The families arrived whole

Lebanese Ghana was not built by individuals. It was built by villages that moved together, and a hundred years later the record still shows it in the names.

The first Lebanese to reach West Africa landed at Dakar in the 1860s, and some of them had not meant to.

Amerka was an imprecise word. It covered the Americas, West Africa, and on occasion Australia, and it meant opportunity somewhere else rather than any particular coast. Charles Issawi recorded a man in the 1940s explaining where he was going: the part of Amerka that is under French rule, where it is very hot and the people are black. He meant Senegal. Nayurk meant New York.

Some who landed in West Africa believed they were bound for the Americas. Others reached Marseille, found they could not afford the Atlantic crossing, and took the shorter passage south instead.

From Dakar they moved down the coast. By the 1890s they were established enough in Guinea to trouble French traders during the rubber boom. The Gold Coast came after that.

This is the part that is usually missed, and it explains everything after it.

Lebanese emigration to West Africa was not a scatter of individuals. It was localised and it was chained. Related families from one place in Lebanon settled one district in one colony, then sent for the next family from the same village.

The historian Emmanuel Akyeampong sets out the pattern. In Sierra Leone the immigrants came from five main districts: Rahbe and the villages around it, El-Metn, Tleill and its neighbours, the country around Tyre, and Tripoli with a few villages north of it. In Côte d’Ivoire you find whole clans from the south, the Ezzedines from Dair Qanun an-Nahr, the Fakhrys and Bilals from Zrariyah, the Nassines from Nabatiyah.

It was the same instinct that had moved village families into Beirut in the nineteenth century, where people from home supplied the introductions and the work. Extended across an ocean, it meant a community existed almost immediately, because the unit that emigrated was never a man. It was a family.

And they behaved accordingly. Settlers sent for wives and children, or had marriages arranged and the wives dispatched to join them. That is not what temporary migration looks like. Colonial officials and local elites noticed, and some of them did not like it, precisely because it read as permanent.

They also arrived into a paperwork problem this record keeps running into.

From the First World War until 1924 they had no nationality at all. Ottoman nationality had been abrogated and distinct Lebanese and Syrian nationalities did not yet exist. They came under French protection overseas, and were widely designated Turks by Western powers, a description they objected to and could do nothing about.

So the earliest decades of Lebanese Ghana sit in colonial files under somebody else’s name. Anybody going back to count them is counting the wrong category. It is the same reason the Brazilian, Australian and American records all start late.

Which brings us to a figure that circulates constantly and should not.

You will read that the Lebanese are two per cent of Ghana’s population and sixty per cent of its traders. Two per cent of Ghana is more than six hundred thousand people. The figure usually given for all Middle East nationals in Ghana is around thirty four thousand.

That is not a rounding question. It is wrong by more than a factor of ten, and it gets repeated because it flatters everybody. It flatters the community, and it suits anyone who wants to argue the community is too large. A number that convenient deserves more suspicion than it gets.

The honest version is better anyway. A community in the tens of thousands, in a country of more than thirty million, commercially significant for a century.

In 1998 a genealogist named Raymond Dib compiled a directory of Lebanese emigrants around the world and gave Accra its own page. There is no commentary on it, no ranking and no claims. It is a list of the families of the city, alphabetically, and the first page alone runs past sixty of them.

Abbas. Abboud. Abi-Karam. Abou-Khalil. Aschkar. Attieh. Ayoub. Azar. Bahsoun. Bardawil. Bassil. Bitar. Boulos. Captan. Chahine. Chebib. Daher. Dakmak. Diab. Dib. Eid. Ezzedin.

That is the letters A to E.

Read it slowly, because a list like that is the whole argument of this piece in one column. Nobody on it arrived alone. Each of those names is a village network that reached Accra and then reached back for the next household. The directory is not a hall of fame and it was never meant to be read as one. It is a census of who was there, which is the rarest and most useful document a diaspora ever produces.

And the names did not go anywhere. Dakfo Enterprise, a building materials business in the North Industrial Area, is registered at an address called Dakmak House in Tudu, the old trading quarter of central Accra. Across the city, on Liberation Road in Airport City, the Atlantic Tower is a commercial office building developed by Wahhab Estate Co Ltd, incorporated in 1995, whose managing director is Radwan Dakmak. Built between 2012 and 2017, it holds final EDGE certification from thinkstep-SGS and is projected to use forty six per cent less energy and fifty six per cent less water than a standard office building. Interviewed in February 2024, the group’s business development manager was Karim Dakmak, which is to say the next one.

A name on a warehouse in the old market district, and the same name on a certified tower in the new commercial one. Pick almost any other surname from that column and the exercise runs the same way. Shops became firms, firms became buildings, and the people doing it now are two or three generations past the man who got off the boat.

Because the usual telling of Lebanese West Africa is a merchant story, and the merchant story is about individuals: the one who arrived with nothing, the one who made it. Told that way it is a sequence of exceptions, and exceptions teach nobody anything.

The record disagrees. The men who came down the coast from Dakar did not arrive as individuals and they did not build as individuals. They arrived whole, and what carried them was not talent, luck or capital. It was that somebody from the same village was already there, and that when they in turn were established, they reached back.

A hundred years later the thing that survived is not any single name on that page.

It is that the page exists, and that the names are still there to be found.