infrastructure, industrial, or other projects, and stimulated free movement of traders and others seeking opportunities in the new coastal economic centres. The development of cash-crop farming promoted further migration, both of seasonal labour and of tenant farmers. Labour migration in colonial West Africa was often un-organised, but agreements were also signed in the 1940s and 1950s among the colonial powers, including between the administrations of Nigeria and Gabon, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, and (most notably in light of later history) Côte d’Ivoire and Upper Volta (today known as Burkina Faso). Indeed, France managed a system of forced transplantation of agricultural workers, and others were recruited by private agencies in conjunction with the French West African labour inspectorate (Inspection du travail de l’AOF), established in 1932.134 The borders between Upper Volta and Côte d’Ivoire were also modified to facilitate movement of labour to the plantations in the south (see box 5). Just before independence, a survey organised jointly by the statistics departments of the governments of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire in 1958/59 found that four to five hundred thousand people a year moved into the two countries during that period; of which over 80 percent stayed for less than a year at a time. Senegal in the mid-1940s was said to host 40-45,000 additional immigrant farmers per year. Long-standing trader migration was also facilitated by colonial transportation links; in the case of the migration to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, dominated by the Hausa-Fulani, Zerma, Bambara-Soninke and Yoruba. Rivers and sea allowed for migration of fishing communities; in other cases farming communities migrated in search of new land as a group, rather than as individual migrants.135 In addition, migrants came from further afield; not just the European servants of empire, but also traders such as the “Lebanese”, from what are now Syria and Lebanon but was then the Ottoman Empire, who began to become established in West Africa from the late nineteenth century.136 Many of the populations in West Africa with the greatest difficulties in obtaining documentation of nationality of the country where they are resident are descendants of those who migrated before independence, for whom the transitional provisions adopted in the laws at independence were not well adapted; or where those laws were early on amended or manipulated to exclude targeted populations from access to nationality and the broader rights of citizenship (see above, section 2.3). Among the groups of “doubtful” nationality, perhaps the most visible in West Africa were the “Lebanese”, comprising both descendants of migrants arriving from the nineteenth century and more recent arrivals. Many of these “Lebanese” have parents and grandparents born in West Africa, speak West African languages, and have participated in the political, social and economic life of the country. At the same time, a strong Lebanese identity is preserved. The Lebanese in West Africa are for the most part business people, dominating commerce in the large towns, and highly mobile among West African and other international locations. This economic dominance, and a perception of failure to integrate, is often heavily criticised by local populations.137 The clearest case of laws being adopted 134 Vincent Bonnecase, Les étrangers et la terre en Côte d’Ivoire à l’époque coloniale, Montpellier : Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Document de l’Unité de Recherche 095, N° 2, 2001. 135 Ibid.; also Akin L. Mabogunje, Regional Mobility and Resource Development in West Africa, Centre for Developing-Area Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 1972. 136 Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa London and New York: Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2014. 137 Lina Beydoun, “The Complexities of Citizenship among Lebanese Immigrants in Sierra Leone”, African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review Vol.3, No.1, 2013, pp.112-143; Chris Bierwirth, “The Lebanese communities of Côte 45