Marseille Rewrites the History of Hail Saeed Anam

Yemenat

Mohammed Al-Mekhlafi

A few days ago, I wrote an article titled (Stories from Inside the Hail Saeed Anam Group),after hearing a story by chance from a friend about the group’s relationship with its employees, and how it encourages them and helps them develop their abilities.

This story prompted me to write the previous article and led me to read and research the history of the group from its very beginning, how it expanded, and how it became the largest commercial and industrial group in Yemen and one of the largest companies in the region.

To understand how this journey began, I had to go back to the group’s first founder, Al Haj Hail Saeed Anam, may God have mercy on him.

He was born in 1902 in the village of Qaradh, one of the villages in the Hifan Mountains south of Taiz. He spent his childhood like many others of his generation. He tended sheep, worked in agriculture, and memorized the Quran at the village’s traditional Quran school.

He was calm by nature and intelligent, close to his family, and ambitious, always looking toward the future, especially after his elder brother, Abdo Saeed, and some young men from the area had gone to France to work there.

At the age of eighteen, he decided to leave. He said goodbye to his family and village and set out on foot toward Aden. He had nothing with him but his parents’ prayers and his desire to travel and work abroad.

When he reached the port of Aden, he boarded one of the ships, but he did not have enough money for a ticket. He offered to work for the crew in return for being taken to Marseille, France. They agreed and assigned him to feed the ship’s furnaces with coal,