The Diamond Pipeline : the emergence of West Africa in the consciousnese of Lebanese novelists

Focusing on the novels Death in Beirut by Tawfiq Awwad and The Story of Zahra by Hanan al-Shaykh, the thesis explores the connections between Lebanon and West Africa, particularly Sierra Leone and Guinea, from the years preceding the Lebanese civil war to the present time. The novels are civil war narratives crisscrossed with Israeli invasions, threatened southern Lebanese borders, and diasporic Lebanese in Africa and their remittances. Although current news headlines are focused on terrorist threats posed by Lebanese diamond smuggling networks in Sierra Leone, the links between Lebanon and West Africa have a longer history. The initial waves of migration (1880s-1940) from Lebanon to West Africa established trading and merchant communities, with the direction of French colonial authority. Lebanese merchants during the first wave of migration entrenched themselves in the economies of West Africa and facilitated the later waves of immigration during the Lebanese civil war. Current articles depicting Africa as a composition of weak, “soft” states vulnerable to terrorist activity echo alarmist publications during the Cold War that identified Africa as fertile ground where “red weeds” can grow (specifically in a Time article). Stereotypes of the Lebanese in West Africa emerge in articles and human rights organization papers, which the two core Lebanese novels selected for the thesis explore