Migration History
Lebanese immigrants first came to West Africa in the mid-19th century when a silk-worm crisis struck their homeland, then part of the Ottoman Empire; the first Lebanese arrived in Sierra Leone in 1893. The first groups were Maronite Christians, but beginning in 1903, Shia Muslim Lebanese began to arrive from South Lebanon where there was an agricultural crunch. They worked as small traders, at first occupying the same position in the economic structure as indigenous coastal traders.
Read more about this topic: Lebanese People In Sierra Leone
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)