Three more episodes of season one of the The Deep Duck Dive Podcast are now available to listen to and we (co-hosts Karen Graaff and Glen Thompson) paddle out into the waves of social and historical matters relating to surfing.
Episode 2 is on the topic of The Waves Don’t Discriminate. In this episode, we discuss the issue of fairness in sport, and how a term that sounds neutral is in fact heavily politicised. We start with the definition of fairness in sport generally and then turn to fairness in surfing. The episode addresses the bans on trans women in sport, including surfing, and look to the gender politics behind those bans as well as the attempts by sporting bodies to use policies to regulate transgender involvement in sport. Listen to episode two of the podcast here.
Episodes 3 and4 is a two-part survey the history of surfing in Africa. In Episode 3: History of Surfing in Africa Part 1: The Colonial Archive we focus primarily on the history of surfing in West Africa, which has colonial records of African aquatic activities. This history draws on the historical work of Kevin Dawson which explores, and reclaims, West African aquatic practices and we also speculate on what other historical sources scholars could look to when opening up the archives to find evidence for surfing in the past elsewhere along the extensive African coastline. We focus the period from the early modern period (c. 1500) to the beginning of the twentieth-century (c. early 1900s). Listen to episode of the podcast here.
In Episode 4: History of Surfing in Africa Part 2: The Modern Era we focus on surfing in Africa during the modern era, from c. early 1900s to the present. We cover the topics of surfing and the British Empire and indigenous African surfing practices in West Africa before 1945, the era of “surf discovery” in Africa in the Sixties and Seventies, and then the diffusion of surfing through the processes of surf tourism, non-profit led social development, and sportisation in Africa from the 1990s and 2000s – taking the story up to surfing’s entry into the Olympics in the 2020s. Listen to episode of the podcast here.
Listen to all The Deep Duck Dive Podcast episodes here.
Announcement: Co-hosts Glen Thompson (Research Fellow, History Department, University of Stellenbosch) and Karen Graaff (Research Fellow, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape), academics and surfers based in Cape Town, South Africa, have launched The Deep Duck Dive Podcast – a public pedagogy and public scholarship podcast engaging with the oceanic turn in the global South by focusing on issues that matter within surfing as a lifestyle sport.
While the podcast has been a work in progress for some time, see our journal article in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning published open access here in 2023 for our documentation of our approach to scholarly podcasting and thinking with/in surfing, we launched the podcast on 30 September 2024. We aim to publish new episodes every two weeks.
Season 1 of the podcast opens with a pilot episode introducing the podcast and ourselves. Episode 1 is titled: Surfing history – Why History Matters. The theme for the first season is, What could surfing (be)come, and makes use of hydrocolonialism, hydrofeminism and critical surf studies perspectives to explore the following topics: surfing’s colonial history, the history of surfing in Africa, surfing and social change, discrimination and the waves, inclusive surfing spaces, and surfer environmental consciousness. In these episodes we seek to challenge and subvert surfing’s normalisation of certain raced, gendered, classed, and ableised bodies; both in past and in the present and so re-imagine surfing’s future through a social justice lens as decolonised and inclusive sporting and leisure activity. A Season 2 of the podcast is planned for 2025.
Recently, Kim Feldmann of Surf Simply interviewed with me about some of the main points of my research on surfing ans politics in South Africa during the early months of the COVID pandemic.
This is from the introduction of the interview, titled “Unridden”:
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.
“Fragments of Surfing Pasts” art installation, Casa Labia Gallery, Muizenberg, 21 September 2014. Photo: Cobus Joubert
The Beyond the BeachExhibition 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
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.
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.
Black surfers at Muizenberg: some of Sandy Worm’s portraits. Photo: Paul Weinberg
Writing Surfing History 