Have you ever wondered why there are no Black African surfers in the Olympics, despite Africa’s incredible Atlantic waves? No seriously, looking at the entry photos is shocking. Even the South African participants are all White. As with many inequalities, this is not a coincidence but the consequence of colonial history. This article provides insights into the hidden Black history behind this statistic.
This article was first published by De Groene Amsterdammer on 18 July 2024 (in Dutch).
When I get caught by a wave with my surfboard in El Salvador, it feels like I'm being spun in all directions in a washing machine. The salty water stings my nose, but at the same time rinses my mind clean. In moments like these, I feel not only the power of the ocean, but also a connection to surfers throughout the ages.
Where and when the first people started surfing is difficult to date. The Polynesian Islands (the triangle between New Zealand, Hawai‘i and Easter Island) are often collectively cited as the cradle. For example, botanist Joseph Banks, aboard James Cook's first voyage of discovery in 1769, wrote in his journal about surfers he saw in Tahiti.
"We saw natives enjoying themselves in a truly surprising manner. (...) a high surf struck the shore, a more terrifying one I have not often seen: no European boat could have landed in it, and I do not think that any European who got into it in any way could have saved his life. (...) In the middle of these waves ten or twelve natives were swimming with the back of an old canoe. Two got into it and by turning the blunt end against the breaking wave, they were washed to shore with incredible speed."
Much better known still is the surfing history of Hawai‘i, the northernmost point of Polynesia. The archipelago has now become almost synonymous with the sport. One of the earliest descriptions of surfing in Hawai‘i comes from William Ellis, officer aboard - again - James Cook's ship, which was the first European ship to pass the Hawai‘ian Islands, in 1778:
"In addition to canoes and boats, they have another way of propelling themselves in the water, on very light flat pieces of wood, which we call shark boards, because of the resemblance of the front part to the head of that fish."
Ellis' description resembles modern surfing, not with half a canoe but standing on a flat board: "On these boards they dare to go into the heaviest surf, and paddle with their hands and feet, propelling themselves at great speed. Indeed, we have never seen people so active in the water; it almost seems to be their natural element."
Yet this is not the whole story. Whereas popular surfing history only mentions Polynesia, the film Wade in the Water: A Journey into Black Surfing and Aquatic Culture pointed me to an entirely different history, that of the Atlantic west coast of Africa. A story unknown to me and many other surfers. While I took my first surfing lesson in Ghana, no less.
Wade in the Water (directed by David Mesfin) shows spectacular images of current African and black surfers. These images are interspersed with a historical analysis of the surfing history of Atlantic Africa, narrated by historian Kevin Dawson. This is where the first European accounts were recorded on the Gold Coast of West Africa in 1640.
Dawson published the book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. In it he describes how Michael Hemmersam, a goldsmith from Nuremberg, traveled from Amsterdam to the Gold Coast in 1639 in the service of the West India Company. There Hemmersam saw parents tying their children to planks, presumably to teach them to swim. Three decades later, in 1679, French merchant and sailor Jean Barbot also described how children in Elmina, Ghana learned to swim "on pieces of planks ... fastened under their bellies."
Dawson thus argues that surfing developed in present-day Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Liberia and West Central Africa. This means that most historians are not only overlooking 140 years of surfing history, but are 15.000 kilometers away from the first record. Why is Africa's surf history so unknown to us?
As a surfer and cultural anthropologist, I was stunned to know nothing about African water culture history. Indeed, I also knew virtually nothing about current surf culture in Atlantic Africa. In Waikīkī, Honolulu I often surfed at Diamond Head, a surf spot just a seven-minute drive from my apartment. Diamond Head comes from the adjacent crater, the same as in the background of early photos of Hawai‘ian surfers in Waikīkī. At this spot, there are always waves due to the reef that is close to the surface of the water. With the crystal clear water and knowledge of the tide, this was not a problem - a matter of deftly dodging the reef or jumping off your board in time. Thanks to the good conditions and poor accessibility, you surf here with locals and surfers from elsewhere in the world who came to Hawai‘i specifically for the high waves. While bobbing and waiting for a good set, conversations in the water were regularly about indispensable global surf locations.
According to historian Kevin Dawson, the main reason our understanding of surfing in Africa is limited is because what was recorded by early European settlers in Africa was not interpreted as surfing, but as a method of learning to swim. The records clearly describe children playing on boards in the waves. Yet the European understanding of surfing came only after the recordings of surfing in Hawai‘i. By then, the surfing culture of Africans had already largely collapsed under the weight of Christianization. Christian settlers saw the often naked surfers as "uncivilized.
Colonialism led not only to the containment of surf culture but also of Africa's broader aquatic culture. On Africa's Atlantic coast, the sea is rough, rivers are wide and islands abound. There are also few natural harbors, which meant Africans at the time had to use canoes through the surf to get to the ocean.
Not surprisingly, people in these areas were tremendously good boaters and fishermen, swimmers and divers. There are even European accounts of African women teaching their babies to swim as early as eight months to a year and a half.
Africans were such good swimmers that in the 16th century European slaveholders exploited Africans' diving and swimming skills. The enslaved Africans had to search for pearls and sunken European gold fleets containing gold from the Aztecs and Incas. Some of these divers realized how much wealth their diving skills brought and negotiated freedom for themselves and their families and friends. However, things ended differently with most enslaved Africans from these areas.
Both in the Americas and on the Atlantic coast of Africa, settlers, slavery traders and slave owners were aware of the impressive water skills of enslaved Africans from coastal areas. Military forts of the British, Dutch and French guarded the Atlantic African coast. This made it impossible for the Africans to get close to the water. Slaveholders in the Americas, moreover, explicitly prohibited enslaved Africans from using their water skills to try to escape. Those who did were cruelly murdered upon discovery as a warning to the rest.
Filmmaker David Mesfin aims not only to raise awareness about the hidden black history of surfing and aquatic culture, but also to offer inspiration and hope for the future. In his film, several black surfers share their stories about their spiritual connection to the ocean and the positive impact of surfing on their mental health. Pro surfer Julian Williams comes across as relaxed when talking about surfing, "When I dive into the ocean, I feel like a new person. Every time I can touch my board, I touch the ocean and then nothing on land really touches me anymore. As a 21-year-old, I have a lot on my mind, so just being able to disconnect from what's going on on land is very important to me.
Sharon Shaffer is the first black female pro surfer. She talks about how in everyday life she can be stressed about all kinds of seemingly important things, but that stress disappears once she's in the ocean. "In the ocean, all you have to do is be. Both on the continent of Africa and among the African-American population in the United States, there are increasing numbers of surfers and initiatives claiming ("reclaiming") black surf culture. The title of the film, Wade in the Water, refers to this reclaiming and is a variation on a freedom song from the slavery past titled Wade by the Water.
Freedom songs usually contain hidden messages for enslaved people to escape. Wade by the Water is best known for American abolitionist and escaped enslaved Harriet Tubman. During her many liberation campaigns, she used the song to instruct enslaved people to dive into rivers to shake off tracking dogs of slave owners.
In addition to a history lesson and an inspiring future perspective, Wade in the Water also teaches us a decolonized and spiritual understanding of human-water relations. With animated drawings, the film tells how African water cultures, like Polynesian water cultures, are intertwined with spirituality.
Although there is also a water culture in the Netherlands, it is of a very different caliber. Water is something we can control, which we can be in charge of and which we must overcome. The struggle against water is an anchor in the Dutch collective identity. Instead of connecting with the water, land preservation requires separating us from the water through dikes and polders. Only a few, including many surfers, will understand the Africans' and Polynesians' spiritual connection to the sea.
"How ancient Polynesians conquered the Pacific on their surfboards." This headline of a Fair Observer article on the spirituality of surfing in Polynesian history provides an ironic example of this persistent Western view. I have noticed this myself. Once I started seeing paddling through rough waves as 'playing with' the ocean rather than 'fighting my way through the waves,'
I became much more comfortable in the water and surfed better. The idea of fighting the ocean is also present in European seafaring history. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when European sailors crossed oceans with their fleets, water was seen as something to fear. Not surprisingly, since seafarers could not swim well. When a ship carrying white Europeans sank, Dawson writes, there were two options: they drowned or they were rescued by the excellent swimming Africans.
Until the Middle Ages, Europeans would have been very good swimmers. But that aquatic culture crumbled in part because of the Christian Catholic Church. Women and men swam naked, and that would be immoral. Moreover, both Catholic and Protestant writers equated water with hell and swimming with eternal torment. On the contrary, according to African spirituality, bodies were seen as gifts from the Maker. There was no shame in women and men swimming naked together. Indeed, the body was a means of connecting yourself to your natural environment. Moreover, in both Atlantic African and Polynesian cultures when swimming, surfing and boating in the ocean, there was a degree of awe and respect for the living force of the body of water.
The idea of the ocean as a living force has important implications for how we understand the history of surfing and water cultures in Polynesia and Africa. In the Western worldview, it is common to see water as a natural boundary between countries and cultures. Islands are seen as isolated units. In Polynesian and African worldviews, it is very different. There, the world extends not just over land, but to all areas that the ocean connects to land.
Language matters in analyzing and reshaping a worldview. For example, the name "Pacific Ocean," and the more familiar in Dutch "Pacific Ocean," comes from the European mariner Ferdinand Magellaan. He encountered only calm waters on his voyage and therefore called the ocean calm (in Portuguese, "pacifico"). Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau'ofa prefers to use the name Oceania instead of "Pacific Islands" (Pacific Islands) to signify the difference between the perspective of "a sea of islands" and "islands in the sea.
That there has been exchange between Polynesian cultures is also evidenced by oral myths and legends. According to Hawai‘ian legends, surfing (he'e nalu) was introduced to the islands by the god of the sea, Kanaloa, who appeared in nature (kinolau) as an octopus (he'e). Other Polynesian islands, such as Tonga and Savai'i, have similar stories in which the god of the sea appears as an octopus or squid: Feke (Tonga) or Fe'e (Savai'i). Oral traditional stories ("chants") from Tahiti include many surfers and even name gods who surf: Hinaraure'a, the wife of demigod Turi, was so good that she was named Tō'ū'ura-oi-ore ("glorious woman of high excellence") for her surfing skills. Various Atlantic-African cultures also have spiritual legends in which gods of the ocean are associated with seafaring and surfing. 'By immersing yourself in water, swimming, surfing or canoeing, you actually connect with the ancestral spirits and gods that reside in the water,' Dawson says of African legends.
I gasp and when my head resurfaces in the sea of El Salvador, I climb right onto my board. In the distance, I can already see the next set approaching. But when I look to my right, I see that I have drifted into another surf spot, "the graveyard" - so named because so many boards die there. The waves are too high today and I begin my paddle back to shore.
Just before I reach the beach, yet a beautiful wave comes rolling in behind me. Swiftly I turn my board in the right direction and begin to paddle vigorously. I feel the wave pick me up and without hesitation I jump up. My heart leaps - had a good wave today after all. I thank the ocean, my board and myself for the session and walk out of the water smiling broadly.
----
In addition to this article, I wrote a short blogpost on how this colonial history influences the Olympics until this day. In this post I also give suggestions on how to keep working on decolonizing the next Olympics when it comes to surfing.
Subscribe to my newsletter if you want to stay updated (max. once a week) on my posts, and connect with me on instagram (@iam_allovertheplace) to follow my life as a slow traveller and online master student.
Then, finally, if you are still here: I am working together with Hostelworld and Airalo (for e-sims), meaning that if you book via my hostelworld link or my Airalo link (within 30 days of clicking it) I will get a commission. So if you want to further support my blog, clicking my link before/when travelling is an amazing way to do so.
Comments