Sediments
Lagos is a megacity of twenty-four million people, where the legacies of slavery and colonialism have set in motion a great migration of an estimated two thousand people daily from across West Africa. As infrastructures of extraction—from the slave factory to the mega port—intensify development along the coastline, more and more people are drawn across a threshold of no return.
The rapid expansion of Lagos and the role that sand and sediments play in constructing its infrastructures and social lifeworlds highlight what writer Amitav Ghosh calls the “great derangement,” the global trend to intensify colonial patterns of urbanization on coastlines, even as they are eroded by climate change. After water, sand is the world’s most consumed natural resource. And as urban planning scholar Nehal El-Hadi declares, sand builds our worlds, yet our demand for it is destroying the world. Its apparent abundance is abstracted from the unthought crisis of its extraction. Repeated all over the city, this process is most spectacularly exemplified by the private development of Eko Atlantic City: a billion-dollar luxury real estate development that reclaimed over ten square kilometers of land from the ocean. Built where the now-legendary Bar Beach evaporated into the sea, the waterfront used to be one of the very few public spaces in the sprawling city. Providing a natural civic space, it has now been eroded by the depleting presence of the colonial port. Through changing sedimentary circulations, colonial infrastructures continue to compound catastrophe upon catastrophe.
In Lagos, as this pattern of urban expansion unfolds, shorelines disappear, riverbeds are devoured, and ecosystems are destroyed, rendering indigenous livelihoods unviable through the voracious consumption and circulation of alluvial sediments. Yet even as the terraforming projects of real estate ensue, the rapid expansion of the urban remains dependent on hidden, multi-scalar assemblages of everyday social, ecological, and climatic lifeworlds that I call “Black infrastructural life.”
On any given night, well after sunset, when the day’s heat begins to radiate from the ground, a fleet of sand divers set sail from Sandbeach in the community of Oworonshoki on Lagos Lagoon. In the black of night, thirty to forty vessels, each operated by a crew of two or three men, are carried by a light breeze and subtle currents. Allowing themselves to drift, they float on the waters of the lagoon until they arrive at a sandy shoal close enough to the surface for a diver to reach on a single breath. Here, they drop anchor and rest for the night with their boats braced together and huddled under their sails as blankets. At dawn, these crews will begin diving for sand, descending up to four meters below the surface with rusty metal buckets to gather sediment. They dive naked to avoid the weight of wet clothes, plunging over and over with little pause for rest, until their flat-bottomed barge is so laden with sand that the gunwales barely reach above the waterline.
This is risky, arduous work. Collecting sand from the seabed stirs up clouds of sediment that hide threats such as large fish with razor-sharp teeth, poison jellyfish, and flotsam from marine wreckages. Braving these dangers, the divers make up to fifteen dollars a day—or more if the wind allows a second trip. In Lagos, sand is categorized and regulated as a mineral, making these men subaquatic miners. Yet there is no protective union or industry regulation, and so the divers are self-employed laborers who cover all their own overheads. By relying on the wind, and using sails made from sewn-together rice sacks, the sand divers reduce their energy consumption and costs.