Dec 1, 2017

It’s a Friday night in a northern suburb of Beirut. West African music blares from the Playroom night club, tucked behind a highway. The first to arrive is a group of young Lebanese men wearing brightly colored African trousers. Fawzi, 19, flashes his Burkinabe passport to prove his age. He also holds Lebanese citizenship, but he’s proud of his ties to Burkina Faso, the landlocked country in West Africa where he grew up and where his family still lives. It’s his second time at Jungle Safari, a party thrown roughly once a month by a group of Lebanese students with close ties to West Africa. His friend Mario has never been to Africa but has learned to appreciate its music through Fawzi. “We like it here. There aren’t many places like this,” Mario told Al-Monitor.

At Jungle Safari, the mood of the music is set by Hassan Jammal, or DJ Ace. He grew up in Abidjan in Ivory Coast. “I see a lot of Lebanese coming that have never been to Africa. They love it, they’re slowly getting into it,” he said. The parties attract around 500 people who pay a $40 entrance fee that gives them access to the open bar.

The partygoers can buy West African-themed clothes and hair accessories from the stands at the club's entrance. One stand belongs to a young Lebanese woman, Diva Kalot, who also grew up in Ivory Coast. She came to Lebanon to study biochemistry and industrial technology in Lebanon, but her real passion was design, and she recently started her own brand of clothes. “I think the Lebanese are maybe a little shocked at first by the colors and the patterns. For them to accept it, you must show them different ways of wearing them, like mixing a brightly colored skirt with a simple white top,” she told Al-Monitor.

Next to her, a group of Ghanaian women are selling hair extensions. Their employer moved to Lebanon a few years ago, when she married a Lebanese man, and they followed to work in her hair salon. In Lebanon, African hairdressers cater to migrant workers, mostly from Ethiopia or Nigeria, employed as live-in maids.

According to Human Rights Watch, there are about 250,000 foreign domestic workers in Lebanon, primarily from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and the Philippines. Their living conditions are bleak and depend on the goodwill of the family they work for. Suicide is common. Should they have children in Lebanon, they can be deported to their home country. However, the ladies selling hair extensions at Jungle Safari prefer not to dwell on these thoughts. “Lebanon is hard, but it depends on how you live your life. You can meet some good people and some bad people. For me, that’s just how things are,” Nadine, 25, told Al-Monitor.