholarship frames Nigerian English not as a corrupt cousin of the Queen’s English, but as a legitimate, living variety with its own phonology, morphology, pragmatics, and history. His 2025 World Englishes special issue makes a compelling case. Nigerian English is not a 'variant;' it is a linguistic ecosystem, fully capable of expressing identity, culture, emotion, and nuance with force and flavour.

Now, imagine Trump meeting Prof Ugwuanyi at the White House. The conversation might go like this:

Trump: “You speak very well. Where did you learn that?”

Ugwuanyi: “From my grandmother in Agbamere Eha- Arụmọna and my students at Nsukka. Also, from writing half the OED’s new entries. You’re welcome.”

Trump: “That’s incredible. I have people in my administration, who don’t know what ‘japa’ means.”

Ugwuanyi: “They probably don’t know what ‘truth’ means either.”

Ugwuanyi’s linguistic engineering, which catapulted the Nigerian English into a global force, does not just capture language; it captures life. Agbero is not just a bus conductor; he is a metaphor for organized chaos. Japa is not just to flee; it is the entire Nigerian youth experience captured in two syllables. These words are soaked in survival, defiance, and swagger.

What Trump fails to grasp is that African nations like Nigeria and Liberia have not just learned English; they’ve transformed it. They have turned it from a colonial script into a postcolonial screenplay, where the once-silent now write the dialogue.

And yet, America’s view of Africa remains frozen in sepia. The African still appears as a guest at the English table, never its co-chef. Which is why Trump’s comment to Boakai wasn’t just cavalier and rude; it was historically blind.

This brings us to the lingering burden of “Good English”. Liberians rightly took offence. Youth advocate, Archie Tamel Harris put it plainly: “I felt insulted… the US president and people in the West still see Africans as people in villages who are not educated.” Veronica Mente, a South African MP, asked on social media: “What stops [Boakai] from standing up and leaving?” But the real tragedy lies in the psychological straitjacket Africans are often forced into. Had Boakai walked out, he would probably have been labelled hypersensitive. By staying, he was forced into polite nodding while absorbing what felt like a pat on the head from a president, whose own command of English remains... folkloric.

Even Liberia’s Foreign Minister tried to spin the insult into a misunderstood compliment: “What President Trump heard was the American influence on our English… There was no offence.” Of course, there was. But sometimes, international diplomacy demands silence in the face of deeply offensive bafflement.

What is most laughable is that Trump imagines himself the custodian of English purity, when in fact, Nigerian and Liberian English varieties now sit in the OED while his own tweets—“covfefe” included—rot in the archives of absurdity. There is a linguistic irony here so rich it needs its own visa. The man shocked by African eloquence is himself the poster child for mangled syntax and lexical chaos. Trump marvels at Africans who can “speak beautifully” while regularly mispronouncing “anonymous” and inventing words in real time like a malfunctioning AI.

Prof. Ugwuanyi, by contrast, is not just speaking English; he is shaping it. His linguistic engineering has repositioned Nigerian English as a global force, celebrated by the very institutions that once considered it a deviation.

That, dear reader, is what makes Trump’s comment so deeply, darkly funny. The compliment, so unintentionally offensive, is the last gasp of a worldview where English flows one way - from West to Rest. But the world has changed. The Rest is now writing the dictionary.

In the words of Africa's literary giant - Chinua Achebe - “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Thanks to scholars like Prof. Ugwuanyi, the lions now have their sociolinguists and they are rewriting the hunt in Nigerian English.

So, the next time Trump marvels at an African’s command of English, perhaps someone should hand him a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, flip to “Naija,” and whisper: “Sir, we didn’t learn your language. We made it and it's now ours.” Kpo!