Tommy Trenchard reveals how families are battling to survive on Sierra Leone’s Nyangai Island amid rising tides from climate change
Life is rarely easy in the remote villages scattered along Sierra Leone’s Atlantic coastline. Poverty is widespread, jobs are few and infrastructure and basic services are rudimentary at best. But for the residents of Nyangai, a diminutive sandy island about 100 kilometres south of the capital, Freetown, these day-to-day worries are eclipsed by a greater concern: whether the ground beneath their feet will even still be there in a year’s time.
Once home to three villages, thousands of people and extensive areas of forest, Nyangai is rapidly disappearing into the sea in the face of devastating coastal erosion. Within the past 20 years, most of its land area has vanished beneath the waves, and all but around 400 of its population have fled.
Lacking the means to defend themselves from the encroaching waters, many of the remaining islanders now fear that within the next few years, what’s left of the island will have disappeared altogether.
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‘For the past five years, the water has been coming on so fast,’ says the island’s traditional chief, Mustapha Kong, whose family has lived on Nyangai for at least four generations. ‘I’ve begged the government to help us, to build a bank around the island, but they haven’t done anything.’
As he talks, Kong is busy sorting through a tangled wreckage of poles, netting and tarpaulin lying in a heap on the island’s eastern shore. Until two weeks earlier, when an unusually high tide swamped the island, this had been his home. It is the fourth he has lost to flooding on Nyangai.
In just the past decade, the island has shrunk from some 700 metres in length to barely 170. On the last remaining patch of dry land, around 70 structures – homes, fish smokeries, a handful of small shops – stand packed tightly together. Many are built of little more than wooden poles, sheet metal and tarpaulin. Around parts of the island, skeletal trees rise eerily from the water, the remains of the forests that once grew here.
A pair of football goals off the island’s northern shore indicate the site of the submerged football pitch. To the east of the island, a few hundred metres offshore, a small mound of sand is all that remains of the village of Mobiaboi, which, as recently as 2018, was still home to around 100 families before it was lost to the sea.
The handful of islands of the Turtle Islands archipelago, of which Nyangai is one, are low-lying and situated off a part of the coastline subject to strong currents. As such, they have always been vulnerable to erosion. Yet the islanders say today’s situation on Nyangai is unprecedented. In Freetown, officials say rising sea levels are exacerbating erosion not just here but in several places along the Atlantic coastline.
‘Our coastal areas are being seriously affected by rising sea levels,’ says Gabriel Kpaka, head of operations for Sierra Leone’s meteorological service. ‘And people are finding it difficult to cope with the changes that are happening.’
In the town of Bonthe, some 50 kilometres from Nyangai, the local authorities have built a concrete sea wall to combat the now regular flooding. Elsewhere, the government and international aid agencies have implemented mangrove restoration projects in an effort to protect certain communities.
Yet with funding in short supply, there’s little more they can do. The deputy director of Sierra Leone’s Environmental Protection Agency, Paul Lamin, said the government was ‘monitoring the situation’ and ‘raising awareness to make sure people understand their vulnerability’, but that no flood defences were currently planned for Nyangai.
‘If this was in Europe, they’d be able to protect it,’ laments the island’s deputy chief, Kpana Charlie. ‘But here we don’t have the means. It makes me so sad.’
Charlie has by now given up hope of any serious intervention, and he knows that with every family that leaves the island, the government has less incentive to try to save it. Instead, he has called on local authorities to grant the islanders a piece of land on the mainland, so they can at least stay together if and when Nyangai becomes uninhabitable. He fears that may not be long.
As Chief Kong works to salvage building materials from the wreckage of his last home, the tide rises steadily. By mid-morning, it has breached the perimeter of the island. Residents of the lower-lying homes make what rudimentary flood defences they can, building miniature levees of sand reinforced with old car tyres or strips of plastic sheeting. The water seeps in nonetheless.
Children splash in the flood waters and a solitary heron perches on the goal of the flooded football pitch, scanning the water below for fish. Scrawny chickens abandon their hunt for scraps on the beach and retreat to higher ground. By the time the tide eventually begins to recede, several houses are flooded with knee-deep, chocolate-brown water.
‘Floods like this don’t affect us too much,’ says 37-year-old Melchior Shannu, who, along with his sister, is responsible for teaching the 109 children currently enrolled at the island’s only school. ‘The big ones affect us a lot. The whole place floods’.
Such events, which typically occur when high tides coincide with heavy rain or high winds, are known on the island as ‘The Johnson’. Nobody seems to remember the origin of the phrase, but what everyone does seem to agree on is that The Johnson is becoming more severe and more frequent.
‘It’s the actions of man that are making it worse,’ says Shannu, referring to what he sees as the increasing number and the growing ferocity of the storms that batter the island during the rainy season. ‘I would guess in five to ten years the whole place will be gone. Everyone has a plan to move.’
Many of the families that still live on the island have been there for generations, and there is a deep reluctance to leave their homes until it is absolutely necessary. Not only is the island their home, but starting afresh elsewhere in Sierra Leone is an expensive undertaking. Nyangai’s economy revolves around subsistence fishing, and few have much in the way of savings.
‘If the island goes under, we’ll move to Yele [Island],’ says the 35-year-old mother of two Gaya Bang, as she stirs a pot of beans by torchlight in the early morning. ‘But I don’t know how we’ll afford it. I’m afraid.’
Like Chief Kong, Bang’s family has had to rebuild their home on Nyangai no fewer than four times, each time relocating further inland, only for the sea to advance and flood them out again. Every move has further drained her meagre savings.
For Kong, who knows he may soon become a chief without a chiefdom, the sense of loss is acute. He remembers vividly the island of his youth – the dense forests of coconut palms and mango trees, the music and the parties, the thrum of daily village life. Today, he carries an air of deep resignation. But like the captain of a sinking ship, he feels a responsibility to stay and do what he can for his people.
‘We’re facing so many difficulties,’ he says, surveying the remnants of his shrinking island, where residents are now using buckets to bail out the last of the flood water from their homes. ‘But I’ll be here until the end’.
