Tracing their roots to an exodus caused by a silkworm crisis in the mid-19th century, West Africa’s Lebanese community makes up a fraction of a worldwide diaspora of roughly 16m, four times the country’s population. Like their fellow exiles in the region, they have specialised in the diamond trade as well as shopkeeping and importing. The 1991—2002 civil war hit the community hard. Without an economic revival, its decline may be hard to reverse. From about 30,000 in the 1960s, their number fell to about 350 during the fighting in the capital Freetown in the late 1990s, recovering to 7,000 today.