Men in Lagos lower battered buckets into the dark lagoon, lifting wet sand that steadily redraws Africa’s largest city’s fragile coastline.
Each diver vanishes for seconds, then resurfaces with a heavy offering destined for construction sites feeding Lagos’s relentless hunger for growth.
Filling a single wooden boat takes nearly three hours, earning about 12,000 naira for middlemen supplying larger, distant buyers.
Dredgers and traders say the price of sand, essential for concrete, has climbed steadily as development presses harder along the water.
The lagoon’s surface is changing shape, with sandy islands appearing where open water once reflected only sky and passing clouds.
Narrowing channels now bend currents that have long sustained thousands of fishermen working these waters for survival.
Where nets once spread freely, shifting shoals now interrupt movement, quietly rewriting routines passed down through generations.
The work continues bucket by bucket, a slow, physical labour sculpting a coastline caught between human ambition and natural limits.