Surfing existed and was independently developed from Senegal to Angola long before westerners arrived.
When American director Bruce Brown landed in Africa to film segments of the classic 1966 surf documentary ‘The Endless Summer’ in Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria. His thoughts towards what he viewed as virgin territory hadn’t moved much from colonial times:
Brown boasted of discovering “surf that had never been ridden before”— even though, in his own footage, you can see children of Ga ethnicity clearly using traditional paddle-boards.
This attitude typifies the “intentional erasure” of African culture, often just swept under the rug.
The first known account of surfing was written during the 1640s in what is now Ghana and was independently developed from Senegal to Angola.
German merchant-adventurer Michael Hemmersam provided this first record as he tried describing a new sport. Believing he was watching children learn to swim, he wrote parents “tie their children to boards and throw them into the water.”
In 1834, while in Accra, Ghana, James Alexander wrote: “From the beach, meanwhile, might be seen boys swimming into the sea, with light boards under their stomachs. They waited for a surf, and came rolling like a cloud on top of it.”
There are also accounts of body surfing. In 1887, an English traveler watched, as an African man named Sua, at home “in his element, dancing up & down & doing fancy performances with the rollers, as if he had lived since his infancy as much in the water as on dry land.” As a wave approached, “he turns his face to the shore & rising on to the top of it he strikes out vigorously with it towards land, & is carried dashing in at a tremendous speed after the same manner as the [surf-canoes] beach themselves.”
Surfing was an intergenerational transmission of wisdom that transformed surf-zones into social & cultural places.
By the 1700s, enslaved Africans were recorded surfing & surf-canoeing in South Carolina down to Brazil.
New book Afrosurf captures Africa’s overlooked surf culture.
