No 37: Roots of Africa

Tribesmen in Ghana with a form of paddle board called a padua, circa 1921

West African nations, including Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Sao Tome, fish in the sea, lakes and rivers from boats, canoes and sometimes even paddle boards hewn from large exotic trees in the jungles fringing the coast. These doughty seafarers have had to ride surf for centuries to make a safe return to shore. Their boat building and surf riding skills would, like Hawaii, be a natural foundation for the evolution of surf craft.

In recent correspondence, Joel Smith, executive member of the Surfing Heritage Foundation in California, says “it may have been a transitory event that this explorer (Alexander) happened upon” because there “is no surf culture in Ghana today”. However, the connection between West Africa and surfing has been made over the years, if you saw Endless Summer, for instance, and a 2007 article about Sao Tome by Sam George in the Surfer’s Journal. 

In South Africa, indigenous people do not have a tradition of boat building. They have fished on foot, either by trapping or spearing fish, collecting shellfish or diving for kreef. There are few large trees in our Afromontane forest, which comprise mostly small to medium-sized dune and riverine trees. Our coastline is uncompromising: rugged and dangerous. West Africa, with its long sandy beaches and tropical palms, is thousands of miles from the wild, southern storms that pummel the jagged South African coast. The Wild Coast is called that for a reason.

The French article in Notes Africaines

Smith sent me an article in French from the April 1949 issue of Notes Africaines. The writer tries to explain scientifically how surfing is possible, with diagrams. “The possibility of ‘surf riding’ is realised more easily if the angle of the front of the wave to the horizontal is at its steepest in water that is not very deep.”

Right.

Closer to home, any resident of Surf City (Durban) will tell you that the seeds of surfing were sown by lifesavers along the beachfront in the late 1920s.

However, there is evidence that surfing began in Cape Town. Apart from the story and photographs published in the Argus of a woman called Heather Price surfing with US marines at Muizenberg after the First World War, there is a fascinating reference by Lord Frederic Hamilton in 1921. In his book Here, There and Everywhere, he wrote: 

“When Capetown swelters in heat, Muizenberg is generally ten degrees cooler, though, most obligingly, the water of the Indian Ocean at Muizenberg is ten degrees warmer than that of the Atlantic at Capetown, owing to the Antarctic current setting in to the latter.”

Heather Price up and riding in Muizenberg, 1918!

“At Muizenberg we found half the population of South Africa in the water in front of the biggest bathing-house I have ever seen. The handling of the surf-plank requires some care, for it is a short, heavy board, and in the back-wash is apt to fly back on the unwary, hitting them on their food-receptacle, and effectually (to use a schoolboy term) "bagging their wind."

“You walk out in the shoal water up to your shoulders, and as a big sea comes in, you throw yourself chest foremost on to your plank, and are then carried along on the top of the roller at the pace of a leisurely train (an Isle of Wight train), to be deposited with a bang on the sandy beach. It is really capital fun, but alas for my flower-wreathed South Sea Island maidens!

“Excluding our own party I only saw many amply waisted ladies disporting themselves staidly in the water, and the surrounding cinemas and tea-shops might have been at Brighton, except that they were far smarter and much better kept.”

It’s hard to tell the year, but he refers to meeting General Louis Botha, who died in 1919 so it must have been some time before that.

Older Muizenberg residents will tell you that an Australian troopship docked in Table Bay in 1914. A soldier shaped a wooden board and went surfing at Surfer's Corner. The activity became all the rage. Even Agatha Christie surfed there in 1922.

Peter Wright of the Corner Surf Shop has some fascinating old boards on display to keep a small chunk of our history alive.

Heather Price surfing with US Marine circa 1918, Muizenberg, Cape Town.