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In 1884, two young men boarded a ship believing it would carry them to the United States. Their names were Eid Laba and Seraphim Ashkar. They came from Mount Lebanon, then still under Ottoman rule, joining the wave of people leaving the eastern Mediterranean in search of work, security and a different life. America was the plan. The Gold Coast was not. Somewhere along the journey the plan changed, and instead of building new lives in the United States, the two men found themselves on the west coast of Africa, in a British colony neither of them had set out to call home.
For most travelers, landing in the wrong country would have been a disaster. For Laba and Ashkar, it became the beginning. More than 140 years later, the consequences of that misdirected journey can still be found across Ghana, in businesses, neighborhoods, family names and companies that have long outlived the people who built them.
Ashkar would follow his own path from there. This story follows Eid Laba first, because the man who had apparently boarded the wrong ship went on to build one of the most successful trading businesses associated with Ghana's early Lebanese community. And then, just as quickly, his family lost almost all of it.
Eid understood commerce. He began trading on the Gold Coast and steadily expanded his operations, and what started modestly grew into a substantial retail network. The Laba family remembers Eid as a trader whose reach eventually put him in competition with some of the largest commercial organizations operating in the colony, UAC among them.
That comparison matters. The United Africa Company was no corner shop. It belonged to a commercial system that connected West African markets to shipping lines, capital and manufacturers overseas, and its resources and influence extended across the whole region. Eid Laba was an immigrant merchant building his position from the ground up, yet his business prospered anyway. The family grew wealthy, Eid became an established figure in Gold Coast commerce, and the Laba name began to mean something.
The journey that was supposed to take him to America had worked out rather differently. He had found his opportunity here instead. Then he died suddenly, and the timing could not have been worse.
Eid had a son, Solomon Laba, known to those around him as Solo. In the normal course of things, Solomon would have stepped into his father's business and protected what had been built. But the normal course of things had already disappeared. Solomon had only recently emerged from a coma, and at the very moment the family needed someone capable of taking command, he was still recovering from a serious illness.
There was no clean transfer of power, no period in which father slowly handed responsibility to son. Eid was gone, and Solomon was not physically able to hold the operation together. The business began to fail, and in time it went bankrupt. The collapse was complete enough to change the family's circumstances at home. The Labas had known real wealth. Now they had to find money for food.
Solomon and his wife Emily had six children. The family had already suffered a loss no parent easily recovers from: their eldest son Fouad died at seventeen. Then the business disappeared too, and Emily went to work. She became a seamstress.
There is something revealing in that detail, because it brings a story of commerce down to household scale. Businesses fail in newspapers and company records, but families experience the same failure differently. It becomes the school fee that cannot be paid, the meal that has to stretch further, the child who has to leave school. Emily sewed to feed her family and tried to keep her children in education, and for a time she managed. Eventually she could not keep all of them there. One of her sons was Aid Laba. At fifteen, he left school and went to work.
Aid was the grandson of a man who had once built a considerable trading business, but that fact did nothing to make his own life comfortable. His grandfather was dead. The business was gone. His father had been seriously ill. His mother was supporting the household with a sewing machine. Aid's wages were now needed, so he worked to help his mother and his siblings, and he helped make it possible for his brother Nowfal to remain in school. At fifteen, the question was no longer what career he wanted. It was how the family would manage.
The irony of the Laba story begins here. A family remembered for business success produced one of its most important entrepreneurs at precisely the moment there was almost no family business left to inherit. Aid had to learn everything for himself. He took on different work and tried different ventures, trading commodities and, at one stage, owning and running a pharmacy. There was no straight road from the collapse of Eid's business to what came next, only years of work. Then, in 1969, Aid found the opportunity that would restore the Laba name to Ghanaian business. He started Latex Foam.
Latex Foam would grow into one of Ghana's most familiar manufacturing brands. Mattresses and foam products carrying the name entered homes across the country, and for generations of Ghanaians, Latex Foam became an ordinary part of domestic life. That familiarity makes its beginnings easy to misunderstand. It is tempting to see Latex Foam as the natural continuation of an old Lebanese family fortune. It was not. The earlier fortune had already collapsed, and Aid did not simply take money Eid had made and put it into a new industry.
Between the two businesses came Eid's death, Solomon's illness, bankruptcy, Fouad's death, Emily's years as a seamstress and Aid leaving school at fifteen. Latex Foam belonged to another beginning entirely, and that may be the most useful way to understand the Labas. They were not a family that simply became rich and stayed rich. They built once. They lost everything. Then they built again.
Their history is not confined to a company. It is also embedded in Accra itself. The family lived around the old Accra Post Office, and Solomon became closely associated with that part of the city. Charles Laba remembers his grandfather as an unusually charismatic man, well known and well liked far beyond the Lebanese community. Over time, the family's presence became attached to the place itself.
Swalaba. The name still marks part of Accra's geography today, and like many old city names, people use it without necessarily knowing where it came from. But in the Laba family's history, Swalaba carries the memory of Solomon.
That gives the story another dimension. The first generation arrived as strangers. The generations that followed were born in Ghana. Solomon was born here. Aid was born here. Their businesses were built here, and their children grew up here, until a part of Accra came to carry the family's name. Yet the Labas remained Lebanese too, and that duality would become familiar across many of the families this series will meet: people who could trace their ancestry elsewhere while tracing most of their actual lives to Ghana. They were not simply visitors who stayed longer than expected. They became part of the place.
It is worth returning to the ship, because almost everything that followed rests on the strange fact that the journey was never supposed to end in the Gold Coast. Eid Laba and Seraphim Ashkar believed they were heading toward the United States. Instead, they arrived in West Africa.
There is no need to romanticize what happened next. Migration at the end of the nineteenth century was uncertain, often poorly documented, and rarely as orderly as later generations imagine it to have been. People followed ships, rumors, relatives and opportunities, and plans changed, destinations changed, and sometimes people simply made a life where the journey left them.
Eid did. His success helped establish the Laba family on the Gold Coast. His death nearly erased everything he had built. Solomon could not save it. Emily kept the household moving. Aid went to work at fifteen. And in 1969, a new Laba business appeared: Latex Foam.
By then the family was no longer simply part of the story of Lebanese migration. It had become part of the story of Ghanaian enterprise, and it had taken less than a century for a journey intended for America to leave its mark on Accra.
The Labas were not alone for long. Other Lebanese families arrived. Some entered trading. Some moved into manufacturing. Others built businesses in transport, construction, real estate, food, textiles and industry. Their names would become increasingly familiar: Azar, Kalmoni, Fattal, Dakmak, Bou-Chedid, Odaymat.
Some of those businesses survived. Some disappeared. Some were sold, and some passed from one Lebanese family to another. Together they created a commercial history that became deeply entangled with Ghana's own.
But before the factories and the large family houses, before the success stories became familiar, the history points back to two men and an unexpected destination. Eid Laba and Seraphim Ashkar thought the ship was taking them to America. It brought them to the Gold Coast instead. The rest became family history, and eventually, part of Ghana's.
Sourcing Note
This article draws heavily on oral history shared with Africa Reporters Network by Charles Laba, son of Aid Laba. The family account provides the lineage from Eid Laba to Solomon Laba, Aid Laba and Charles Laba, the story of Eid and Seraphim Ashkar's journey, the collapse of the early Laba business after Eid's sudden death, Solomon's recovery from a coma, Emily Laba's work as a seamstress, Aid leaving school at 15, and the founding of Latex Foam in 1969. ARN is continuing to find more Lebanese family accounts with archival, corporate and other historical records to get the most accurate stories for cherished readers.
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