“More than 10,000 Lebanese [people] have been living in Senegal for several decades. They feel at home. They know our customs, speak our languages. Bonds of friendship and fraternity connect them to Senegalese people, bonds that can withstand any adversity!”
President Léopold Sédar Senghor[1]
The decolonization period that began after the Second World War and led up to Senegalese independence in 1960 was indeed rife with adversity as remarked by Senegal’s first president Léopold Sédar Senghor. After World War II, the French Empire was on shaky ground across its colonies, slowly disintegrating. According to a military report from April 1947, the French had multiple concerns: Growing resentment from disgruntled returning colonial soldiers stirred by anticolonial sentiments and connections made with other soldiers in the metropole; an increasingly violent resistance in North Africa calling for an end to colonialism with generous support from other Arabs including Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya; major rebellions were underway in Madagascar and Southeast Asia (French Indochina), and violence rocked the Levant.[2] With instability in North Africa, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia and already having lost the Levant by 1946, French West Africa (FWA) had to be preserved at all costs to the imperial mind. It is precisely during this decolonization period that Pan-African and anticolonial thinkers began hotly debating questions of identity and belonging: What does it mean to be African or Arab? How did anticolonial Pan-African thinkers confront and contest the colonial arbitrary fault lines that separated Arab from African, Black from Amazigh, Muslim from Christian and Animist? How did they conceptualize the place of the Arab in the African imagination during the descent of empire?
While recent scholarship on Afro-Arab relations has, for good reason, overwhelmingly focused on anti-Black racism, slavery, and racialized labor in Arab societies, it often sidelines how Black and African thinkers have historically engaged with the idea of the Arab. Much of the scholarly literature on race in Middle East studies, in particular, has focused on how Arabs have historically perceived Africans—especially in terms of racial othering, and the ways in which Arab elites embraced whiteness to navigate colonial hierarchies and claim proximity to European power.[3] But far less attention has been paid to the inverse: how African and Pan-African thinkers perceived and debated the place of Arabs and North Africans within African identity. Pan-African thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in the postcolonial moment, engaged in vigorous debates about whether North Africa and Arabs should be included in the African imaginary.[4] Was North Africa truly African, or fundamentally Arab or Amazigh? Could it belong to Pan-Africanism, or did it represent a separate civilizational and racial order? Could Arabs from outside North Africa, born and raised south of the Sahara, really become African?
This paper examines Senegal’s first president, poet, and literateur Léopold Sédar Senghor’s ambivalent and contested positioning of Arabs within his vision of African identity, tracing how his writings on Arabité and Africanité simultaneously included and distanced Arab identity from the core of Négritude. In juxtaposing Senghor’s theoretical embrace of cultural métissage with his political actions—such as the exclusion of North Africans and Arabs from the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) hosted by Senegal—this study situates him within broader debates among postcolonial Pan-African thinkers regarding the place of Arabs and North Africans in the African imaginary, adding to a recently growing literature on the subject.[5] It also grounds these ideological questions in the material reality of Senegal’s longstanding Lebanese diaspora, whose close ties to Senghor and to the Senegalese elite made them a focal point of critique, while also challenging assumptions of perceived racial differences. Senghor’s rhetoric of inclusion was sincere but selective—offering belonging to Arab communities like the Lebanese, while failing to address the structural inequalities and popular resentments that undercut his project of “cultural synthesis.” The stakes remain high today: although Senegal is often celebrated as a model of peace and hospitality (the land of teranga), the Lebanese there are still widely perceived as an insular elite (for many reasons of their own making), and Senghor’s legacy as a Francophile statesman continues to haunt them.
Senghor’s Nègritude and Arabité
Born in 1906 (d. 2001) in Joal to a wealthy Serer family, Senghor completed his preliminary schooling in Senegal and continued in France. First at the Sorbonne and later at Lycée Louis-le-Grand where he was the first African to achieve the prestigious Agrégation in French grammar in 1935, allowing him to become a teacher in the metropole.[6] In 1939, he was conscripted into the French Army with the outbreak of World War II. He was assigned to the 3rd Colonial Infantry Regiment at the rank of 2nd class private despite his higher education, consistent with the French colonial policy that barred Africans from attaining positions as officers in the French army.[7] In June 1940, he was captured and imprisoned by the German army in France, like many other Tirailleurs Sénégalais. He was interned in several prisoner camps and transferred to Front Stalag 230 in Poitiers, a prison labor camp for colonial soldiers.[8] Released in 1942 on medical grounds and transferred to Paris under Vichy control, he then resumed his job as a schoolteacher in a Paris suburb.[9]
While living in Paris in the 1930s, Senghor met and befriended French Caribbean intellectuals Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, together the three men founded the Négritude movement. Négritude was a bedrock in the anticolonial and Pan-African movements and sought to reclaim Black identity and culture from the dehumanizing narratives of colonialism, emphasizing the values, cultures, and traditions of all people of the African diaspora across the globe.[10] Négritude explored the relationship between race, culture, nationality, and citizenship within French colonial humanism. Senghor envisioned an Africa that balanced Négritude with industrialization, advocating for cultural synthesis (métissage) and political integration to unite primordial African identity with Western modernity. His catchphrase was, “It is about assimilating, not being assimilated,” and believed that “what the black man contributes to European and universal civilization” created a hybrid universal culture that would erase the perceived directional oppositions between Western modernity and African culture.[11]
While Négritude has been given adequate scholarly attention, Senghor’s view of Arabs and Arabité have been comparatively understudied, reinforcing how scholarship has often overemphasized the relationship between the metropole and the colony, often at the expense of cross-colonial encounters.[12] Senghor believed that Africanité and Arabité were complementary to each other: “I often define Africanité as the ‘complementary symbiosis of the values of Arabité and the values of Négritude.’”[13] “Alongside African civilization, with its Negro-African and Arab-Berber facets, we teach, on an equal footing, each of the great civilizations: European civilization, American civilization, the Chinese, Indian, Christian, Islamic, Judaic civilizations, etc.”[14] Senghor viewed African and Arab civilizations as closely intertwined but also very much separate:
We believe that you first need not confuse Arabité and Negritude. There is Arabité, which must be defended and promoted by Arabs. They do it, and do it well. The Arab league organizes, on a regular basis, conferences, where Arabs discuss their cultural policy. It is also our duty, we Negro-Africans and Negroes of the Diaspora, to defend Négritude by first defining it…And this was also as it should be because, if Black civilization, Black culture, in sum, Négritude, must be defined, then it is the internal business of Negroes. We will not resolve the cultural problem of Arab-African cooperation if we do not raise those issues in a straightforward manner.[15]
For Senghor, Europeans were to blame for spreading racist ideas about Arabs as slave traders who disparaged Black people. He countered these characterizations by showing that Arabs and Africans share:
…a sense of solidarity, whether they are Arab-Berber or Negro-African. Senegal is an example of this. In our country we have 20,000 Lebanese-Syrians, of which half have obtained Senegalese nationality. Above all we have 150,000 Mauritanians, who own small shops all the way into the villages. Twenty percent of the Senegalese population is foreign. Yet, there has never been any racial conflict, even less an ethnic cleansing.[16]
For Senghor, Arab-Amazigh cultures were not external to Africa, but integral to its civilizational fabric. In a 1969 speech at the University of Algiers, he reaffirmed that Arabité was a vital part of African heritage: “We encourage and scientifically organize the teaching of Arabic language and civilization at the University of Dakar because Arabité is part of the African cultural heritage.”[17] Senghor’s framing, in theory, rejected colonial attempts to draw racial lines across the Sahara and instead insisted on a historical (albeit essentialist) continuity between Arab and African civilizations. Despite this, the practical application of Senghor’s ideas was often inconsistent and, at times, exclusionary.
The most glaring of these tensions was Senegal’s decision to exclude North Africans and Arabs from participating in the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) in Dakar. This would become a point of contention and divergence between Senghor’s Négritude and the anticolonial Pan-African thinkers Frantz Fanon and Cheikh Anta Diop. For Fanon, Négritude’s focus on cultural affirmation was politically insufficient: it risked mystifying structural inequality and enabling bourgeois nationalism under the guise of racial pride.[18] While Fanon acknowledged the psychological benefits of reclaiming Black identity, he rejected what he saw as Négritude’s reliance on a mythical past. Diop—Senghor’s Senegalese political rival and celebrated postcolonial historian—critiqued the civilizational partitioning of Africa. Whereas Senghor posited a symbiosis between “Arab and Negro” cultures, Diop insisted that ancient Egypt was the cradle of Black African civilization, and that any division between North and Sub-Saharan Africa was a colonial fiction.[19]
The tensions between these competing visions of identity came to a head during the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77), held in Lagos. Senghor’s insistence on restricting North African participation to observer status was widely interpreted as racial gatekeeping.[20] The backlash to Senegal’s position, including accusations of “racial bigotry in the most nauseating sense,” dealt a blow to Senghor’s international reputation.[21] This confrontation cannot be understood apart from the earlier 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) in Algiers, where Négritude was vehemently criticized by Fanonist and Marxist intellectuals as retrograde and essentialist.[22] The Souffles-Anfas collective, which emerged in Morocco in the 1960s, had already dismissed Négritude as bourgeois and complicit with neocolonialism. Haitian poet René Depestre, writing in Souffles in 1968, derided Senghor’s culturalism for ignoring class struggle, and decried it as giving “rise to unacceptable black Zionism.”[23] But Senghor’s position at FESTAC 77 was as much a reaction to previous ideological marginalization as it was a racial stance.[24] His attempt to exclude North Africans from shaping the festival’s discourse was, in part, an effort to reassert the centrality of Négritude within a rapidly shifting Pan-African cultural landscape.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Senghor’s earlier defensive posture gave way to a more inclusive approach. As Hisham Aïdi shows, Senghor became a central figure in the Afro-Arab Cultural Forum in Asilah, Morocco, which sought to promote Afro-Arab dialogue across linguistic, religious, and continental lines.[25] There, Senghor praised Morocco as a civilizational mirror to Senegal and framed Arabité as a co-constitutive element of Africanité. His friendship with King Hassan II and participation in cultural diplomacy reflected a strategic shift toward embracing Arab identity not only as a domestic policy within Senegal but as essential to a shared Afro-Mediterranean heritage.[26] And by the 1980s, many former critics—including Depestre—would find themselves honored at the Afro-Arab cultural forums in Asilah, presided over by Senghor himself. In many ways, this paradox reflects Senghor’s quiet success in his late career—the reframing of Négritude not as an exclusive racial doctrine but as a humanist civilizational project—capable of incorporating Arabité, Berbéritude, and even dissent itself.
The Lebanese in Senegal
Perhaps the most enduring expression of Senghor’s vision of cultural métissage was his long-standing relationship with the Lebanese community in Senegal. While many Senegalese viewed the Lebanese as economic outsiders or a privileged minority, Senghor insisted they were part of the national fabric. His defense of the Lebanese community was arguably not simply political expediency (although some would argue that it had some hallmarks of it); it was theoretically aligned with his broader universalist convictions. By the time Senghor became president, the Lebanese in Senegal were deeply embedded in commercial and political networks in Senegal and broader French West Africa. Their presence, dating back to the late nineteenth century, grew rapidly during the French colonial period, particularly in the interwar years. Originating mostly from the Shi’a communities of Jabal ‘Amil in southern Lebanon—long marginalized within Lebanon—they found in West Africa opportunities for economic and social mobility unavailable at home. As French colonial dependents, they could travel freely throughout the empire, and many settled in towns and cities across French West Africa, including Dakar, Kaolack, and Kankan, as merchants and traders. [27] By the 1960s, the Lebanese population in West Africa had grown to nearly 20,000.[28] Today, the Lebanese community in the region numbers close to half a million, with substantial populations in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria, as well as a presence in every postcolonial West African nation.
In Lebanon, Shi’is were excluded from elite privileges dominated by Maronite Christians. In West Africa, they were treated preferentially in comparison to African subjects but still distrusted by French officials. They were often portrayed as disease carriers or economic threats, yet they had privileged access to capital through European banks. This enabled them to lend at high interest to local farmers and expand into real estate and retail in Dakar. Their economic visibility and intermediary role between colonizer and colonized fed tensions with local Senegalese and also with the French. [29]
After World War II, Lebanese migrants came to represent a country that had chosen to sever its ties from France (Lebanon became technically independent from France in 1943) and thus became the subject of vicious racist attacks from French settlers and lost the trading and banking privileges from which they had once heavily benefited before 1945 in comparison to their West African counterparts. The Lebanese in Senegal in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s heavily depended on a Dakarois political elite to defend their interests among them Senghor but others as well, including Lamine Guèye, Lamine Amadou Diallo, and Mamadou Dia. As French-imposed restrictions increased on Lebanese migrants’ activities and abilities to secure credit lines from European banks, the French grew increasingly paranoid about the collaboration, working relationships, and friendships between Senegalese and Lebanese in the decolonization era.[30]
Between 1946 and 1960, Lebanese Syrians were targets of several attacks by “petits blancs,” French working-class settlers who put pressure on the French colonial administration to impose several limitations on their activities.[31] These restrictions included limits on the groundnut trade, quotas on the issuance of business agent licenses, strict parameters on the amount and frequency of remittances migrants were allowed to transfer to Lebanon, and looming threats of expulsion.[32] Many who had faced arrest were expelled, their foreign identity cards withdrawn, and beat up. There were several registered incidents of unfair arrests and beatings by French police.[33]
The anti-Lebanese campaign was led by French settler and journalist Maurice Voisin, who ran a weekly newspaper, Les Echos Africains, in 1947 and formed an organization entitled Les Amis de Petit Jules and later Défense de l’Afrique Française in 1954.[34] Lebanese migrants dubbed it the Mauvoisin campaign. He used his newspaper to launch his vicious attacks against the Lebanese in FWA, dubbing them a “yellow” race and calling for the expulsion of the “bad Lebanese” from French West Africa who deceive Africans with their “unscrupulous” means. [35] Voisin’s newspaper called the Lebanese “dishonest,” “foreign,” “Semitic,” “parasites” who required elimination.[36] Voisin simultaneously degraded the Lebanese and patronized Africans. He made himself out to be their benevolent protector from the trickery of “dishonest” Lebanese intermediaries who at first were a “necessary evil” doing a job that “few Europeans would want to do, especially regarding the bush trader.” [37]
Voisin became bolder in the 1950s, when he established the DAF and recruited many more Africans into the movement, opened branches in Thiès and Kaolack, and started publishing pamphlets signed by Africans to underscore the support the DAF movement had from Senegalese merchants and farmers, especially in the countryside.[38] The DAF used Lebanese support of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) against the Tirailleurs Sénégalais in the 1950s to try to attract more African supporters. While the DAF was a fringe movement of mostly French railway or lower-skilled French workers and some Senegalese merchants and farmers, it substantially influenced polices against the Lebanese in the colonies and caused a massive stir in Lebanon and Senegal. The Lebanese were further outraged that Lebanon was not responding more forcefully to the campaign against them, citing its duty as an independent country to protect them.[39] But ultimately it was not Lebanon who came to their defense in face of these attacks, but it was Senegalese politicians like Senghor, Guèye, Lamine Amadou Diallo, and Mamadou Dia who defended them.
Founder of the Anti-Racist Committee of Republican Vigilance (Comite Antiraciste de vigilance republicaine), Lamine Amadou Diallo wrote a scathing response to Voisin’s campaign against the Lebanese.[40]
The law of the QURAN prohibits Islamic populations from remaining inactive and indifferent to the LEBANON-SYRIAN problem and especially to the SOLUTIONS OF VIOLENCE, PARTISANSHIP, and HATRED that the NON-ISLAMIC LEADERS of the “FRIENDS OF PETIT JULES” and “LES ECHOS AFRICAINS” want to impose.[41]
Mamadou Dia, who would become the first Prime Minister of Senegal under Senghor’s government and was a deputy in the French National Assembly, also defended the Lebanese against Mauvoisin.[42] In a letter to Senator Dia, Voisin asked him “why do you defend the Levantine-Syrians? Why?” Voisin claimed that Lebanese Syrians did not invest money or infrastructure for Africans and did nothing to “educate the bush farmer out of his ignorance.”[43] Voisin suggested on multiple occasions that Senegalese politicians and deputies like Dia and Diallo were paid off by the Lebanese. It was undeniable that the Lebanese had a strong affinity with the Dakarois elite. Many of them, both Lebanese and Senegalese were French educated, visiting France often, and had urbanized cultural tastes. Several of them were good friends. Ali Assad was a well-known and respected trader who reportedly made his fortune during the Second World War. He was believed to have been one of Lamine Guèye’s closest friends.[44] The Lebanese community offered to build a school in support of their recognition from Guèye as mayor of Dakar.[45]
Perhaps the greatest champion of the Lebanese in French West Africa, in Senegal and in Dakar was Senghor himself. He wrote in Echoes de Kaolack in October 1954 defending the Lebanese:
You [the Senegalese] know that the Lebanese are Muslims like you.
Would you agree to drive away your brothers from this country? Why does not he [Voisin] talk about trading companies like the C.F.A.O. and the “Niger Français” whose capitals are abroad! These are the real strangers, but the Lebanese are your brothers.[46]
Even though Senghor here references the shared Muslim umma between Lebanese and Senegalese as Lamine Amadou Diallo did and many others, he was, in fact, a Catholic. Senghor often made clear in his statements and speeches that the Lebanese were “brothers” to the Senegalese and part and parcel to the Senegalese cultural fabric. These sentiments were consistent with his strong convictions in universal humanism.
Within this backdrop it is unsurprising that Senghor had excellent relationships with the Lebanese in Senegal, and with Lebanon, and vice versa.[47] The Lebanese Bourgi family were well-known in the Senegalese political scene during decolonization. Abdou Karim Bourgi arrived in Senegal in 1927 and met Senghor in Kaolack in 1947 at an inaugural meeting of Senghor’s Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais party (BDS).[48] At that same meeting Karim Bourgi also met Alioune Badar M’Bengue, A. Cisse Dia, and Bassirou Bali, other leading members of BDS. Karim Bourgi offered up his cinema in Dakar as a space to hold the first BDS congress in 1950, which he attended with his son Ramez.[49] Voisin would later attack Senghor for his support of the Lebanese accusing him, Mamadou Dia and other BDS leaders of receiving 40 million francs in donations from the Lebanese.[50] Many Lebanese who had a network of lorries for trading purposes connecting the countryside with major cities, would lend their lorries to BDS leaders to campaign in more remote areas of Senegal.[51] Karim Bourgi and Senghor were known to be good friends. Almost every trip Senghor would take, Karim Bourgi would be at Dakar-Yoff airport sending him off or receiving him. He was the first Lebanese to receive Senegalese citizenship in 1961 and was offered several awards from Senegal and Lebanon.[52] It was not only Senegalese politicians that Karim Bourgi maintained a good relationship with but he was also known to have close relations with the leaders of the Muridiyya and Tijanyya Sufi orders such as Murid Caliph Muhamad Falilu Mbakke, and Tijani spiritual leaders Sheikh Abdul Aziz Sy and Al Hajj Tierno Sydou Nourou Tall.[53]
Not everyone was like Senghor, far from it. While there was an affiliation between Lebanese and Senegalese elites and leaders, non-elite Senegalese men and women did not always hold such a favorable view of the Lebanese. The tight-knit relationship between Senghor and the Lebanese merchant elite—particularly in Dakar—fueled the perception that Négritude and its overtures toward Arabité and Arabness were not actually inclusive projects, but elite intellectual endeavors driven by a Francophile bourgeoisie. Whether in the cultural salons of Morocco or among the business circles of the Lebanese diaspora in Senegal, these affiliations gave credence to the critique that Senghor’s pluralism was more rhetorical than redistributive.
Senghor’s relationship to Arabité and the Lebanese diaspora in Senegal offers a cautionary tale of both the promises and hard limits of his vision of métissage. His inclusive rhetoric often clashed with his exclusionary practices, but his ignorance of class dynamics, in the end, left many Senegalese feeling excluded and fundamentally unseen.[54] The contradictions within his thought—between racial essentialism and humanist universalism, between cultural diplomacy and political exclusion are constitutive of the constant negotiations, messy, non-linear, and ongoing debates within post-postcolonial identity-making. They remind us that Afro-Arab entanglements, like so many other identity-making projects, are never static or resolved. To understand Senghor’s legacy is for us to grapple with the rough terrain of Afro-Arab intersections, where solidarity and hierarchy, inclusion and boundary, race and class, often occupy the same historical space.