Inside Liberia’s nascent surf scene

What strikes you first when watching footage of locals surfing the peeling left-hand breaks of Robertsport – a fishing village on Liberia’s far western coastline – is how playful it all looks.

In part, that’s because many of the surfers, who have grown up in the long shadow of civil war, are not riding traditional surf craft – some are shredding planks of wood, others standing on beaten up bodyboards, while those who are on surfboards might be missing a fin or two. But it’s also because there’s a lot of steeze on display, though the style is not immediately recognisable from other surf breaks.

Arthur Bourbon, a French filmmaker and professional surfer – whose latest documentary We The Surfers shines a light on this thriving, embryonic scene – puts this down to the remoteness of the location and a lack of internet access.

“Today with smartphones, everything is globalised,” he says. ​“We all dress the same from Indonesia and Mexico, to Paris and Amsterdam. We all like to eat smashed avocado…”

But in Robertsport, he suggests that because locals haven’t spent hours watching surfing online, they haven’t adopted the usual codes and styles of the sport. ​“They didn’t know what was cool, what you should do with your knees, how you should look – they just wrote their own book on it, and that created a really raw and instinctive style,” he says, comparing it to children dancing. ​“They just feel the rhythm and go with it.”

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Arthur first visited Robertsport in 2018 with fellow pro-surfer Damien Castera. He turned the resulting footage from that trip into Water Get No Enemy – the title inspired by the classic Fela Kuti song – a documentary about the first generation of Liberian surfers, over 30 of whom had either been child soldiers or refugees in the country’s last civil war, which ended in 2003, or their children.

The film had a huge impact. An early edit prompted a group of Swiss surfers who were already shipping bikes to West Africa, to set up Provide the Slide: an NGO which collects unwanted surfboards from Europe and sends them to Liberia (they now ship to seven other west African countries including Senegal and Sierra Leone). 

As more boards arrived on the beaches, a Canadian NGO called Universal Outreach, based in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, got involved and set up Robertsport Surf Club to support this growing community of locals who wanted to take up surfing. Part surf shack, part cultural hub, they wanted to create a place where kids could just be kids, and given the region’s history, that in itself symbolised hope for a better life, explains Arthur.

“These are people who grew up with nothing,” he says. ​“No food, electricity, access to education or healthcare, let alone a sport like surfing, which you need expensive gear to take part in. But they’re super positive and happy – it’s a good reminder of how lucky we are in the West. We shouldn’t take that for granted.” 

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Universal Outreach helps communities build businesses by providing skill training and equipment, but they don’t have any economic interest in the business. From the start, the NGO said the surf club – which opened in 2022 – had to generate income and be sustainable in the long term, otherwise as soon as donations from Western people stopped, it would fall apart.

With the community, they helped plan the project in different stages starting with the surf club, surf rental and a restaurant, and then adding a little platform where visiting surfers could stay in basic, camp-like accommodation.

“Universal Outreach is smart about it,” says Arthur. ​“They make sure it’s well managed and only intervene when there’s a need, perhaps to get a cook some training in the city. They now offer scholarships for the youth in the village, so if they want to be part of the surf club and have a board to use, they have to go to school.”

Some of the adults in the community took some convincing, as they associated the ocean as a place where children drowned or went missing. But little by little, they’ve come on board.

• Read next: Photos capturing the invisible scars of Liberia’s civil war

For Arthur, making a film that sparked genuine positive change is ​“the biggest kind of achievement a filmmaker can have”, so when Universal Outreach suggested he make a follow-up film, to tell the story of how the locals are doing and the growing ecosystem around the surf club, he was keen. We The Surfers is the result.

One of the biggest shifts he’s witnessed since those early trips to Robertsport is that there are now women surfers in the water.

“When we went before, there were only eight to 10 boards in the village, so obviously they would be used by the big guys, or maybe a few kids would get to ride them at the end of the session,” he says. But now as there is far more accessible surf equipment, including bigger and more stable boards, it’s opened the sport up to greater sections of the community, namely women and kids.

“Providing access to surfing is an amazing way to empower women,” Arthur continues. ​“As we say in the movie, Liberia is a super tough place to be a woman – they leave school super young, female genital mutilation is a big problem, they get married and pregnant at 15 or 16, they have to do a lot of housekeeping, to take care of their brothers and sisters – and they don’t get to do any sport or have fun, unlike the boys.”

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But when they’re in the water, they’re part of the surf community and equal to the men, says Arthur. ​“In fact, they’re doing something that 99% of the men in the country are not able to do, as they’re afraid of the water. And the women are super proud of that. Women like Butterfly and Faith – they can swim and take big waves.”

One of the hopes Arthur has from We The Surfers is that it will encourage more surfers to visit the country. At the moment, tourism in Robertsport is still very much in its infancy, though you get the odd European stopping by as they drive from the top to the bottom of Africa. During his last trip he met an old French couple in a Land Rover Defender and a German guy on a motorbike doing exactly that, but most of the visitors are expats living in the country’s capital Monrovia, an hour’s drive away.

“It’s a little paradise,” says Arthur. ​“There’s a cool surf club, it’s clean and beautiful, and the roads are better now.” Liberia is a poor country, but Arthur says he’s found the town to be safe and friendly. On his first visit the only guest house was in the village but now you can stay at the beach, right where the wave breaks, which is far better.

And the wave itself? ​“It’s a super nice wave,” says Arthur. ​“I don’t know if I got lucky, but on my first trip it was a genuinely world class wave and on the second trip, the forecast was predicting super small waves, but we actually had chest-high, perfectly glassy waves.”

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As the surf club grows, one of the trickier things to deal with is expectation management amongst the wider community, Arthur says, as unfortunately the club can’t provide apprenticeship jobs for everyone. ​“It’s a big topic,” he says, ​“And something that Universal Outreach has to take care of. Who gets these opportunities? The older surfers who’ve been there the longest or the younger ones to keep them on track with school? It’s a challenging project with a lot of expectations.” 

Some of the surfers even ask him if he can take them back to France. ​“Life is tough, and they see the surf club happening and think there is a lot of money involved, or that we’re making tonnes of money with the movies. I understand why they’d think that, but it’s a passion project for us,” he says.

The surf club will continue to evolve as more and more NGOs get involved. They now run local environmental initiatives and Waves for Change – who run surf therapy workshops in South Africa – will train some surfers to run their programme in Robertsport, while the ISA (International Surf Association) has sent their instructors to train surfers in the village to be teachers for tourists.

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One of the stranger accusations that Arthur has had since making the films, is that Robertsport might turn into the next Bali – overdeveloped, with big hotels, owned by foreign investors who leech money out of the country. 

How does he respond to that? ​“Liberia is still recovering from the last civil war and youth unemployment is very high. Surf tourism is just getting going and it’s going pretty slowly,” he says. He points out that while it’s sad to see the negative environmental impacts caused by development in Bali, it’s also worth noting that the local population there are no longer starving and have access to education in a way they didn’t before tourism.

“If surf tourism can evolve it’s going to be really positive for the community of Robertsport. The land where the surf club is was given to them by the government – it’s locally owned and locally run. And seeing the opportunities these kids are getting now, it feels like a pretty good start.” 

We The Surfers is now streaming worldwide. To watch the film & find out more about the project go to We The Surfers’ official website.

Sam Haddad is a freelance writer who writes the newsletter Climate & Board Sports.

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