From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Makoko Frequency
This article covers a West African adaptation filmed/broadcast in Lagos. For adaptations by location, see Adaptations by location. For West African traditions, see West African adaptations of Beach Surgery.
Makoko Frequency is a multimedia adaptation originating from Makoko, the lagoon-built community on Lagos Lagoon, that reconstructs Beach Surgery (story) through the register of Nollywood melodrama, Yoruba oral commerce-narrative, and pirate community radio. The work exists simultaneously as a digital video serial (distributed by ██ productions, now offline) and as an FM radio broadcast, the two forms narrating parallel versions of the same story that never fully align [citation needed].
In the video version, Katita is reimagined as a **migrant nurse** trafficking medicines across the lagoon by canoe; Leif is a **merchant-engineer** repairing water-pumps in the stilted compounds. The story's two halves (city / interior) become Lagos proper and the mangrove interior; the "glitch" is figured as a tidal reversal—the day the lagoon begins flowing backward, and the protagonists must navigate its new current.
The radio serial, broadcast irregularly on █ FM, call letters unconfirmed , tells the story in Yoruba, punctuated by call-in commentary from Makoko residents who debate whether the broadcast describes a real lagoon disaster or a parable about colonial infrastructure. Dialogue is improvised, recorded live-to-tape.
The two narratives—video and radio—contradict one another in key details. In the video, Leif drowns. In the radio serial, he escapes. Neither version resolves whether this is intentional ambiguity or accidental de-synchronization. Both went offline around 2016 . Fandom treats Makoko Frequency as a foundational example of Adaptations and impossibility: the more one tries to verify its production details, the more they scatter [citation needed].