Over the summer, around 150 people gathered with surfboards at Cowell Beach in Santa Cruz, California, for a paddle out. Under the midday sun, dedicated surf enthusiasts, novices and those who’d just picked up a board for the first time entered the water.

The paddle out – an event where people gather in the ocean on surfboards to honour the life of a deceased person – was organised by Black Surf Santa Cruz, a nonprofit providing no-cost surf lessons to Bipoc residents intending to get them confident in the water. For the last four years, the paddle out has taken place to commemorate the death of George Floyd, A Black man who was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020, setting off global protests. The event encouraged a sense of community and served as an introduction to a sport – and a culture – that many Bipoc say they have felt estranged from.

Esabella Bonner, 28, is the founder of Black Surf Santa Cruz, and had never been on a surfboard before the summer of 2020.

“I’ll never forget my first time [surfing]. The weightlessness”, said Esabella Bonner as she took to glassy waters, flanked by dozens of fellow surfers. “It’s unlike anything.”

Afterwards, Bonner said her only thoughts were: “Why had it taken this long and how can I get more Bipoc people to experience it?” It is partly why she started the Black Santa Cruz group – to allow others to experience what she had.

A ‘return’ to origins

The call to the ocean, and to surfing in particular, is diversifying in the US, beyond the stereotype of the blonde, often male surfer. A recent Diversity in Surfing report found that Black and Latino individuals make up 40% of the total US surfing population, currently outpacing white surfers to comprise the largest growing demographic in the sport. The trend is expected to continue. While some may consider this as indicative of the sport “branching out” to new audiences, it may be better described as a “return” to the sport’s ancient origins.

The contemporary practice of surfing derives from a mix of Indigenous cultures. Polynesians – particularly those who settled in Hawaii – were experts at the sport, and weaved surfing into their culture. Yet possibly predating the Polynesians, was an African practice of wave riding – using boards and canoes – that occurred on multiple spots along the African coast.

This little-discussed history of Black surfing in Africa and the United States is the central topic of Wade in the Water: A Journey into Black Surfing and Aquatic Culture, a documentary from first-time film-maker, David Mesfin. “I remember as a young man just how many people said to me things like, ‘Oh, Black people don’t surf,’” he said, recalling years of doubting his place in the ocean. “They don’t swim. I’d even hear this from Black people themselves, and I just thought: ‘Where is this idea coming from?’”

Mesfin, who is from Ethiopia but has lived in California for 28 years, said the impetus to make Wade in the Water came from such memories, and the discovery of writings by Kevin Dawson, a surfer, academic and the author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. “Reading his work about surfing happening in West Africa hundreds of years ago, I was hooked,” Mesfin, who is already working on a follow-up documentary, recalled. “I needed to examine why Black Americans have lost the connection to [surfing] and I wanted to do something to inspire people to take it back.”

Surfing’s whitewashed history

If you’ve ever watched the canonical surf film The Endless Summer, you see Hollywood’s whitewashing and western gaze at work, suggesting that surfing was introduced to West Africa by some blonde Californians in the 1960s.

Dawson, the African diasporic cultural studies scholar, features heavily in Mesfin’s film, does not hold back on assessing The Endless Summer. “That depiction is a myth, it is a fabrication, a white saviour narrative that really took hold in 20th century surf culture and has been hard to shake ever since,” Dawson said.

In his work with historical archives, Dawson came across the first written account of activities like surfing from Africa. In 1640, a German merchant-adventurer described how parents around Ghana would “tie their children to boards and throw them into the water”.

Then, in 1834, the British explorer James Alexander wrote of “boys swimming in the sea with light boards under their stomachs” who would wait “for a surf and [come] rolling like a cloud on top of it”.

Dawson’s theory is that surfing evolved in Africa for pragmatic reasons. The West coast doesn’t possess a lot of inlets, he says, and “people, often teenagers, would have to learn to go through waves in order to go fishing and come back.”

Neither Dawson nor Mesfin’s film tries to make surfing an African invention – rather, they seek to give the continent a place in the wider discussion of the sport. It was the “Polynesians, who took [surfing] to a cultural and spiritual level,” Dawson added, “at the same time Africa has had a connection to surfing for just as long, maybe longer”.

Segregated beaches

Focusing on surfing’s history in the United States, Wade in the Water posits that the wicked combination of enslavement, violence and Jim Crow-era segregation worked to diminish African Americans’ relationship with water.

In the late 19th century, “beaches became a focal point of recreation,” Dawson said. “You had this profound unease about Black people having leisure time. So you have these racialised efforts to drive Black people off these places of recreation”, resulting in three pillars of discrimination at the time: “violence, the built environment, legislation”.

In many places in America, people of color were barred from prime surf beaches which were considered “white only”. For instance, in the early 1900s, the popular surf town of Malibu mostly allowed only white people, but just 20 miles down the road was a beach south of the Santa Monica Pier that was a haven for Black people. It was derogatorily dubbed the “Inkwell”.

Racist practices prevented Black people from getting too comfortable in some beach-side locations. Near the so-called “Inkwell” in Santa Monica, ritzy hotels were erected in a thinly veiled attempt to block the creation of successful water-front Black-owned establishments, including the addition of Los Angeles’s I-10 freeway.

A similar story repeated itself in the squashing of Bruce’s Beach, a once thriving Black beach community in today’s predominantly wealthy and white enclave of Manhattan Beach.

“This worked to create an overriding sense that the culture of swimming or surfing wasn’t an option to them specifically,” Dawson said.

‘The ocean doesn’t care what color I am’

Wade in the Water features interviews with a host of Black surfers and leaders, who have broken barriers and fought for greater representation in the sport. For instance, Sharon Schaffer, the first female Black pro-surfer, recounts her days of breaking out into the surfing scene, while Tony Corley recalls founding the Black Surfing Association in 1975, which has bought California’s Black surfers together for 43 years. “It was amazing to assemble these icons,” Mesfin said. “Many people don’t know who they are,” he said. “Black surfing is far less publicised.”

While examining the past and paying respect to trailblazers, the documentary also looks to the future. It optimistically notes the growing surf industry in Africa, the uptick in Bipoc surfers in the United States and devotes time to hearing from a current crop of young leaders who are working towards achieving diversity in the sport around the US. Those voices include Bonner and her contemporaries like Lizelle Jackson (Color the Water) and Kayiita Johansson (Black Surfers) who have set up like-minded initiatives.

“Unfortunately people still encounter racism in the water, so part of our goal is to not just teach surf skills, but to help make our breaks as welcoming as they can be,” Bonner said. “To make change though, we have to be seen in the water, we have to show up.”

Johansson, 33, from the Bay Area, was also at the paddle out. He agreed with Bonner’s sentiments as he shepherded several people on their boards in the water. “There are still systemic issues,” he said. “The legacy [of past policies] doesn’t just go away.” Much of his future plans are to push for policy change, tackling things such as “mandatory water and ocean safety and skills programs in public schools”, which he plans to do through his organisation, Black Surfers.

One of his charges was Keisha Browder, 46, a local who first took to the ocean only a few years ago and is a co-founder of Black Surf Santa Cruz.

“I’ve always lived in California, but for the longest time, I never thought it was my water to enter,” Browder said in a mellifluous voice. ‘“I know a lot of African Americans who feel this way. I may never become an amazing surfer – it’s a little late for me – but I’m here, having fun, and reclaiming my space,” she added between laughs.

She had recently seen Mesfin’s documentary and later, on land, she said: “It reminded me of how wrong I’d been about the ocean for all that time. It doesn’t care what color I am – it’s blind to all of that.”