Glen Thompson
HISTORY was made on Saturdaywhen the
Waves for Change Khayelitsha surfing contest
was held at Monwabisi Beach on the
northern shores of False Bay. A twist of
geography, history and a surfing development
programme for black youth had led
to this historic moment.
It looked much like any other amateur
surf contest. A Surfing South Africabranded
gazebo above the surf zone was
the judges’ podium and the epicentre of
the event, sponsors’ flags dotted the beach,
and loudspeakers pushed out house beats.
Yet this was not a “Big Surfing” happening
but a community initiative. The commentary
by surf coach and co-founder of
Waves for Change, Apish Tshetsha, was in
Xhosa, it was the first contest the surfers
had entered, and many of the parents and
community leaders on the beach were witnessing
their children surfing for the first
time.
The event was run by Isiqalo’s Waves
for Change programme, a youth development
NGO working with at-risk communities
from coastal townships. It was a celebration
of the one-year anniversary of
their Khayelitsha programme working
with schools to provide pupils with HIV
awareness and youth leadership development.
Surfing is offered as an alternative
to the street and gangsterism.
The surf contest was run as a tag-team
format, de-emphasising the competitive
individualism of surfing. Two teams of
five Monwabisi (“Monwa”) surfers from
Khayelitsha competed against two teams
from Masiphumelele (“Masi”). The Masi
surfers were from the Waves for Change
Masiphumelele programme and surf at
Muizenberg.
The judging rules worked to score
surfers irrespective of their ability – many
of the surfers had been surfing for a year
or less – and saw two surfers at a time enter
the surf to catch two waves within six minutes.
Once they had caught their waves,
they exited the surf to tag the next team
member. The two teams with the top accumulated
scores then surfed off in the final
for the trophy. The contest was won by the
Monwa A team over Masi A team, showing
that local knowledge of surf conditions
was an advantage.
In the surf, news and social media, this
contest was overshadowed by other surfing
contests held on the same day. The
Billabong Junior Series at Long Beach and
the Xpression Wave Classic at Muizenberg
offered the surfing community examples
of mainstream shortboard surfing and the
newer SUP surfing. A surfing development
contest at a more remote Cape Town beach
was off the radar.
It may be that black surfing is less surprising
today because many black surfers
are seen in the Cape Town waves, in contests
and in the surf media, compared with
the 1980s and 1990s when surfing was
regarded as a white (and male) sport. This
was because of the racial segregation of
beaches under apartheid and the years of
transition when surfing remained outside
South Africa’s sports transformation focus
on soccer, cricket and rugby.
Despite a long history in Cape Town
dating to the 1960s, as well as links between
surfing and the struggle for non-racial
sports during apartheid through surfing
clubs and surfing development programmes
in the 1990s and 2000s, it was
through the film documentaries of bigwave
surfer Cass Collier, Taking Back the
Waves (2005) and longboarder Kwezi Qika,
Black People Don’t Swim (2008), and then
the feature film Otelo Burning (2011), that
local black surfing began to shift mainstream
local surf culture away from the
whiteness of its Californian roots (despite
Hawaii being the birthplace of surfing).
The history of surfing in Cape Town is
one factor pushing this Khayelitsha event
to the margins; another is its historical
geography. Monwabisi Beach is located
across the sand dunes from Khayelitsha’s
Kuyasa community. It is about 20km east
along Baden Powell Drive from the popular
Surfers’ Corner at Muizenberg.
The iconic Endless Summer film scene
of surfers running over pristine sand
dunes to discover perfect waves is not what
is to be found when arriving at Monwabisi.
Expectations of a place to escape from the
city into the waves are dashed by the
reminder of apartheid’s past and our postapartheid
present. The sandy beach to the
east is broken by sandstone outcrops and
a cliff to the west. A rocky breakwater
offers a small wave, reforming along an
inshore sandbank with an incoming tide.
Despite its proximity to Cape Town’s
southern suburbs, Monwabisi is not a
Cape Town surfing destination – the waves
of the southern peninsula or Muizenberg
are preferred.
Today, Monwabisi remains underserviced,
bordering the urban sprawl and the
sea, its amenities aimed at the working
class. The pavilion was dilapidated and the
tidal pool empty of children swimming at
the weekend. In winter the beach is quiet,
unlike peak season when thousands of
people visit the beach over New Year.
The Monwabisi Beach resort was built
in 1986 as a recreational facility for African
and coloured residents of Khayelitsha and
Mitchells Plain during the latter days of
beach apartheid. Beach apartheid ended
formally in November 1989, predating the
repeal of the Reservation of Separate
Amenities Act in 1990, although its social
effects persisted into the years of transition
as racialised practices at the beach
and in the surf.
One legacy is that the political stigma of
beach apartheid has acted as a cultural
deterrent to going to the beach for many of
the older generation. It is within this history
of exclusion that cultural mythologies
have perpetuated into the present in
African township communities, where the
ocean is seen as a place of threat and not
play.
Yet leisured play was central to the
design of Monwabisi as a beach resort in
the apartheid years. The tidal pool, pavilion
and public amenities provided a space
for safe swimming and picnicking, while
the beach itself remained dangerous for
ocean bathing. The Monwabisi Lifesaving
Club was established in 1987 to provide
beach safety for bathers.
In the early 1990s, in an attempt to
reduce the tidal pool’s exposure to wave
action and backwash, a rock breakwater
was built. While seemingly creating a
safer beach, the opposite occurred, resulting
in rip currents generated by the longitudinal
drift that have led to numerous
drownings.
Beach safety was top of mind for City of
Cape Town officials from 2005 to 2009 when
the Shark Spotter programme was run by
the lifesavers at Monwabisi Beach during
the busy summer season. While resourcing
constraints led to the closing of the initial
Shark Spotter programme at the
beach, a call by Waves for Change led to the
reinstating of the Shark Spotters programme
in December 2012 operated by
spotters who came through the Waves for
Change surf coach programme.
Despite efforts over the years by the
City of Cape Town, Monwabisi Beach
remains an underutilised amenity catering
for the local community.
William Finnegan in Crossing the Line,
his 1982 memoir of living, teaching and
surfing in Cape Town during the antiapartheid
education boycotts, had the following
to say of the change in South
Africa: “In a situation like South Africa’s,
history is no lifeless palimpsest; it is the
chart of possibilities.” For surfers in
Khayelitsha the “chart of possibilities”
took time to be realised and it is this surf
contest that offers a view of the possibilities
of surfing as a vehicle for social
change at the post-apartheid beach. In
Xhosa monwabisi means “bringing joy”,
which seems to equate to what surfers call
being “stoked” after surfing. It was this joy
that I observed among the surfers at Monwabisi
Beach that Saturday.
. Thompson is a PhD candidate in history
at Stellenbosch University researching
gender and politics in the history of South
African surfing culture.
He is a keen surfer.
His blog is at writingsurfinghistory.org.za.
For more on Waves for Change, see wavesforchange.org