One of the things I love about reading is that it can take you to places you’ve never visited in real life and are never likely to. Chioma Okereke’s new novel, Water Baby, is set somewhere I knew absolutely nothing about: Makoko, a community built on and around a lagoon in the Nigerian city of Lagos. Although it may sound idyllic, that’s sadly not the case. Makoko, as Okereke describes it, is a place where most of the inhabitants are living in poverty, where the lagoon is dirty and polluted and drug use is a widespread problem. It has become known as Africa’s ‘biggest floating slum’.
The heroine of Okereke’s story is nineteen-year-old Yemoja, nicknamed Baby by her father. Since leaving school, Baby has been earning her living by rowing passengers across the water in her canoe, Charlie-Boy, named after her beloved younger brother, but she and her friends dream of one day experiencing a different way of life. However, with her father trying to push her into marriage with Samson, a neighbour who repairs boats, and with a large family of younger cousins to help care for, the possibility of leaving Makoko seems remote.
Things finally begin to change for Baby when she hears about a newly launched project using drones to create maps of Makoko, increasing the profile and visibility of their settlement. Young women from the community, known as ‘Dream Girls’, are being trained to pilot the drones and Baby is desperate to get involved, despite her father’s distrust of the project. When someone takes a photograph of her on the lagoon, mistaking her for a Dream Girl, the image soon goes viral on social media and Baby finds she has become a celebrity overnight. The opportunity arises for her to represent Makoko at a conference in Switzerland, but will this be the start of a new life for Baby or will she decide that her future lies at home after all?
I thought this book was fascinating, mainly because of the setting and the insights it gave me into a lifestyle so completely different from my own. Okereke describes Makoko so vividly I could already picture what it looked like even before searching for photos to see it for myself. The lives of the people of Makoko are already difficult – making your home on a lagoon means facing problems with sanitation, electricity supplies and running water, not to mention access to education and medical care – but they are also in an unusually vulnerable position regarding climate change:
There used to be more vessels on the horizon, but year on year that’s changing. From the shrinking lagoon size and lesser quantities of fish to water levels rising alongside the rubbish enveloping us. From manmade disasters to unthinkable diseases. Life is always throwing something at us, but we hold our ground.
I liked Baby, but some of the other characters were less well developed; in particular I felt that I never fully got to know her love interest, Prince. I did find Baby’s relationship with her little brother Charlie Boy very moving, though, for reasons that I can’t really explain here without spoiling the story! Although Baby and her friends are fictional characters, the Code for Africa mapping project and the Dream Girls are real and I found it interesting to read more about them after finishing the book.
Thanks to Quercus for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.