Why is Liberia’s president’s son playing for the U.S. in the World Cup?
On Tuesday, millions of Americans rejoiced as the United States advanced to the knockout rounds of the World Cup, defeating Iran by a single first-half goal, only its second of the tournament. The first goal, scored against Wales in a 1-1 draw, came off the boot of 22-year-old New Yorker Tim Weah, the son of George Weah, a legend named the best player in the world in 1995.
The elder Weah was a global superstar, winning league championships in both France and Italy, collecting a veritable museum of individual awards. He split his time during offseasons between his native Liberia and the United States, where he met his Jamaican-born, New Yorker wife, Clar, Tim’s mother.
But George Weah is not just a legendary athlete, an icon of African soccer placed ahead of names like Drogba, Touré, Mané and Salah. He’s also the leader of a nation. In 2017, George Weah was elected the 25th president of the Republic of Liberia.
But why is the son of the president of Liberia playing for the United States in the World Cup?
The United States and Liberia, the nations of Tim and George Weah, are tied by the same scars of the transatlantic slave trade, violent colonialism, deadly civil wars and political systems with shared roots. Liberia itself was born of a uniquely American idea of liberty gained through republican governance in combination with two American systems of racism: slavery and settler colonialism.
Liberia’s founders were Black Americans, most born free in the border states, who began immigrating to West Africa in 1822, fleeing slavery and social and legal restrictions rooted in white supremacy. For some, immigrating to the Liberian colony was a condition of their emancipation, particularly for those from the Deep South. For others, it was a chosen act of social and legal liberation, access into a political and commercial class almost wholly denied them in the United States.
They were refugees, migrants and asylum seekers escaping one of history’s most violent systems of oppression. Yet they were also invaders and colonizers. Nearly all who expatriated brought with them to Liberia the American values upon which they were raised, like Christianity, capitalism and the belief that those values gave them the right to conquer and convert the Indigenous people they encountered at will.
The colony grew on those terms, welcoming more than 10,000 additional Black American migrants by the end of the 1840s and serving as the U.S. Navy’s modest anti-slave trading outpost and an export hub for camwood, ivory and other West African goods.
In July 1847, under threat from encroaching British imperialists to the north and French imperialists to the south, the expatriated American settlers, who had by then firmly established political and economic power in the area, issued a declaration of independence, framed around that of the United States. The Republic of Liberia, the first independent African republic, was born.
The first 10 presidents of Liberia were all Americans, freeborn natives, and they never forgot it, creating in Liberia a political, social and cultural identity built first upon their American births and later their American blood. Indeed, they inherited the American political and cultural traditions that would go on to define Liberia’s history and its greatest challenges for a century and a half. These tensions were informed by the legacies of American-inspired settler colonialism, including the repression of “Native” populations and the forced institution of cultural norms that mirrored 19th-century American values — including Protestant Christianity, formal “settler” English and aristocratic dress and manners.
The tensions borne of this settler colonial hierarchy boiled over in 1980 in the form of a violent and unrelenting civil war that would last for nearly 26 years. By the time George Weah retired from thrilling global soccer audiences in 2003, he joined the community formed by a reverse diaspora of thousands of Liberians who had recently migrated to the United States.
But Weah, along with many others displaced by the violence, remained deeply tied to Liberia. He soon returned and launched a series of humanitarian efforts and political campaigns. Drawing on his sporting popularity, humanitarian work and a shrewd ability to form political alliances, he successfully ran for president in 2017, defeating a field of 20 candidates including the incumbent vice president.
Meanwhile, his son Tim become one of the most exciting young prospects in American soccer. In 2017, the same year as his father’s election to the presidency, he became the first American to sign with the storied French club Paris Saint-Germain, where his father had played two decades prior. In France, an American and a Liberian dream of intergenerational soccer success was fulfilled.
When Liberia declared its independence in 1847, both the newly independent nation and the United States celebrated the extension of American republican values across the Atlantic. The United States was formed as a rejection of the British model of government, while Liberia’s independence was seen as fulfilling American values and American governance — for better and for worse.