Roots and Routes: The Paths of Lebanese Migration to French West Africa

Abstract

We have no way of knowing when the first migrant from present-day Lebanon arrived in West Africa. Some amongst the Lebanese of Dakar still clung in the 1960s to tales of a man, known only by his first name — 'Isa — who had landed in Senegal a century earlier (Cruise O'Brien 1975: 98). Others told of a group of young men — Maronite Christians from the craggy escarpments of Mount Lebanon — who had found their way to West Africa some time between 1876 and 1880 (Winder 1962:300). The Lebanese journalist 'Abdallah Hushaimah, travelling through the region in the 1930s, met in Nigeria one Elias al-Khuri, who claimed to have arrived in the colony in 1890 (Hushaimah 1931:332). The Dutch scholar Laurens van der Laan, combing in the late 1960s through old newspapers in the reading rooms of Fourah Bay College in Freetown, found the first mention of the Lebanese in the Creole press of Sierra Leone in 1895 (van der Laan 1975: 1).