The interwar years marking the end of World War I and the start of World War II was a particularly interesting time for individuals who found themselves within the purview of the French empire. It is precisely during the French mandate interwar period that we see numbers of migration to West Africa by Lebanese Syrians swell, particularly of Lebanese Shi’is. The French mandate in Greater Syria also brought a permanent presence of West African soldiers known by their misnomer tirailleurs sénégalais until late 1946. In 1921, 2,500 tirailleurs sénégalais were sent to the Levant. Therefore, during this same period in the 1920s and 1930s with the new opportunities provided by the French mandate, thousands of Lebanese Syrians migrated to the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) and British controlled West Africa. I have yet to find a study that has made this connection—that as West African soldiers were living in the Levant, Levantines were making their way to West Africa in search of economic opportunities. The intimacy and lived experiences between Lebanese Syrians in West Africa and West African soldiers in Greater Syria offer a fairly unique case study in the Middle East. What makes this distinctive in the long and complex history between sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and its entanglements with African enslavement is that Lebanese Syrians established permanent settlements, communities, and families in West Africa that continue today. It poses questions about how racial ideology and lived experiences of the diaspora in Africa were intertwined at this time and how the presence of African colonial troops simultaneously shaped these ideas. The relationship between the diaspora and home is a well-established dialectic. Ideas, people, cash, goods, books, travelled to and from the homeland to the mahjar and back and vice versa. The purview of empire provided an ideal transnational space where people and ideas could move relatively freely. On the one hand this is a preliminary history of the circulation of racial ideas amongst Lebanese Shi’is within the context of its diaspora in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while on the other hand, this study hopes to start probing the relationship between Lebanese Syrians and West Africans at home and abroad during the shared period under French Empire.