Like this Sierra Leonean widow and mother of six children, most of the inhabitants of this slum of Freetown have erected their shack on a plot reclaimed from the Atlantic. They piled tires, rubbish and bags of dirt at the bottom of the bay on the ocean, and compacted this amalgam with mud. Then they built on it.
This filling, called here "banking", literally the creation of banks, is the only solution that destitute residents have found to the overcrowding of the capital, caused by geographical constraints and exacerbated by years of civil war. It is an ingenious but fragile conquest, threatened by water and fire. And there is no road or service.
Lamrana Bah used to live in town. When her husband died, she was no longer able to pay the rent for the apartment. She spent $350 between 2014 and 2018 to build her house away from a road in Cockle Bay. It has electricity, but no running water.
"My mother has no more rent to pay and we have no problem with anyone. We have our own house," says her son Prince Anthony. Like most of the surrounding structures, this one initially had sheet metal walls. Then Lamrana Bah had them raised in solid.
Since then, the neighborhood has continued to advance into the sea and the Bahs are now 500 meters from the shore.
About a third of Freetown's 1,5 million residents live in slums or poor neighborhoods, according to city services.
The population of Freetown exploded with the civil war from 1991 to 2002, which drove hundreds of thousands of displaced people to the capital.
A constrained city
But the city built on a peninsula is wedged between the Atlantic and the mountains. To build towards the heights, often without authorization, is to take the risk of a landslide, like the one which killed more than 1.000 people in 2017. Towards the sea means exposing oneself to flooding and submersion. Cockle Bay, for example, is at sea level.
Difficult to establish when we started filling in the coastline here and in Freetown. Cockle Bay was occupied before the Civil War and has since expanded. Its location makes it a port. There are schools and at least one mosque, all built on artificial banks.
Not everyone is poor there. In an older part, lemon trees, coconut trees, papaya trees shade robust yellow and pale green buildings.
"We live happily here, we have no problems," said Fatu Dumbuya, a 33-year-old hairdresser. She calls on one of her children busy with their homework and another running with the local kids. While she is busy with the braids of a client, her husband carries mud to further widen the bank.
Banking, "it's local technology", proudly proclaims his client.
The Federation of Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP), a grassroots organization, puts the number of people living in the slums of the seaside, mostly on embankment, at 198.000. .
"Our biggest problems are floods and fires," said Nancy Sesay, a longtime resident of another seaside neighborhood, Susan's Bay.
In 2021, the flames left 7.000 people homeless.
the belly speaks
"When it rains, we don't sleep. The rubbish rises and floats in a pestilential smell," says Nancy Sesay while strolling along a putrid stream near which children are washing.
But Nancy Sesay, who sells toiletries and cosmetics at a nearby market, might lose her job if she moved elsewhere.
“Every year for the last five or seven years we have had disasters during the rainy season,” reports Joseph Macarthy, head of the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre.
"A lot of people don't care about the disasters they've been through... Once here, they're sure to have enough for at least one dish of rice," he says.
While striving to improve the daily lives of her citizens on the spot, the mayor of Freetown advocates the creation of economically attractive centers outside the capital.
"It's not Freetown that people are looking for, it's work, food, the possibility of receiving care," Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr told AFP. "Offer them that somewhere else, and they'll go somewhere else."
She and local organizations are urging residents to put an end to the backfilling of the waterbed.
"At this rate, we won't have any more seas," worries Andrew Saffa, who works at FEDURP. "And when the sea comes back and takes back its rights, it's a lot of disasters".