Vol 1: AFLOAT

From late 2018 to 2021, I traveled from Lagos to Cotonou almost every month. It didn’t matter if it was raining or the sun was boiling hot—I had to go. I was doing some marketing work for a university in cotonou.

Anyway, back to the story.

Traveling from the Island to Cotonou was no small feat at the time. The roads were terrible—you could spend hours stuck in traffic, so frustrating. I remember one particularly day when I spent almost nine hours just moving from Lekki Phase 1 to Seme Border (that’s the Nigeria-Benin border, for those who don’t know). By the time I got there, I was mentally drained and ready to give up the entire project.

That was the turning point. We needed a better way. That’s when we discovered the boat option and my life just became easier.

We would take a small boat from a jetty in Lekki Phase 1 to Badagry, then continue the rest of the journey by road across the border. Sometimes we even took a direct boat to Porto Novo, and that made everything so much easier. Depending on the weather and the tides, the ride from the Island to Badagry could take just 1 hour 20 minutes or even less.

But it wasn’t just about saving time.

AFLOAT is my visual love letter to Lagos’s water life, the rhythms, the beauty, the danger, the people, the pulse of it all. I want you to feel the water as I felt it. Smell the salt, hear the engines, and see the glimmer of the sun on ripples.

There’s so much potential in these waterways. Maybe if more of us paid attention, we would realize what a gift we have and how important it is to protect and nurture it.