Mona Khalil

Mona al-Khalil (born 2 August 1949 in Lagos, Nigeria), commonly known as Mona Khalil (Arabic: منى خليل) and sometimes transliterated as Mona el-Khalil, is a conservationist and environmentalist in Southern Lebanon, who specialised in the protection of endangered sea turtles.

Khalil was born and spent the formative years of her childhood in the Nigerian city of Lagos, when the West African country was still a colony and protectorate ruled by the British Empire. Her parents were diaspora Lebanese with a Shia Muslim background originating from Jabal Amil. Many families from that area had escaped mass-poverty caused by systematic discrimination from the imperial Ottoman rulers against the Twelver Shia Muslim inhabitants between the late 19th century and the 1920s, when the five Ottoman provinces constituting modern-day Lebanon came under the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, by migrating to Western Africa.

In a 2017 oral history interview for the Storytellers Project of the Beirut-based feminist Knowledge Workshop (KW) Khalil described her mother as a "society woman" who did not care much about her children. Khalil stresses that she instead had a very close relationship with her nanny, developed a profound love for nature and always felt in her own identity more Nigerian than Lebanese.

Hence, she suffered badly, especially due to the separation from her nanny, when at the age of seven years she had to move to Lebanon together with her young sister. Khalil attended the US-American Beirut Evangelical School for Girls and felt discriminated there, since she mainly spoke Nigerian English and only poor Arabic. In contrast, Khalil spent happy childhood days during weekends and vacations at her family's farm with a beach house in the coastal village of Mansouri, about 95 kilometers south of Beirut and just a few kilometers south of the ancient port city of Tyre. The area was mainly inhabited by Palestinians who had fled from their homeland in the context of the 1948 Nakba.

According to her own account, Khalil got married at the age of 21 years under the pressure of her family to lead a bourgeois life and had a child.

Shortly after the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in early 1975, Khalil fled from Lebanon because of an "incident". She found refuge in the Netherlands where she worked in a museum as a porcelain restorer. During her time in Europe, Khalil also acquired the citizenship of the United Kingdom, which she was entitled to because of being born in Nigeria when it was still a British colony.

In 1982, Khalil was devastated by a psychological trauma due the death of her only child in the Ionian Sea off Corfu. The young boy was snorkeling for starfish and run over by the drunk driver of a speedboat. In HIMA – a 2021 short documentary by filmmaker Giulia Franchi – Khalil describes this cruel stroke of fate as a turning point in her life:

« You don't have a choice : either, be yourself and live your life, or kill yourself and finish with this. So my way of thinking is compelety different than my family's way of thinking. They all wanted me to be someone who I am not. I was married, I had a child, I did shut up for a long time, until I lost him. When I lost him... that was it. I woke up. »