Surfing, the beach and lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa

May 26, 2023 ~ Glen Thompson

I recently had a chapter published on surfing during COVID times in South Africa. The chapter is titled: ‘Dreaming of “Level Free”: Lockdown and the Cultural Politics of Surfing during the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Africa‘ and is part of the volume Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times: COVID Assemblages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) edited by David Andrews, Holly Thorpe and Joshua Newman. This collection draws on scholarly research from across the globe and “highlights the global and local inadequacies of the sporting/physical cultural order exposed by COVID-19.”

The abstract for my chapter (set out below) draws attention to my interest in tracing the cultural, social and political factors that shaped surfer attitudes to beach bans during the lockdown in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa:

The South African government implemented a hard lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One lockdown measure was a national beach ban which received national attention due to anti-lockdown protests at three beaches on May 5, 2020. In contextualising these beach protests within the period of March to August 2020, this chapter critically examines how surfing’s historical non-conformist values and ideas of freedom shaped surfer social attitudes in COVID times. Protesting surfers’ desire to return to the waves is read as the making of a politics of refusal. This refusal to acquiesce to the state’s regulations was the most visible response of surfers to the lockdown and shaped national tropes about surfer entitlement entangled with South African surfing’s history of whiteness and middle-class privilege. Refusalist responses, however, were contested within the South African surfing community as alternative configurations of the relationship between surfing and the lockdown were also expressed.

While my chapter is limited to the early to mid-2020 period, my original thoughts were to consider and compare those periods when a beach ban was in place due to lockdown rules for the 2020 and 2021 periods. I still hope to undertake that research, using this chapter here as a starting point. Another theme I was keen to explore further is the poetics of surfer responses to the beach bans as seen in artistic, cartoon and literary representations of the experience of surfing during lockdown.

History lesson: the history of surfing in SA

April 12, 2022 ~ Glen Thompson

On 4 February 2020, Phemelo Motene, host of SAfm‘s show “Life Happens”, interviewed me on the writing the history of surfing in South Africa and some of the key social history themes I focus on.

We chatted about surfing’s past in South Africa since WW2 as well as the changing representations of surfing in South Africa today, including a focus on the role of black surfers and female surfers in shaping today’s wavescape. We discussed how surfing development programmes add value to the lives of black surfers, the emerging commercialisation of township surf culture, and surfing’s involvement in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. We also covered about my research method of participating in surf contests.

You can listen to the full interview here (listening time: 17min 48sec).

This interview was conducted a month before COVID-19 arrived on South Africa’s shores so there is no reference to the impact on COVID-19 on the South African surfing community – a topic I will post on in due course.

Book launch: Interview with Melissa Volker on her novel Shadow Flicker

October 17, 2019October 17, 2019 ~ Glen Thompson

On 22 August 2019 I interviewed Melissa Volker about her eco-romance Shadow Flicker (Karavan Press, 2019) at Xpression on the Beach, Muizenberg. The novel is set in contemporary Cape St Francis, where the female protagonist returns to surfing. The novel addresses environmental issues relating to the development wind energy farms in the area.

This is one of few literary outputs in South Africa to foreground surfing within the novel’s plot and frame main characters as surfers (or where the authors are surfers themselves). I am aware of a handful of novels and short-stories in English which also do so, namely: Hagen Engler’s Life’s A Beach (1997) and Water Features (1998) (autobiographical fiction, short stories) and Robin Auld’s Tightlines (2000) (beat fiction), Byron Loker’s New Swell (2006) (autobiographical fiction, short stories), Mike Nicol’s Of Cops and Robbers (2013) (crime fiction), and Mary Duncan’s Surfing Sally (2010) (illustrated children’s fiction). Andy Mason’s (aka N.D. Mazin) The Legend of Blue Mamba (2013) (graphic novel) brings this literature into conversation with the world of underground comix.

I am aware of Afrikaans youth fiction too, specifically Mary-Ann van Rensburg’s ‘n Reënboog oor Grootbaai (1995) and Jeanette Morton’s Die Vlinder en die Surfer (2012).

There are also fictional short stories published in local surf magazines since the 1960s.

There is published poetry too that adds to the literature featuring surfing, for example, Robin Auld’s “Between the Storms” and “Reef” in his Kelp (2006) and Stephen Symons’ “Death of a Surfer” and “Muizenberg” in his Questions for the Sea (2016).

It may be time to start compiling an authoritative account of South African “surflit”. Inspiration for this can be drawn from the innovative work undertaken for the Waves of Fiction: Surfing in Australian Literature project led by scholar Rebecca Olive. The aim of the project is to be “able to follow the various threads of surfing that weave through Australian literature [that] will deepen our understanding of how surfing has shaped our relationships to beaches, coastlines and oceans, and how surfing has contributed to a sense of being Australian.”

Gender, Sex and Competitive Surfing in South Africa – comparing the late 1970s and early 1990s

August 15, 2018August 15, 2018 ~ Glen Thompson

I have a chapter published in a study that focuses on how sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies have shaped and re-shape surfing culture. The book, edited by lisahunter, is Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities, (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), covers surfing’s pasts and its present. My historical lisahunte cover chapter is titled: “A tale of two surf contests: Gender, sex and competitive surfing in South Africa during the late 1970s and early 1990s.”

In summary, the chapter historicises two surf contests as formative moments in South African amateur surfing during apartheid and as South Africa began its transition to a democracy. The 1978 South African Surfing Championships illustrated the consolidation of surfing’s patriocolonial whiteness at a time when local amateur surfing was under pressure from the international boycott of apartheid sport and the ascendancy of professional surfing. The 1992 Wella for Women’s Surfing Contest was the first women’s only surf event in the country and foregrounded the representation and the ongoing struggle for recognition of female white surfers within a male dominated sporting arena as South Africa transitioned towards democracy and global surf brands began commercialising women’s surfing. These surf contests open up how political and socio-cultural events shaped surfing, how patriarchy was produced within local organised surfing, and how the intersectionality of gender, sex, and race is crucial in tracing the changing social construction of competitive surfing identities in South Africa.

As set out in the overview of book, Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities “crosses new theoretical, empirical and methodological boundaries by exploring themes and issues such as indigenous histories, exploitation, the marginalized, race, ethnicity, disability, counter cultures, transgressions and queering. Offering original insights into surfing’s symbolism, postcolonialism, patriocolonial whiteness and heteronormativity, its chapters are connected by a collective aspiration to document sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies as they are shaped by surfing and, importantly, as they re-shape the many, possibly previously unknown, worlds of surfing”

lisahunter’s introduction to the book outlines this field of study and points to future directions in scholar-activist engagements in and with surf culture. The introduction is available here – click on “preview PDF”.

Race, Gender, Politics and Transnationalism in the Making of Surfing’s Sixties in South Africa

August 15, 2018 ~ Glen Thompson

In a chapter titled “Pushing under the Whitewash: Revisiting the Making of South Africa’s Surfing Sixties” in Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman (eds), The Critical Surf Studies Reader, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), I explores the making of the South African surfing lifestyle in Sixties.

The chapter historicizes how surfing in South Africa was raced, gendered and shaped by transnational surf culture. The socio-cultural determinations of racial exclusion and male privilege are examined through the intersectionality of a tanned whiteness fashioned through beach apartheid, lifestyle consumption and an imported “California dreaming.” In revisiting South African surfing’s emergence in the years from 1959 to 1968, this chapter seeks to push under the whitewash of that period and point to the persistence in the present of South African surfing’s founding mythologies.

From book’s blurb – “The Critical Surf Studies Reader brings together eighteen interdisciplinary essays that explore surfing’s history and development as a practice embedded in complex and sometimes oppositional social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Refocusing the history and culture of surfing, this volume pays particular attention to reclaiming the roles that women, indigenous peoples, and people of color have played in surfing.”

The introduction to the volume by Hough-Snee and Eastman, which provides a historiographic overview of surfing studies, can be downloaded here.

Review Essay: Surfing and Swimming Histories in the Radical History Review

August 15, 2018August 15, 2018 ~ Glen Thompson

My review essay “Disturbed Waters: New Currents in the History of Water Sport,” Radical History Review 125, (May 2016) appeared in a special issue of the journal edited by Peter Alegi and Brenda Elsey, focusing on the theme of “Historicizing the Politics and Pleasure of Sport”.

I review studies on swimming and surfing history which open up new perspectives on the relationship between politics, culture, and gender. The books under review are:

Lisa Bier, Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870 – 1926, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).
Scott Laderman, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i, (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011).

These water sports can be seen historically as political and determined by local, national, and global conditions. Each study historicizes the politics of aquatic pleasure. Bier’s Fighting the Current foregrounds American women’s swimming challenge to the social order. Walker’s Waves of Resistance looks to the contested nature of the surf zone in reclaiming Hawaiian surfing “traditions” and masculinities marginalized by Western cultural appropriation. Laderman’s Empire in Waves documents the Americanization of surfing, how it expanded globally as a politically ambiguous cultural practice, and carried with it the seeds of US imperialism.

Alegi and Elsey’s introduction to this sports history issue of the journal can be downloaded from here.

Talking about books and the big-wave brotherhood

September 26, 2016September 26, 2016 ~ Glen Thompson

Stoked! by Chris Bertish

Stealing the Wave by Andy Martin

“Me and My Board” was a discussion session hosted by the 2016 Open Book Festival in Cape Town on Saturday, 10 September 2016. The panel included: Capetonian big-wave surfer and SUP adventurer Chris Bertis, with his autobiographical account of his 2010 Mavericks Big Wave Invitational win in Stoked! (Zebra Press, 2015), and Andy Martin, University of Cambridge French literature and philosophy academic and surfer with his Stealing the Wave (Bloomsbury, 2008), subtitled “the epic struggle between Ken Bradshaw and Mark Foo”, about their big wave surfing rivalry in the 1980s and 1990s. I was asked to chair the session.

The session was captured by surfer, SUP’er and writer Melissa Volker for Wavescape.co.za as “Talk About Waves“, noting who else came to listen: “It was as much a weird blend of academia and aloha on stage as it was in the audience. There was a mix of readers who surf (or surfers who read?) and literati, those bookworms and mind surfers who never have (and never will) get on a surfboard.” Read the full article, with photographs and the podcast of the session (it runs for about 1 hour).

Among her reflections, Melissa captured the contradiction of speaking about a big-wave brotherhood that emerged during the conversation – it “does not refer to gender, but rather to the connection with people in the ocean” (Bertish) and “strikes a patriarchal note” (Martin). These views are poles apart, the former an example of a hegemonic surfing masculinity at work and the latter a pro-feminist reading of surfing’s male domination. This raised the question of naming women surfers as girls from the a member of the audience, and my reply that in surfing culture the representation of the “surfer girl” has a history of subordinating women surfers to the male surfing imaginary. However, while that cultural history is acknowledged, some recent third-wave feminist sports scholars have seen girl surfers as advocates of stealth feminism empowering women as athletes within the sport of surfing. It was here that the “Me and My Board” session connected with the broader currents within contemporary surfing culture and its changing gender order – pointing to the continued need to interrogate why we create myths out of big wave surfing and how those myths reinforce the masculine within surfing and society.

Surfing histories at the Beyond the Beach Exhibition

October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 ~ Glen Thompson

"Fragments of surfing pasts" art nstallation, Casa Labia — “Fragments of Surfing Pasts” art installation, Casa Labia Gallery, Muizenberg, 21 September 2014. Photo: Cobus Joubert

The Beyond the Beach Exhibition opened opposite from the waves at Muizenberg’s Surfer’s Corner at the Casa Labia Gallery on Sunday, 21 September and ran to 21 October 2014. Curated by Paul Weinberg, the exhibition features several photographers whose work re-imagined the beach and shoreline of False Bay as space for ways of seeing the fluidity of identities, emotions, spaces and aesthetics associated, evoked or juxtaposed to the “beach” as place and concept. I was invited to participate in the exhibition and create an art installation that critically explored South African surfing histories (see note below for more details).

Exhibition summary

Paul Weinberg talks to the exhibition themes at the Walkabout on 12 October 2014. Photo: Casa Labia

BTB_Panel3 — Exhibitors on display: HUMA hosted panel discussion on the *Beyond the Beach Exhibition,* Muizenberg and the raising questions about the beach as a space opening the possibility of inclusivity and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Held in at the Casa Labia ballroom, 12 October 2014. (L to R: Rodger Bosch, Sean Wilson, Paul Weinberg, Robert Hamblin, Jenny Altschuler and Glen Thompson. Not pictured, Sandy Worm, who is based in Germany). Photo: Casa Labia.

A note on the “Fragments of Surfing Pasts” art installation

Surfing pasts becomes somewhat knowable through traces, found fragments providing a view of what happens beyond the beach in the waves. This art installation was a reflexive review of my place within my studies of South African surfing history. Part summation of my doctoral dissertation in History (the exhibition run during the final month of my writing up of my dissertation), part visual representation of some of the key sources and themes informing that historical study, this installation was a becoming for me as a surfer and historian, a space for me to speak as a cultural practitioner to my interpretations of the beach and surfing’s historical place therein. The selections from the magazines on display come from independent South African surfing magazines no longer in print, South African Surfer (1965-68), Offshore (1987-89), and Liquid Girls (2005-6), or in the case of Amaza (2012 – ), currently in print but not widely available. All found a publishing home in Cape Town; South African Surfer moved from Durban for its last issue. The earlier magazines folded due to market pressures, Amaza is published by Waves for Change, a local non-profit organisation that uses surfing for leadership training and social development for at-risk youth from Masiphumelele and Khayelitsha townships in Cape Town. Each magazine reflects turning points in South African surfing history and points to the shaping of the diversity of surfing identities in the present. South African Surfer provides a record of the Sixties surf boom in the longboard era, Offshore reported on non-racial surfing under apartheid, Liquid Girls made girl and women surfers visible in a market over-determined as youthful males, and Amaza brings to the fore the lives of black surfers and emergence of township surfing. Framing the surf magazines, the broken surfboard speaks of the how the shortboard is no longer the only way of finding pleasure when riding waves. It was provided by Share the Stoke Foundation South Africa, which repairs and re-deploys surfboards into local surfing development programmes. This surfboard was beyond repair and was last used at the Surfshack Surf Outreach Project in Muizenberg. The wooden Alaia Needle surfboard, shaped by Muizenberg based WAWA Wooden Surfboards, guides the chronology of the installation, from the Sixties to the present. It also references surfing’s precolonial Hawaiian past, that surfing has traveled the globe in the modern era, and gestures to the future of surfboard shaping in seeking alternative and environmentally-friendly materials to surfboards made out of petrochemical based epoxy, polystyrene, polyester and polyurethane products. The UCT documentary film, Berg Boys (2013), brings Muizenberg into focus as a space for passing on surfing styles and know-how from a surf coach to a young grom in keeping the surfing stoke alive. The film brings to the fore the role of surf tourism in providing employment to black surfers and provides a view of how surfing keeps youth off the streets and in the waves.

BTB_Walkabout8_surf — Reading surfing histories during the exhibition Walkabout. Photo: Paul Weinberg

My installation shared a room with Sandy Worm’s portraits of some of Muizenberg’s black surfers, titled: Black People Don’t Surf. The details of this photographic project, and the others that were on display at the Beyond the Beach Exhibition are detailed in the catalogue archived on the Casa Labia Gallery website.

Otelo Burning, freedom and surfing

October 30, 2014August 22, 2022 ~ Glen Thompson

In August 2013, Meg Samuelson and I collaborated on an interdisciplinary project that considered the contemporary politics, shifting poetics and invoked pasts in the film Otelo Burning (2011), an isiZulu language film that uses surfing to pose questions about personal and political freedom during the demise of apartheid (1988-1990).

An outcome of the project was the publication of several essays and an interview with Sara Blecher (producer, director) and Sihle Xaba (actor, surfer) in the Contemporary Conversations section of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, Volume 26, Number 3, September 2014.

Contemporary Conversations: Otelo Burning

Meg Samuelson and Glen Thompson, “Introduction.” (Free Access to the article, which includes audio-visual supplementary material relating to the film and its reception).

Meg Samuelson, “Re-telling freedom in Otelo Burning: the beach, surf noir, and Bildung at the Lamontville pool.” (Free Access to the article).

Glen Thompson, “Otelo Burning and Zulu surfing histories.” (Open Access to the article).

Bhekizizwe Peterson, “Otelo Burning (dir. Sara Blecher, 2011).”

Litheko Modisane, “Otelo Burning: On the turbulence of freedom.”

David Johnson, “Beyond tragedy: Otelo Burning and the limits of post-apartheid nationalism.”

Meg Samuelson and Glen Thompson, “Interview with Sara Blecher and Sihle Xaba: the making and meanings of Otelo Burning.”

The Paddle Action of Aquatic Leisure

October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 ~ Glen Thompson

I put on my water activist cap on at the 2013 Slide Night hosted by the Wavescape Surf Film Festival on Wednesday, 11 December 2013 at the Two Oceans Aquarium at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. The format was a 10-minute talk to slides on an ocean-minded topic.

I spoke about the Peninsula Paddle and reflected on my experience of paddling on a stand-up paddleboard (SUP) from False Bay to Table Bay to highlight an ongoing conversation about creating visibility for the polluted state of Cape Town’s inland waterways and coastal waters.

Glen Thompson on the Black River, 2011 Peninsula Paddle

For more on the annual Peninsula Paddle community initiate held in June see their website. The paddle route via Cape Town’s inland waterways and short sea leg can be seen here.

Guy Bubb and Glen Thompson paddling the Steenberg Canal, above Zandvlei, 2011 Peninsula Paddle