Musa Bamba moved to West Point, a bustling slum on a peninsula jutting out from Liberia’s capital Monrovia, two decades ago. The 48-year-old scrap metal trader bought a plot of land and built a 10-room house, back from the water’s edge, for his family in 2005.
But Bamba says over the years the sea has “eaten away” at West Point’s low-lying land, which is directly exposed to the brute force of the Atlantic Ocean all along its western flank. Now only a single room of that home remains. The rest has collapsed after being battered by waves.
The father of five now rents a tin shack further inland. “The sea was way back before,” says Bamba, who has turned the one remaining room of his old house into pay-for-use public showers. “But it has been running towards us, closer and closer, taking our land.”
