Nigerian Church Watches, Prays as Ocean Rises
Ayetoro was founded to be a city on a hill. Now it’s facing a watery apocalypse.
Thompson Akingboye is old enough to remember a time when the ocean was not a threat to his home in the coastal town of Ayetoro in Nigeria’s southwestern Ondo State. That was back in 1997, when he was just nine years old.
But in the 2000s, the storm surges began, and then everything changed.
Homes, factories, schools, and maternity clinics built up over the town’s long history began to be slowly consumed by the water.
Ayetoro, meaning “happy city” in Yoruba, is home to more than 10,000 people. It is a theocratic Christian fishing community. Since it was founded in 1947, it has been run by the Ogeloyinbo, or traditional ruler, who is also the head of the town’s charismatic Holy Apostles Community Church.
Today, even that church, around which much of the town’s communal life revolves, has been impacted. It has had to be moved three times in recent years, and the waves are lapping ever closer to its present location.
“Our common prayer in the church is seeking God’s intervention to touch the heart of the government to answer our plight,” Akingboye, now 36 and the spokesman for the town’s youth congress, told CT.
That intervention would involve reclaiming the land that has already been lost to the sea and building up levees, dikes, and seawalls that can withstand the waves, experts say.
Ayetoro’s people are historically self-sufficient, but a project this big is beyond the abilities of even its most able artisans, Akingboye said. Appeals have been made at every level of government: local, regional, and state.
“No tangible respite has come,” he said. “The land continues to be eroded, houses continued to collapse into the sea, people continued ...