Washing Away
In the early 1990’s, a civil war broke out in Sierra Leone. My household was forced to flee to Makeni. Here we lived in a compound surrounded by cornfields and mango trees, with a peanut farm down the road. For most of my early childhood, this landscape felt like a part of me, the mango trees a source of food and the corn fields a maze to get lost in.
As the civil war expanded from one district to the next, my family was displaced again to Conakry, the capital city of Guinea. Here, I met one of my grandmother's cousins. Sisi Djeneba was a small lady with a stern face. She worked tirelessly as a fisherwoman. I spent most of my time playing soccer on the coastline, watching her and her husband disappear into the Atlantic Ocean with their crew of young men.
They would come back with a boat full of fish and garbage. The smell was unbearable. I’d watch from a distance as they separated plastic and tires from chiming scales, deciding what could be sold and what would be baked on wood.
In Belgium, during the early stages of college life, I joined European youth camps with other young change makers. During one of our trips to the Parliament, we spent many hours in Strasbourg debating migration and border control. It was the first time that I heard young people from the European Green party connect climate change and migration. As we discussed the climate’s effects on food production and water availability, I realized that I had lived in an environment like this: Freetown.
After the civil war, my family moved back to Freetown. Here I spent most of my days hanging around Cline Town, a wharf area close to the sea. The streets were lined with old British colonial style houses once owned by the first freed enslaved Africans who returned to Freetown. Trees crafted borders between the paths leading to the main road and those leading to the slums. When my friends and I would sneak to the shores to swim after hours of playing soccer, we would often find large boats bearing foreign European flags.
In 2015, I attended my first climate march. On a cold and windy December day I sat on a packed train leaving Mechelen heading towards the port city of Oostende. I was alone. I had been unable to convince my other Black and Brown friends to come. I arrived at the station, where a few thousand people were already marching with banners and protest boards.
On the station poles I read flags calling to “save the polar bears”, “save the whales”. As the march continued, I began to feel unsettled. I was in a crowd of like-minded people advocating for a cause I firmly believed in, yet I felt invisible. The calls to action that surrounded me focused on animals and the future of “our children” – that is, European children. I took a step back to observe the Green movement I was getting sucked into. Who advocates for me and where I’m from when I am not in the room?
I remembered this moment when, many years later, Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate was cropped out of a widely-shared picture with Greta Thunberg. As much as I understood the need for local stories and advocacy, the narrative of climate change that centered “the future,” “the whales,” and “the polar bears” cropped out justice for the part of the world affected the most by climate change, while having contributed the least to it.
I was faced with the reality of coastal erosion when visiting the Kunta Kinteh island in the Gambia as a twenty-some-year-old. We took a wooden boat to the island. As we neared, it became painfully obvious that large parts of it were already underwater. It occurred to me that this erosion marked a threefold loss: a UNESCO protected heritage site, a source of income for the local people, and a wealth of peace history washing away with the tides. For those of us that cherish our histories and the sites of our ancestors, soon there will be only visits to the sea, to point at what used to be.
When I started writing this piece, I asked my mother about Sisi Djeneba. We lost touch when my family moved back to Freetown in the early 2000s, but her and her crew have remained on my mind. My mother described the period of struggle Sisi Djeneba has faced in the last decade. Each year, she must travel farther into the ocean to make a good catch. Each year, she must move deeper into the city as the ocean swallows her land.
Sisi Djeneba is not alone in this journey. 17 out of the 20 countries most threatened by climate change are located in Africa. It manifests daily in the lives of the 420 million people living on the West Coast of Africa, who are disproportionately affected by floods, extreme weather, and coastal erosion exceeding an average of two meters per year. It manifests in the swallowing of whole communities, in the loss of culture, livelihood, stability, infrastructure, and economic opportunities.
It manifests in Senegal, where the legendary city of Saint-Louise is sinking. In the Gambia, where people are losing lands of great historical significance, and in Sierra Leone wherein the last decade alone mudslides, heavy rains and coastal erosion have killed thousands of people and displaced many more. It manifests in the “Cotton Tree,” a 400-year-old national symbol of freedom, which collapsed in Freetown just last year. It manifests in the islands around Freetown which are being swallowed up, and in the people moving inland in search of resources who are crowding up cities that were never built to sustain their populations.
In snapshots of my own life, I’ve come to understand the deep and painful reality of climate change not as an abstract concept, but as a daily struggle. Growing up in Sierra Leone, I witnessed firsthand the slow disappearance of familiar coastal landscapes, eroded by the relentless forces of extreme weather. These are not distant warnings, but the lived experiences of families trying to hold onto land, culture, and livelihood.
As a child of the diaspora and a Muslim, I cannot separate my everyday actions from the responsibility of being a good steward of the Earth. I am aware that overconsumption and wastefulness are not options in communities like mine that are already facing the devastating impacts of a climate crisis. The memories of my childhood now submerged underwater serve as a constant reminder that climate change is not about the future; it is our present reality.
My faith provides a crucial framework for climate justice. In Islam, we are called
to be khalifah (stewards) of the Earth, entrusted by Allah ﷺ to protect and care for his creation. This responsibility is intertwined with key principles like tawhid (the oneness of God and His creation), adl (justice), and mizan (balance), which guides how we interact with the world around us. As a West African Muslim in the diaspora, I have grappled with the ethical questions this invites—seeking ways to transform knowledge into action.
We must reconnect with our roles as stewards, ensuring that the land and its resources are preserved beyond our time here. In Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin ( الله يرحمه) urged Muslims across the world to create Green Deen organizations, merging environmentalism into a way of living guided by Islamic teachings.
In my search to understand how muslims use Islam as their guidance to a sustainable life, I started talking to muslims across the world. I came in contact with The Green Deen Tribe and Sustainably Muslim, two organizations in the UK bringing Muslims together for farming, retreats and hiking, cleaning communal spaces, creating community gardens that grow food for locals, organizing workshops and events, and hosting ethical iftars. They emphasize limiting food waste and use reading groups to spread awareness on the environmental teachings of Islam.
In the US and Canada I learned about Green Ummah and Faithfully Sustainable, both organizations that hold conferences and give out grants to Muslims setting up initiatives to take care of the environment.
Finding this network of organizations and talking to these organizers helped me ground my beliefs in Islam. We as humans are indeed caretakers of the earth, not just takers. We are indebted to make sure each other, nature and animals are nurtured. In my personal life this has meant becoming vegan, limiting my water and food waste as much as I can, and finding ways to donate and connect with organizations that do the work I care about locally and internationally.
The movements for climate justice have deep roots within poor, working class, Black and Brown struggles and, therefore, those communities should be looked to when searching for answers to the climate catastrophe. The fate of the earth should not be left in the hands of capitalists and the one percent. Green Deen can inspire you. The works of Dr. Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement can be your call to action. Whatever you do, play your part in conserving and embracing your role as a caretaker on earth.