History of Surfing in Africa Part 1: The Colonial Archive

In this episode we dive into the history of surfing in Africa as part of wider scholarly work within critical surf studies and the blue humanities. This episode is Part 1 of a two part series on the topic.

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. 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. In this episode we focus the period from the early modern period (c. 1500) to the beginning of the twentieth-century (c. early 1900s).

For the history of surfing in Africa in the modern era (c.1900 to the present), check out the Part 2 episode in this link: ADD LINK.

Scholarship referenced in this episode:

Booth, Douglas. "Mediating Contested Narratives of the Globalization of Sport: The Case of Surfing" in Joseph Maguire, Katie Liston and Mark Falcous (eds), Palgrave Handbook on Globalisation and Sport, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Dawson, Kevin. "Surfing beyond Racial and Colonial Imperatives in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and Oceania" in Dexter Zavalza Hugh-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman (eds), The Critical Surf Studies Reader, (Duke University Press, 2017).

Dawson, Kevin. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Dawson. Kevin. "A Brief History of Surfing in Africa and the Diaspora" in Mami Wata, AfroSurf, (Mami Wata, 2020).

Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750-1840, (Penguin, 1995). Originally published in French in 1988.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House, (Duke University Press, 2022).

Maguire, Joseph, Katie Liston and Mark Falcous (eds). Palgrave Handbook on Globalisation and Sport, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. “It Never Existed,” Aeon, 13 January 2023, https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-precolonial-africa-is-vacuous-and-wrong.