World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [64]
But didn’t Sierra Leone still have laws discriminating against Lebanese? I asked them about section 27(4) of their constitution, which essentially authorizes discrimination against “non-native” citizens of Sierra Leone, including ethnic Lebanese who were born in Sierra Leone and whose families have lived there for four generations.
“It is the Lebanese who discriminate against Sierra Leoneans,” one of the students repeated while the others nodded. “For example, no Lebanese woman would ever marry a (black) Sierra Leonean man. I have never heard of a single case. Some Lebanese men do marry Sierra Leonean women, but those women are then treated as second-class citizens. Sometimes their children are even taken away from them!”
The same student then added: “But I like the Lebanese. I have many Lebanese friends, and I discuss these issues honestly with them.”
Compared to the reviled soldiers of the RUF, the Lebanese today are in most Sierra Leoneans’ relatively good graces; the psychotic brutality of the rebels in many ways unified the country. Nevertheless, in postwar Sierra Leone the Lebanese remain the country’s principal commercial group, controlling access to most international capital. Although not all Lebanese are prosperous, there are several highly visible Lebanese tycoons, and as a group they are starkly disproportionately wealthy. Meanwhile, despite the optimism of the Sierra Leoneans I met in New Haven, 80 percent of Sierra Leoneans continue to live in desperate, disease-ridden poverty. In 2001, the United Nations listed Sierra Leone as the country with the lowest human development index ranking in the world, behind Bangladesh and Rwanda.
34
A similar dynamic holds throughout West Africa, which includes some of the world’s poorest countries. In The Gambia—which sits in the middle of Senegal—the tiny Lebanese community owns nearly all the stores and restaurants in the capital Banjul and controls the groundnut industry, the country’s predominant cash crop. The Gambia’s tourism industry is dominated by foreign investors, mainly from the United Kingdom (although Russians have recently come onto the scene). In relatively prosperous Côte d’Ivoire, the Lebanese (only 150,000 strong) and French multinationals jointly control the modern economy while 65 percent of the indigenous population of 14 million live in extreme rural poverty. Similarly, in Benin, Ghana, and Liberia, tiny numbers of Lebanese, along with a handful of European expatriates and foreign investors, dominate the most advanced, lucrative sectors of the private economy.
In many of these countries the Lebanese are often regarded as no different from the old colonialists. Living in isolated and heavily guarded villas, they zoom through the streets in fancy cars and glimmering motorcycles while most Africans drive second- and third-hand rusting mopeds. Outside of Sierra Leone many Lebanese businesses are of relatively recent vintage, owned by tycoons in Beirut who send their youngest children to cut their management teeth on the African investments. The youngsters play for a few years, indulging in various excesses, before returning to test their new skills in a business back home. Needless to say, none of this wins them much favor among the locals, even those who chauffeur and guard them.
Meanwhile, vast numbers of West Africans live so far outside the modern economy that privatization, trade liberalization, and foreign investment have virtually no effect on them whatsoever. Compared to the still largely traditional West African majorities around them, the Lebanese are far better educated (usually abroad or in private Lebanese schools) and have vastly superior access to capital and distribution networks. Sometimes collaborating with, sometimes competing against