The untold story of surfing’s ancient African roots

If you’ve ever watched the clas­sic surf movie The End­less Sum­mer, you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing that surf­ing was first intro­duced to West Africa by a cou­ple of perky Cal­i­for­ni­ans who arrived on Laba­di Beach in Ghana in the ear­ly 1960s. A myth, rich in white sav­iour-nar­ra­tive, that has remained the dom­i­nant take in con­ven­tion­al surf cul­ture ever since.

Yet, as the new doc­u­men­tary Wade in the Water: A Jour­ney into Black Surf­ing & Aquat­ic Cul­ture explores, surf­ing has exist­ed for a thou­sand years in Africa. Accord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Kevin Daw­son, who appears in the film, the first writ­ten account came in 1640 when a Ger­man mer­chant-adven­tur­er described how par­ents would ​“tie their chil­dren to boards and throw them into the water”. While in 1834, the British explor­er James Alexan­der wrote of ​“boys swim­ming in the sea with light boards under their stom­achs” who would wait ​“for a surf and [come] rolling like a cloud on top of it”.

Accord­ing to surf lore, waves were first rid­den by Poly­ne­sians, with the Hawai­ian Duke Kahanamoku famous­ly pop­u­lar­is­ing the sport in Cal­i­for­nia. But if wave rid­ing devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly on the shores of Africa, why has the lega­cy of Black surf­ing been over­looked for so long?

It was a ques­tion that both­ered David Mes­fin, a Black surfer and cre­ative direc­tor, so he decid­ed to make a film about it. David was born in Ethiopia, but adopt­ed as a child, grow­ing up in the small town of St Augus­tine in Flori­da, where he was first exposed to surf­ing at 14. ​“I fell in love with it right away,” he says.

There wasn’t a large com­mu­ni­ty of Black surfers – David thinks there were prob­a­bly five at most – but he loved the escape from the every­day that surf­ing gave him and when he lat­er moved to Long Beach, Cal­i­for­nia to study, he kept surf­ing, falling in with a bunch of new surfers at near­by Hunt­ing­ton Beach.

In 2010, a friend told him about an event being held by the new­ly formed Black Surfers Col­lec­tive, who fea­ture in the film, which he attend­ed. ​“It was the first time I saw a col­lec­tive of Black and BIPOC peo­ple com­ing out and surf­ing togeth­er – it was eye-open­ing and real­ly impact­ed my life,” he says.

David joined the group, attend­ing reg­u­lar meet ups, and get­ting involved with teach­ing kids how to surf and learn­ing more about the his­to­ry of Black surf cul­ture. The death of George Floyd, at the hands of a white police offi­cer in May 2020, affect­ed him a lot, and he decid­ed to deal with that pain and anger in a cre­ative way by start­ing work on Wade in the Water. Its title is tak­en from the African Amer­i­can Under­ground Rail­road song, which Har­ri­et Tub­man is believed to have sung to warn slaves to get into the water so they wouldn’t be sniffed by dogs and captured.

“It’s almost like the civ­il rights move­ment, when a lot of artists came out of that and expressed them­selves through music, art and film,” he says. ​“This movie is an expres­sion of how I felt and a way to find some sort of heal­ing through telling this story.”

Wade in the Water began as an art project, with David tak­ing por­traits of Black surfers, but then he came across the work of Pro­fes­sor Daw­son, who had exten­sive­ly researched aquat­ic cul­ture in the African dias­po­ra, and Afro­surf, a book cel­e­brat­ing African surf cul­ture by the African surf brand Mami Wata, which Daw­son pro­vid­ed insight for, and switched to mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary to dive deep­er into the topic.

David stress­es his film isn’t about con­test­ing the ori­gins of surf­ing in Poly­ne­sia or Hawaii. ​“They have embraced the cul­ture of surf­ing and passed it on to all of us,” he says. ​“I’m grate­ful for that but I’m also grate­ful to be shar­ing these oth­er impor­tant sto­ries viewed through the Black expe­ri­ence – it makes surf­ing a rich sto­ry for all of us.”

I ask David why he thinks Black surfers have been so rarely seen in the sport’s cul­tur­al his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly pre-George Floyd, when few brands remote­ly engaged with the Black surf expe­ri­ence or spon­sored Black surfers. ​“Cor­po­ra­tions are cor­po­ra­tions,” he says, ​“They go where the mon­ey is.” Though as the doc­u­men­tary points out, there is clear­ly an eco­nom­ic case for invest­ing in Black surfers today, giv­en the increas­ing­ly high par­tic­i­pa­tion rates amongst the community.

The film weaves his­tor­i­cal accounts of surf­ing and aquat­ic cul­ture in West Africa, and seg­re­ga­tion around surf­ing and pub­lic swim­ming in Jim Crow-era Amer­i­ca, with con­tem­po­rary surf footage and inter­views with a host of Black surfers includ­ing Sele­ma Masekela, one of the co-founders of the African surf brand Mami Wata, Tony Cor­ley, who found­ed the Black Surf­ing Asso­ci­a­tion in 1975, Sharon Schaf­fer, the first Black female pro surfer, and Lizelle Jack­son, who co-found­ed Col­or the Water.

As a woman who surfs and has often felt like I’m tres­pass­ing on a sport that pure­ly exists for young white dudes, I was heart­ened by how many women are includ­ed in the film. ​“It was very impor­tant for me to fea­ture a lot of women surfers,” says David, who want­ed to over­turn the gen­der stereo­types that say black men can’t swim and black women don’t get their hair wet.

“[In West Africa] women were great swim­mers his­tor­i­cal­ly, bet­ter swim­mers even than the men. And it’s so pow­er­ful to let women know this is part of your roots and your his­to­ry and to tell the younger gen­er­a­tion that, so when they pad­dle out, they respect women in the water.”

He describes a 1640 account of a moth­er teach­ing her son to catch a wave and says there was an eco­nom­ic imper­a­tive for moth­ers to do this. ​“As Kevin Dawson’s research shows, Ghana had an aquat­ic cul­ture, and a teenag­er would have had to learn to go through the waves with surf canoes and boats to go fishing.”

Visu­al­ly, Wade in the Water looks dif­fer­ent to reg­u­lar surf movies, and not just because all the fea­tured surfers are Black. ​“I have my palette on how I like to tell sto­ries and I didn’t real­ly need a ref­er­ence point from [main­stream] surf cul­ture,” says David. ​“This was a nar­ra­tive that need­ed to be told through an African Amer­i­can lens. That makes it like a new lan­guage that oth­er peo­ple can look at and be inspired to do their own ver­sion of their story.”

For encour­ag­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of Black surfers in the US, and cru­cial­ly also in Africa, to take this nar­ra­tive and run with it is David’s pri­ma­ry hope for the movie. As the founder of Mami Wata says in the film: ​“There is this mas­sive explo­sion of Sele­ma Masekela and African surf cul­ture. It has a dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cy and sig­na­ture and rhythm and it’s 100% African. Peo­ple say: ​‘I knew the waves were great in these places, but oh they’re doing it there and they’re doing it their way.’”

David is excit­ed by thriv­ing surf scenes in Ghana, Sene­gal, Moroc­co and South Africa, which he hopes will con­tin­ue to devel­op along their own path with­out hav­ing West­ern surf dog­ma forced on them, new African surf brands includ­ing Mami Wata and Ban­tu Wax, and the rich surf tal­ent com­ing through, such as Cherif Fall from Sene­gal and Joshe Faulkn­er from South Africa, who fea­ture in the film. Mikey Feb­ru­ary, also from South Africa, was the first Black African to make the World Tour in 2018. In the future, David thinks we’ll see more Black pro surfers com­ing from Africa than the US as Black surfers have bet­ter access to the ocean there.

“It’s a sport that requires a dai­ly reg­i­men of going out pad­dling, surf­ing and embrac­ing the cul­ture and com­mu­ni­ty,” he says. ​“In Amer­i­ca, it’s so hard to be Black and have access to the beach, where­as in Ghana, Sene­gal, Moroc­co and South Africa these kids can get in the water day in and day out, so they’re able to build their skill sets.”

Though he con­cedes the finan­cial bar­ri­ers would still be lim­it­ing for many surfers based in Africa when it came to hav­ing the funds to trav­el to con­tests all around the world. ​“Ide­al­ly a brand would embrace an indi­vid­ual and cov­er that,” he says. ​“And then he or she could break into the World Surf­ing League and have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to become the next Kel­ly Slater or whoever.”

Reclaim­ing and cel­e­brat­ing the thou­sand-year-old tra­di­tion of Black surf­ing and cir­cling the sport back to its African roots in the process. As the film’s pow­er­ful clos­ing sequence, slow-mo surf­ing to a spe­cial­ly writ­ten poem by spo­ken word artist Sek­ou Andrew, says: ​“We are the orig­i­nal bod­ies of water… the water wades in us.”

The full ver­sion of Wade in the Water: A Jour­ney into Black Surf­ing & Aquat­ic Cul­ture direct­ed by David Mes­fin is avail­able to stream now.

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

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