As Israeli bombs rained down on southern Lebanon in 2024, I found myself thinking about Rabih, a Lebanese man I had once met at his furniture store on Lagos Island. I wondered what had become of him and his family back in Beirut. By October, the escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah had displaced more than 1.2 million people, while Lebanon’s already tenuous infrastructure lay in ruins and its beleaguered economy was once again teetering on the precipice of collapse.
My first impression of Rabih was that he was an exceptionally pleasant man, which, of course, is hardly unusual for a business owner eager to make a sale. But Rabih seemed to possess something beyond the customary affability of a salesman. He was genuinely vivacious, the kind of man one might instinctively describe as the life of the party. He appeared particularly amused when I asked how good his dabke was, the exuberant Levantine folk dance performed in lines and circles at weddings and other celebrations.
I have always been fascinated by the Lebanese diaspora and by the extraordinary economic footprint it has established across the world. In Nigeria, the Chagoury brothers, Gilbert and Ronald
have built a formidable business empire spanning construction, real estate, hospitality and manufacturing. In Mexico, Carlos Slim Helú, the son of Lebanese immigrants, built a telecommunications and industrial empire that, at one point, made him the richest man in the world.
Across West Africa, Latin America, North America and beyond, the story is the same. Lebanese communities have repeatedly demonstrated a remarkable capacity to transform displacement into enterprise, adversity into opportunity and diaspora into enduring commercial networks.
But the Lebanese diaspora did not emerge because Lebanese people simply developed a preference for life abroad. Far from it. It was forged in the crucible of repeated violence, economic deprivation, political instability and war. Significant emigration began in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly following the sectarian violence that engulfed Mount Lebanon in 1860 and amid the economic dislocation and eventual collapse of the traditional silk industry. Between approximately 1860 and 1914, more than 300,000 people left the region that would eventually become modern Lebanon, many of them bound for the Americas, Africa and Australia.
Then came the First World War and the catastrophic famine that devastated Mount Lebanon. The pattern continued thereafter. In other words, the Lebanese diaspora was not the product of a single catastrophe but of a recurring historical cycle: violence, insecurity, economic desperation, departure, and then the powerful pull of family and community networks drawing others through the same door.
Once Lebanese communities became firmly established in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone, they developed commercial and social networks that made subsequent migration considerably easier. The Lebanese experience became, in many respects, a masterclass in the transformation of displacement into economic influence.
One might therefore expect that a people whose history is so deeply marked by displacement would possess an instinctive understanding of the vulnerability of immigrants. Yet this is precisely where Lebanon’s treatment of migrant workers becomes so difficult to reconcile with its own history.
For decades, Lebanon has depended heavily upon migrant domestic workers, overwhelmingly women from countries including Ethiopia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and several African nations. Before the economic crisis that began in 2019, more than 250,000 migrant domestic workers were estimated to be living in the country. By 2024, that number had fallen substantially.
These women perform work upon which countless Lebanese households depend. They clean homes, prepare meals, care for children, tend to the elderly and perform the innumerable tasks required to sustain domestic life. Yet their vulnerability has been extraordinary. Human rights organizations have documented allegations of unpaid wages, confinement, passport confiscation, physical abuse, sexual abuse and other forms of exploitation. The numbers are deeply disturbing.
A study based on interviews with 913 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon found that 68 percent reported experiencing at least one incident of sexual harassment. The reported behavior ranged from sexual comments and unwanted touching to exposure, sexual propositions and attempted or actual sexual assault.
In December 2020, Lebanon enacted Law No. 205, criminalizing sexual harassment and establishing protections for victims and witnesses. The legislation was rightly regarded as an important legal development. Problem is, migrant domestic workers remained largely outside the protection afforded by Lebanon’s ordinary labor law framework. Their vulnerability is further compounded by what is known as kafala, the sponsorship system under which a migrant worker’s legal status is closely tied to an individual employer.
This is where the language of modern slavery becomes difficult to avoid. Kafala was not conceived as a system of slavery. Its stated purpose was to regulate migrant labor. But when an employer exercises extraordinary control over a worker’s employment, residency and ability to leave an abusive relationship, the conceptual distance between employment and coercion can become frighteningly narrow.
A worker may arrive in Lebanon carrying a passport, a contract and the hope of earning enough money to improve the lives of her family back home. But if her passport is confiscated, her wages withheld, her movements restricted and her legal status made dependent upon the very person abusing her, the absence of physical chains does not necessarily signify the presence of freedom. Tragically, that has been the reality experienced by many migrant workers in Lebanon.
Modern slavery does not always require an auction block, iron shackles or an overseer standing over a field with a whip. Sometimes all that is required is a passport locked inside a drawer, a telephone taken away, an unpaid salary, a locked door and an immigration system that grants the person holding the key extraordinary power over the person trapped behind the door.
In 2020, a Lebanese man posted a Facebook advertisement offering a Nigerian domestic worker for $1,000. He displayed her passport and described her as a 30 year old domestic worker who was “active and clean.”
There is also the haunting 2016 documentary A Maid for Each, by Lebanese filmmaker Maher Abi Samra. The film takes viewers into the world of a Beirut domestic worker agency, where African and Asian women are recruited and matched with Lebanese households in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of a commodities market. Its portrayal of the industry is devastating. Domestic labor becomes a marketplace in which the employer assumes the role of master and the worker is reduced to something approaching property.
Then came the war of 2024. As Israeli strikes intensified across Lebanon, thousands of Lebanese families fled their homes in search of safety. But some migrant domestic workers discovered that they had nowhere to flee to.
Reuters documented the case of Fajima Kamara, a Sierra Leonean domestic worker whose employers fled to Dubai, leaving her without her passport, telephone or belongings. She eventually made her way toward Beirut, where she became homeless before finding temporary refuge in a volunteer run shelter. Similar stories unfolded among thousands of predominantly female live in domestic workers, many of whom lacked the documentation required to move safely.
That is the deeper pathology of kafala. The problem is not simply that some individuals are cruel. It is that a system can confer upon cruelty an extraordinary degree of leverage. The failure, therefore, is not merely one of individual compassion. It is a failure of equality before the law.
Lebanon, however, is not alone. In Saudi Arabia, the 2022 census counted 13.4 million non Saudis, representing more than 40 percent of the country’s population. Migrant workers are indispensable to the Saudi economy, working in construction, transportation, hospitality, health care, domestic service and countless other sectors.
The Gulf, however, is not a monolith, and it would be both inaccurate and intellectually dishonest to portray every Arab country, or every Arab employer, as participating in an identical system. Meaningful reforms have taken place.
Qatar introduced a minimum wage and reforms allowing many migrant workers to change jobs without their employer’s permission. Saudi Arabia introduced labor reforms intended to reduce employer control over migrant workers. Other Gulf states have enacted legislation addressing workplace abuse, discrimination and harassment. Yet these reforms also illuminate the larger problem: legislation on paper does not automatically translate into freedom in practice.
There is responsibility on the other side of the migration equation as well. The strongest chain is sometimes not forged by an employer. It is forged by desperation. When home becomes the mouth of a shark, even a perilous journey can begin to resemble salvation.
African governments therefore cannot simply watch their citizens board airplanes and disappear into foreign labor markets. Countries that send large numbers of migrant workers abroad require robust systems of licensed recruitment, enforceable employment contracts, pre departure education, consular support, monitoring, emergency intervention and repatriation. A woman should not have to depend upon the benevolence of strangers on another continent to discover that the job she was promised has quietly transformed into a prison.
There is something profoundly unsettling about the human species. We have spent centuries abolishing slavery in law. Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, and slavery was subsequently abolished throughout most of the British Empire. Yet nearly two centuries later, we have demonstrated an extraordinary ingenuity for constructing systems capable of reproducing some of slavery’s essential characteristics without ever having to call anyone a slave.
No chains. No auction block. No shackles. Just poverty on one side, privilege on the other, and a legal system that can sometimes make escape almost impossible.
Perhaps this is the most uncomfortable lesson of all: oppression does not automatically teach the oppressed empathy. Sometimes those who have experienced subjugation, once they acquire power themselves, become capable of inflicting upon others the very indignities from which they once suffered.
History is replete with such ironies, and this realisation has complicated my feelings about Rabih and his people. When I think of him now, I still see the cheerful Lebanese man in Lagos, the man who laughed when I asked about his dabke, the man whose family may have been terrified and displaced when Israeli bombs descended upon his country.
I still feel empathy for him. I still feel empathy for innocent Lebanese families who have repeatedly found themselves caught in wars they neither initiated nor chose. But I also think about Fajima Kamara, abandoned in a country where she had worked to provide another family with comfort. I think about my country woman whose passport was displayed beside a $1,000 price tag on Facebook. I think about the hundreds of thousands of African and Asian women who have crossed oceans in pursuit of a better life, only to discover that the door through which they entered can, under the wrong circumstances, become the very door that imprisons them.
And that is where my empathy becomes conflicted and it should not have to be.
A people’s suffering should never require another people’s suffering in order to become visible.
If anything, the long and painful history of Lebanon should have taught us a simpler and more universal lesson: there is no dignity in escaping one cage only to construct another for someone else.
Osmund Agbo is a medical doctor, author, and the 2026 recipient of the Thabo Mbeki Prize for Scholarship and Public Service
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