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THE FIRST FRONTIER, THE LAST FRONTIER
Why Africa remains surfing’s least-known continent
By Greg Alder
(Surfing Magazine, December 2008)

One chilly, late autumn afternoon I was headed to the village to buy milk when a student ran up to me with a complicated smile. “They took Motsilisi, sir. They’re going to marry her.”

I walked through the high school’s gate to where a few more girls were standing on a path and looking off to the north. In the distance, there was the long, flat top of Qeme Plateau, crowned in orange sandstone. But that was far off; you can see forever in Africa. The girls were looking into the rolling fields of corn and sorghum below us. Yellow and stiff as old men this time of year, the stalks rustled in the breeze.

Among the fields sprang a vision of tangled blankets and appendages. I focused on it and untangled it to be two guys wearing blankets and yanking on the arms of a girl.

As the girl wriggled, one of the guys lifted up his molamu and hit the girl with it. I heard the snap of the thick wood stick on the girl’s body. She yelped. It was true: Motsilisi was being kidnapped for marriage.

I stepped onto a nearby termite mound to get a higher perspective -- and to decide. Should I try to intervene, or do I let them take her? This kidnapping-for-marriage practice, called chobeliso in Sesotho, was an acceptable way of securing a wife here. Two of my students had been married that way last year. But despite that being the local way, could I just stand there and watch it happen?

As if having heard my internal debate, one of the girls on the path looked up at me. “If you get involved,” she said, “they will shoot you.”

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I had been living in Lesotho, alone in a small village, for over two years at that point and the place still baffled me. I was never sure what was going to happen around me on a given day, let alone my proper role in the action. Living in Africa, I’d found, was like living in another world.
Landlocked Lesotho was no more puzzling than the African coast — and there is a lot of African coast. Tens of thousands of miles of shoreline, holding off two oceans and a sea. Thirty African countries are surfable -- more than any other continent. At the same time, there are – by far – fewer surfers here than any other wave-rich region.

South Africa, Morocco and to a lesser extent Namibia all have established surfing communities. Otherwise, you’ll find small local crews of Africans — as in, a dozen maybe — in a few places, like Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, then in each major coastal city there’s a handful of expatriates —oil industry employees, non-governmental organization workers, international school teachers —who ride waves. But the majority of Africa’s coastline is totally unsurfed.

Occasionally, a single African, taught by a traveling surfer long ago and left with a board, will be living with most of his entire country’s surf to himself. This is Peggy, in southern Cameroon. In 1994, a French guy showed him how to surf — which might be why Peggy wears a little mustache — and gave him a 6’3”, which is now a foot shorter since the nose broke off long ago and peeled strips of fiberglass from the board’s bottom. But Peggy still makes some late drops and does turns in the beachbreak at Tara Plage, mostly by himself.

This all makes little sense. Wasn’t Africa the first surfing frontier when Bruce Brown and company showed us “the ultimate wave” at Cape St. Francis? Shouldn’t that vision of endless, shimmering right tubes have unleashed a battalion of surf exploration on the continent way back in 1964? Aside from finding the places right under their noses – like Jeffreys Bay – it didn’t. Then Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson took us to an amazing left point in Liberia during their forays in the early ’70s. “A set of waves—lines without end—wrapped, peeled and raced along … a mild offshore wind blew across the wave faces.” What then? A group went to Liberia last year and documented their trip in the pages of this magazine. Dan Malloy was among them, calling Robertsport “the most perfect sand point I’ve ever seen.” And yet the lineup they found was empty, save Alfred Lomax, a lone local surfer. No discovery — or even media coverage —it seems, has been able to turn Africa into a continent of surfers.

Maybe Africans just don’t want to surf. “Africans on the coast use the ocean to make a living, not for recreation,” said photographer, and longtime Africa sojourner, John Callahan. “Surfing in a western sense can seem laughable — an irrelevant recreational and athletic conceit based on self-indulgence and fashion. It has nothing to do with survival, and few people have the time or the energy.”

True, most Africans spend their days in physical labor whereas people from more developed nations usually work more sedentary jobs. We have machinery to do much of our labor. When an African adult comes back from the fields or fishing, he wants to relax, not exercise. He’s been exercising all day.

But that’s not to say Africans can’t surf. Mike Sternberg, a South African who drove and surfed with two of his friends all the way from Cape Town to Morocco last year, told me that one day while they were sitting on a beach in Cote d’Ivoire, they saw a local fisherman swimming in the water. He pushed an empty gas can into the first wave of a set before stroking into a second 6-foot wave himself. “He bodysurfed approximately 150 meters to the shore with a grace that had the kids on the rocks — and us — clapping and cheering. He stepped up onto the sand, grabbed the [gas can], and sprinted off to the village.” It turned out that his boat had run out of gas, and he had been dropped off to get some more.

If Africans don’t really care to play in the ocean, then what keeps the rest of us from playing in their waves? Must be the bad news. Stories of war and corruption and famine and disease rise out of Africa like smoke from an eternal fire. “Surfing in Africa has the sketch factor,” says Mike Losness, who happened to be in Senegal at the same time as Sternberg. “The sketch factor on land alone in West Africa is gnarly.” That’s when there is not all-out war going on. For decades, there have been civil wars in some of the African countries with the most surf potential. Angola recently spent 27 years fighting. And Mozambique was at war for almost two decades. The smoke has settled there for now, but recently, two countries we thought were stable lit up with violence: Kenya and Cote d'Ivoire.

When entire countries in Africa are not off limits due to war, travelers still have to deal with myriad other obstacles. The list of communicable diseases on the continent is long: malaria, hookworm, tuberculosis, typhoid, dengue fever, ebola, cholera, and the scourge of sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to just 10 percent of the world’s population but bears more than 70 percent of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases.

Then there’s the corruption. Police and border officials of some African countries are known to respond much more quickly when a little extra cash is thrown their way. And if you don’t have it? So much for getting where you want to go. When Sternberg and friends tried to leave Congo for Gabon, both sets of border guards demanded astronomic "departure" and "registration" fees. The Congolese guards wanted $125, while the Gabonese wanted an additional $65. That's a ton of money in Africa. (The average per capita income in Congo is less than $60 a month.) The surfers argued and dragged their feet until the guards showed aggression, at which point they paid. The border crossing ended up costing them about $75.

Finally, you have African roads. Not all roads in Africa are bad, but since Africans aren’t surfers and don’t even prefer to live near the ocean in many areas, most main roads are inland, with occasional offshoots to a single destination on the coast. Rarely do roads connect good surfing spots. Sternberg and his friends took a particularly bad track through the Gabonese rainforest on their trip. The road was overgrown and unmaintained. They had to drive over fallen logs and get out constantly to hack off branches. They averaged about 10 km per hour. Then they came upon the ultimate mud puddle. There was no way around it. They decided to rush it and made it halfway through before the front end of their Land Rover became stuck in waist-deep mud and the car began to fill with murky water. They tried the winch; it dragged the hood up a bit and died. Until dusk they tried jacking the car up and sticking things under the tires to no avail. In a clearing not far away, they made camp for the night. The next day they struggled again for hours to free the vehicle before discovering the battery had gone dead anyway. Sternberg eventually walked out 32 kilometers, at which point he got cell phone reception and called for help.

That sucked, but driving those Gabonese roads also got them to a left point where they found glassy barrels to themselves. You earn your waves in Africa.

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I was prepared to earn some waves of my own. The South African coast was only a day’s travel from where I lived in Lesotho, and I had my sights set on a stretch of a relatively undeveloped part of the country’s Eastern Cape Province. Roads were especially poor around there, and I didn’t have a car anyway, so I decided that I’d taxi to a point on the coast and then walk in search of waves from there. I paid a local guy to hike with me. Senzo knew a little English, which he spoke in the same rhythm of isiXhosa, his mother tongue. The last word of every sentence was emphasized. So when he insisted on carrying my board for me he said, “I will carry the BOARD.”

On our first afternoon, we came out of a forest, where we saw two dogs tearing out the entrails of a dead cow whose guts looked like blue-green balloons, and descended into a small valley where a sandy cove came into view. The cove was flanked by rocky headlands and fed by a river. A wave appeared in the cove and pitched near the rocks on the cove’s south end, running hollow and steadily right toward the rivermouth. It was a big wave. I stopped on the footbridge over the river and considered riding it. We hadn’t seen any other surfers. In fact, we wouldn’t for the entire 40 kilometer hike.

The solitude of the wave reminded me of a previous surf trip in South Africa. About a year earlier, an acquaintance named Grant had offered to take me and a friend to an out-of-the-way spot in his truck. We pulled up to a bay, fed by a river, with a rocky headland to the south — very similar to the set-up I’d find later while hiking with Senzo — and Grant walked onto the rocks to get a closer look. He picked something up and tossed it my way. “This isn’t what you want to see. But that’s why it’s uncrowded here.” The shark tooth was not that big, but it was unmistakably a shark tooth. Just the month prior, a surfer was attacked at a point not far from there.

The waves were running fast from the rocks into the sandy bay without sections. It was flawless and empty. I followed Grant into the water. So clear I could see the mosquito bite on my ankle, the water revealed every bit of life in the ocean around me. I couldn’t decide whether or not that was a good thing. Balls of bait fish migrated by, with bigger fish pouncing on them, and the biggest pod of dolphins I’d ever seen came through. The dolphins were momentarily comforting — where they are sharks aren’t. But then every rock below took on the shape of a shark’s shadow.
After an hour, two other guys paddled out. They ended up making it even harder for me to remove my concentration from the shark threat since they both had bulky black devices on their ankles. “The thing sends out electro-magnetic waves that will shock any shark within a 20-meter radius,” one of them told me. I’d take a wave and ride it all the way to shore, then run up the beach and jump off the rocks and paddle directly to one of the shark-shocker guys, keeping within his radius.

Back with Senzo, on the bridge, looking at the distant wave, all I could think of was not the backside barrels I might get, but the sharks that might get me. Senzo probably couldn’t swim well enough to help me out of the water. There wasn’t even a village close by.

Senzo asked, "We can GO?"

We went — away from the hollow, empty waves.

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Africa is a wild place, making it unpredictable. Back in Lesotho on that autumn day, as I stood on the termite mound, as if out of nowhere a dozen male students came running through the school gate yelling, “Let’s go!” Two male teachers followed them, one of whom waved for me to come along. We all entered the fields like a pack of dogs in chase.

We tramped through the stiff stalks, hopped over ditches, and then Motsilisi came fleeing past us, back toward school, moaning, trying to refasten the blanket that had been torn from her waist. Only one of the kidnappers was in sight now and we tracked him down and encircled him. The boys then picked up rocks and began to throw them at him. Tumelo, a 12th grade boy, heaved a rock the size of a football into the back of the kidnapper’s head. His body went limp and he fell to the ground face first.

The school boys, always so docile in class, then didn’t stop throwing rocks either. I thought I would see a man stoned to death. Blood was spilling from the wound on the kidnapper’s head and coursing over his ear. He made an attempt to get onto all fours, but the mob wasn’t finished. Tumelo stepped up to him, now armed with the kidnapper’s own molamu, and released a heavy blow onto his back. This dropped the kidnapper prostrate once again.

“We’re going to the chief,” Tumelo then said, and the boys all propped the kidnapper onto his feet and pushed him toward the village.

Out of Africa, always something new — so goes the ancient Latin adage. Just when I thought I knew how things worked, I got surprised. Just when I accepted the fact that girls get kidnapped for marriage in Lesotho, a group of students go and beat a guy half to death for trying to kidnap a girl. What will the future hold for surfing in Africa? How can one even begin to guess?

I’d wager that the sharks aren’t going anywhere. I’d also bet that large groups of Africans aren’t going to become fascinated by the act of riding waves for fun anytime soon either; they haven’t cared about it for thousands of years. But for traveling surfers, and the local surfing populations that already exist, some areas of the continent seem ripe for exploitation, in the best sense of that word.

Mozambique is having more roads tarred and more areas cleared of landmines. It is politically steady and next to Africa’s largest and richest group of surfers, the South Africans. Mozambique is quickly becoming for South Africans what Baja is for Californians. Tripping up through Moz, as they call it, doesn’t require a visa for South Africans and it has a coastline of over 2,000 kilometers. Did I mention that the water is always boardshort temperature, too?

But beyond Mozambique’s own evolution, the changes inside the heads of South African surfers might be even more important. After one trip there, a South African friend remarked that he had found good waves and, with some surprise and relief, that traveling through was “not as bad as one may have expected.”

West Africa is likely to remain relatively empty since cost, crime and extreme poverty keep much of it off the “must surf” list. But North Africa may find its lineups growing with visitors. It’s close to the many surfers just above the Mediterranean.

“During a long time people were thinking there was no surf in that little sea,” says Frenchman Erwan Simon. “But now we realize that there is a big potential.”

Some nice pointbreaks have been found in Tunisia, and Egypt already has a crew of locals. Antony Colas, editor of the World Stormrider Guides, says, “Driving the ‘Kurnish’ [coastal road] on a good swell makes Alexandria look like it should be one of the top 10 surf cities in the world. Despite a lack of consistency, Alex has good reefbreaks and beaches. And Egyptian hospitality is not a legend.”

However long greater Africa remains the last surfing frontier, we can be sure that those who venture there will find much more than a few memorable rides. As Callahan put it, “Any idiot can buy a ticket, get off the plane, and be surfing good waves the same day in Bali, Costa Rica, or Puerto Rico. Africa is a hundred times harder and more expensive to get there, find waves, and actually ride them. But when you do, the reward always outweighs the risk.”