© Numero Unoma
I’m not here to throw shade, so before you call me the B-word, try to understand that certain unpopular things need to be said, and somebody has to do the dirty work, so It might as well be me.
I’m actually here to talk about something that should normally be pleasant and beautiful. Should be, I said. Today, on World Oceans Day, I want to talk about oceans and their beaches.
There is something magical about a coastline, something wild, free and beautiful. Many African cultures believe that the spirit world meets the living world on the shoreline. Hence the white candle wax we would find on the Bar Beach as youngsters, many years before greedy developers unscrupulously snatched it from the ordinary people of Lagos and Nigeria, almost a decade ago now. Bar Beach was a regular favourite haunt for white garment church members to offer special prayers. Olokun and Yemoja worshippers also gathered on the beach to pay obeisance to the Orishas.
Countries with a coastline have an extra natural resource to tap. Apart from gifting us with the exquisite beauty of mother nature, the ocean also yields many monetisable resources. The wind can be converted into electricity, the water is a source of food and also a transport route for people and goods. In fact much of Nigeria’s wealth has come from our coastal waters, in the form of light Sweet Bonny Crude oil. The oceans also bring us cultures and practices from faraway places.
On the beaches of the République du Bénin, every year in Ouidah, the Vodun Festival is held. In 1996, Vodun was officially declared a religion by the government, allowing people to practice it openly. Its origins lie in the spiritual practices carried across the Atlantic Ocean by Africans sold into slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean and America. There, slaves had to conceal their indigenous practices with Catholicism, giving birth to Haitian voodoo, Cuban Santería and Brazilian Candomblé. These amalgamations then crossed the ocean back over to Africa via returnee slave descendants.
I imagine some of you Christians and Muslims are thinking what sort of rubbish is this woman writing this week…well I’ll tell you exactly what rubbish. Have you heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It is a floating island of garbage aka rubbish, that covers 1.6 million square kilometers, and stretches from California to Japan. It weighs more than 40,000 cars, is 3 times the size of France, and is made up mostly of plastic. Hard to imagine, huh? What’s that got to do with us in Nigeria? More than we think. Stay with me.
I have on more than one occasion participated in garbage clean-ups at Usuma Dam. What looks like a relatively sparse littering of plastic bottles, plastic shopping bags and the ubiquitous purewater sachet to begin with, shows its true size and volume once collected and bagged.
These days we are also finding guess what…hundreds of Covid face masks also floating around in Usuma Dam, the source of Abuja’s drinking water. And what does this have to do with the ocean? Well, all the plastic in the ocean once landed, kpam, on the ground, somewhere in some country. Then it rained, and the water torrents carried it into the gutters and sewage…which channelled it into the rivers….which since time immemorial have poured into the oceans, and sometimes lakes. And dams.
So you see, the ocean, which scientists say is the source of life, has been turned into a dumping ground for a man-made substance that takes anywhere from 20 to 500 years to decompose.
I find this sort of collective careless behaviour to be particularly infuriating, for a number of reasons. First of all, ever since I was a child, people have called me Mammiwata. I have old friends of many many years who do not call me by my actual name because apparently I always stood out in my relationship with the water, which I feel to be my true element. I swam competitively for University of Ife, and it was a thrill to bring home a medal from the West African University Games back in the day. My favourite place of all to swim is of course the sea. I also love to sail. The broody Atlantic Ocean is one whom I know very well. Since childhood, I have sailed her from Africa, from Europe, from South America, from the Caribbean, and from North America. The offshore races with the Lagos Yacht Club were always my favourite, because you knew when you had left the brackish and mostly filthy waters of Apapa Wharf, and crossed into the Atlantic, because a clean line demarcated the murky former from the exhilaratingly blue water of the latter.
Who cares? I do, for one, and so should you! And something else you should care about are the dwindling fish populations in the Atlantic ocean. I remember meeting with the Igbo traders in Nouadhibou, Mauritania in 2011. They had okporoko factories in that coastal town. Yes, kpanla. As far back as then, they had begun to lament the lack of catch, and the decline of their business since the Chinese had bought up all the fishing rights along the coast of West Africa.
But the unethical overfishing of the Chinese is not the only problem. Plastic refuse in the oceans is killing off marine wildlife at an alarming rate. According to the Oceanic Society “plastic pollution impacts sea turtles, whales, seabirds, fish, coral reefs, and countless other marine species and habitats. In fact, scientists estimate that more than half of the world’s sea turtles and nearly every seabird on Earth have eaten plastic in their lifetimes. Plastic pollution also mars otherwise beautiful beaches, coastlines, and snorkel and dive sites worldwide, even in remote areas.”
Thankfully, some people somewhere are using their brains and hearts, and are now using lot of fishing trawlers to ‘catch’ huge amounts of plastic refuse. But each and every one of us should do our part, even if we live in land-locked countries, but especially if we have a coastline…like we do in Nigeria.
Let me suggest a few things we all could and should do, so as to mitigate this problem that we will leave our children and grandchildren with, if we don’t do them:
Please stop or at least reduce your use of single-use plastics, and please also do agitate for, or at least support legislation to curb plastic production and waste, as well as organisations that address plastic pollution. When it comes to waste, please please try to re-use and recycle your plastics, and like me, please do participate in an organised plastic clean-up once or twice a year. By organising this sort of activity, you are also spreading the word, which is another important attack on the issue of plastics in our oceans. Another sneaky addition to the problem is all those cosmetics like facial scrubs and even many shower gels, that contain micobeads, or micro pearls. That stuff is just grains of plastic, and is extremely dangerous, as it gets into our food chain so easily. All plastics are getting into our food chain, by the way.
In March the UK Independent Newspaper headlined an article “Microplastics found in human blood for first time in ‘extremely concerning’ study”. It went on to say that “Nearly 8 in 10 people’s blood fhas been ound to contain plastic particles. PET plastic, most commonly used to produce drinks bottles, food packaging and clothes, was the most prevalent form of plastic in the human bloodstream. The third most widely found plastic in blood was polyethylene, a material regularly used in the production of plastic carrier bags.”
Let’s think about the legacy that we are leaving behind. Let’s even just look at the increase in pollution-related diseases like cancer and dementia. Let’s understand that every action of ours has consequences. By choosing the consequence you prefer, you are committing to the action that leads to it.
I wrote about this a couple of weeks back, and I deem it befitting to once again praise the country of Gabon for its amazing coastal and marine conservation work. Experts at the University of Exeter have praised the country for “providing a blueprint that could be used for protecting the oceans in many other countries.”
Many Nigerians have recently discovered the joys of taking a voyage on a cruise liner. Being a sailor myself, I’m a bit of a snob, so I’ll pass on those awful floating hotels. I prefer the exhilarating sound of the wind in my sails. But what I am getting at here is that these luxuries will be thing of the past if we humans to not get a grip on plastic pollution in the oceans, which is currently set to more than double by 2030, according to an assessment released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). The report highlights dire consequences for health, the economy, biodiversity and the climate.
There are over 200 million of us plastic polluters in this our country. Those who have ears, let them hear o!