Paper long abstract:

Author: Isaac Xerxes Malki

This paper addresses the political history of a ‘middleman’ group in West Africa. It makes two claims. The first asserts that their ‘middleman’ isolation was created and enforced by the legal and political mechanisms of the state. The second claim problematises the concept of ‘middleman community’, maintaining that a ‘Lebanese community’ in Ghana did not develop in any sense other than a loose cultural one.

The research presented demonstrates the historical dynamism of social and economic categories by documenting changing political and legal processes in the state’s interactions with ‘middlemen.’ It also shows that in Ghana, the colonial government envisaged and enforced the concept of the Lebanese as ‘aliens’, institutionalising policies later deployed by post-independence governments. This took the form of a regime of control including deportation, immigration barriers and the denial of citizenship. These conclusions challenge prevailing sociological, economic and anthropological theories regarding ‘middlemen communities’, which tend to assert that the separateness of ‘middlemen’ arose from networks, kinship ties or internal exclusivity. The regime of control was necessary because colonial and post-independence governments saw the Lebanese as economic actors devoid of political agency. Significantly, the political economic function of the Lebanese changed at independence (1957) from intermediaries in the colonial “commercial pyramid” to industrialists intended to assist the country attain developmental goals.

Finally, this paper reveals that the pressures placed on the Lebanese by the state’s mechanisms of control undermined the formation of a ‘Lebanese community’, encouraging individual defection strategies by ‘aliens’ who sought citizenship, elite patronage and other forms of political protection. Ultimately, this work demonstrates the importance of citizenship in influencing integration outcomes. Without the possibility of attaining citizenship, many Ghanaian Lebanese had to operate in an arena outside of the domain of formal politics, which further undermined the legitimacy of their claims to political inclusion.