Two days earlier, people in Lebanon’s capital had commemorated the 2020 Beirut port explosion. The boom was reminiscent of the shattering sound back then, when 237 people were killed. 

This explosive sound was quickly followed by another — stronger and louder. In the streets, terrified people scrambled for shelter.

It was not a bomb or an explosion at the port: Israeli attack planes had torn through the air, flying as close as possible to the ground, fast enough that they broke the sound barrier. 

The sonic boom and shockwave this creates is used as a tool of psychological warfare, and it came right before a scheduled speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

It wasn’t the veiled threat of war by Israel that threw Marian Sesay, a Sierra-Leonean migrant living in Lebanon. It was the trauma of the past.

“Those sonic booms, that’s like what happened on the fourth of August explosion for sure,” says Sesay, referring to the port explosion among whose fatalities were 76 foreign nationals.

“Now, I’m scared of every little sound,” she says.

On that day in 2020, 2 750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate kept in Beirut’s port exploded, killing hundreds, injuring more than 6 000 and leaving about 300 000 people homeless.

Sesay was a domestic worker then in the Bourj Hammoud municipality, on the outskirts of Beirut, not far from the port. When the blast boomed through the air, like everyone, she was stunned at first then fear rapidly set in.

“After the blast, I was afraid of everything. I had insomnia and I was always afraid I was going to die,” she recalls. “That sound is a trigger.”

Sesay came to Lebanon 10 years ago to work for a Lebanese family under the Kafala system, an extreme form of employment sponsorship that allows employers to control the entry, exit, work and residence of migrant workers, making the labourers vulnerable to exploitation and modern slavery, particularly in domestic work.

Collectively, the Arab region is home to more than 24 million migrant workers, making up 40% of the labour force — the highest share of any region, according to the Global Slavery Index. Lebanon has at least a quarter of a million from Africa and Asia.

Crises exacerbate the vulnerabilities of workers under the Kafala system and the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion was a case in point.

“Many of the people in the affected areas were vulnerable women, and while Lebanese had other places to go to, they didn’t,” says Ghina Al-Andary, an officer at Kafa, an NGO that helps domestic migrant workers in Lebanon.

In the affected area, in-house help had become a status symbol.

Viany De Marceau, a Cameroonian who came to Lebanon as a domestic worker under the Kafala system in 2015, explained this in an article for the Migrant Worker Action group: “Along the port of Beirut, two maids per apartment are not enough. The more maids you have, the better you are regarded. There are two Filipinas for the cooking, two Ghanaians to take care of the children, an Ethiopian or a Cameroonian for the cleaning.”

After the 2020 blast, most of the help Lebanon received was prioritised for locals. One MP, George Atallah, proposed a law to explicitly exclude families of non-Lebanese victims from compensation.

Marceau wonders who remembered the Africans who died on 4 August 2020.

She wrote: “Even in death, for you, we do not count. They retrieved the bodies but did not mention the presence of the black women, our presence.”

In the aftermath, some migrant workers decided to leave Lebanon. Others chose to stay. They healed with the help of some organisations, their community and their family back home.

But the scars are still there — scratched each time Israeli jets break the sound barrier, as they have done several times since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

The Israeli state responded to the attack not only by bombarding Gaza (where more than 41,000 people have since died), but also stretching the hits, or threat of them, to parts of Lebanon, Syria and even Iran, in pursuit of Hamas allies like Hezbollah. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here

Less than 24 hours later, a convoy of civilian vehicles hit an improvised explosive device (IED). Thirty-five people died on the spot and 37 were evacuated to the capital, Ouagadougou, with injuries. 

The defence minister, Barthélémy Simporé, told journalists on Wednesday that the bomb was triggered remotely and hit a vehicle carrying women and children.

The incident, which happened on the road between the northern town of Djibo and Ouagadougou, was the fourth in two months. 

On 1 July, four civilians were killed when their tricycle hit an IED along the same road. Two subsequent attacks — on the Djibo-Bourzanga road and the Dori-Sebba road, both near the border with Niger — killed 17 soldiers.

The government says that it killed 84 militants in the same period.

“This is proof that we don’t have control of this route,” said Mahamadou Savadogo, a former police officer and now a security expert, after the attack.

The continued violence puts military leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba in an awkward position. 

He led the January coup that removed the country’s elected president, Roch Kaboré, and justified it by saying that the civilian government had failed to pacify the country. Political commentator Siaka Coulibaly said, “Terrorists aren’t reduced like we would have thought and they keep their ability to be harmful.” 

Even Damiba appears to have a slight change in tone. After the Monday attack he said that the security situation was everyone’s responsibility.

Although agreeing that everyone had a role to play, Savadogo pointed out that this responsibility was not equally shared. “The government has the responsibility to restore peace.” He added that Burkina Faso was struggling to see results because the army is still not united. 

This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It is designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.