There’s an old tale where we live about throwing a newborn into the lagoon.

If the baby drowns, it is illegitimate and the mother must be banished from the community. But if it floats, the infant is embraced by all. They say fathers used to celebrate their child’s birth with this test. It must have been a trick, though, as everybody knows that all babies float.

I was born in the water. That’s what Papa says but it’s a fiction. I wasn’t born in a hospital or on land; most of us in my community weren’t. We drew our first breaths on Adogbo, though according to Papa, my first moments were almost in the lagoon itself. Makoko is what the outsiders had originally called our settlement hundreds of years ago, due to its abundance of akoko leaves, and the name stuck for the community on the Lagos coast just across from the Third Mainland Bridge. To strangers, it’s a slum, a metallic and wooden eyesore built over a stinking bed of ever-mounting sewage, spreading out across the smoke-filled horizon. For the government, it’s the impediment between even larger coffers for them and prime waterfront real estate. But to us, who are from here, Makoko is simply home.

The Nigerian government likes to pretend that we don’t exist, but we’ve been here for hundreds of years, our wooden houses resting proudly on their stilts above Lagos’s charcoal-coloured lagoon. We’ll remain here for some time, no matter how many attempts they make to push us out.