“It will get me into trouble again!” laughs Ghana President John Mahama upon the conclusion of our interview.

A few weeks earlier, Mahama’s Foreign Minister had visited the U.S. State Department, only to be immediately confronted with an op-ed that his boss had written for the U.K. Guardian newspaper. In it, Mahama eruditely excoriates U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a white genocide in South Africa and calls his “unfounded attack” on its President Cyril Ramaphosa in a fractious Oval Office meeting “an insult to all Africans.”

“They asked, ‘Did your President actually write this?’” Mahama tells TIME in his presidential office within Accra’s Jubilee House. “He says, ‘Yes, my President is a writer and likes to express himself.’ And they said, ‘Well, he's President

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