lame duck

For a country with as rich a political history as South Africa, it's a nation that can seem very bland at times. As the ANC cake walk to another victory at the polls you can't but wander where the next generation of politicians in this great nation will come from.

Millions live in continual fear of the ANC's militant, radical and still youthful Julius Malema but there's no alternative being offered up elsewhere. Few if any young South Africans seem genuinely interested in meaningfully engaging in politics. In fact youth culture in South Africa can feel as shallow as it is narrow at times and does a fantastic impersonation of the banal and comfortable youth culture peddled by American soaps and sappy teen dramas: off beat bohemian posturing on the outside, yet driven by a steady, conventional and excruciatingly mundane corporate beat.

There seems to be such an obvious opening as the struggle veterans of the ANC grow older and more corrupt and the DA makes inroads but will never truely win the hearts of those that experienced apartheid. Where is the young party waiting in the wings, ready to embrace the ideologies of the struggle and update them for the new, united, young South Africa?

Or do we have to accept that the best we can muster is the Cape Party? That the pinnacle of our year will still be the arrival of Coldplay? And that for some the arrival of Starbucks will be the final advent of true democracy.

Maybe Apartheid has left a legacy of apathy amongst some young people here. They'll continue to live in their bubble until it is popped around them and Malema slips in. At which point there will be a mass bailout to Perth and the fingers pointing to 'them'. 'Them' who ruined 'our' perfect country.

'Us', who never thought to engage in the first place.

Isiqalo - new beginnings...

This afternoon I will drive into the township of Masiphumelele on the outskirts of Cape Town. There, a group of 10 high school students will be waiting to join myself and two Isiqalo Foundation peer coaches to come to the beach and learn how to surf.  This won’t be a usual surf lesson though, in fact surfing will play a perfunctory role in what will otherwise be a fun and educational day at the beach where we will learn how to avoid the dangers that stand in our way to becoming HIV free adults.

For the students this will be their second lesson of eight with us. They range between 15 and 22 years old and are all examples of the positives and negatives of a developing schooling system. ‘We’ are the Isiqalo Foundation and we will be delivering our ‘Waves for Change course’, an educational curriculum rooted in surfing which uses the thrill of riding waves to address the social issues of township life that can lead to the contraction and proliferation of the HIV virus.

A couple of weeks ago HUCK ran a video blog profiling a Sunday session with the Isiqalo Foundation. Following its airing, HUCK online editor Ed Andrews contacted me and asked if I would be interested in writing a short column detailing a little more about the inception of Isiqalo and just how I arrived in the townships of the Cape from the UK. A little worried at first about presenting Isiqalo as a vanity project, I agreed as in my own story lie many parallels to the work that Isiqalo does today and that bind our very different communities.

As a teenager growing up in suburban middle England, surfing always maintained an illusory and ethereal presence throughout my days. I longed to surf but with no transport and landlocked, the waves always remained just beyond my reach. Though surf posters filled every inch of my room, they represented a reality that I could only dream of living one day.

Beyond surfing there was little else to fill the void. Middle England can be a dull and dreary place to experience adolescence. I enjoyed playing sports but didn’t have the competitive spirit to really excel so I drifted through my late teens. My saving grace was music and I spent a lot of time delving into the back catalogues of bands like Black Flag and Fugazi, bands whose music was more a visceral expression of an ideology that advocated a strong sense of self and a DIY ethos. In the absence of the ocean, it was through music that I found I could relate and built a small but strong group of friends all dedicated to a similar cause that kept us on a relatively straight path.

I remember my first visit to Masiphumelele vividly. It was early 2007 and I was being guided by Mthandazo ‘Thomas’ Ndabeni, now a good friend and trustee of Isiqalo but then a stranger whom I’d met just hours before on the beach at Kommetjie, a wealthy beachside suburb of the Cape where Thomas and a bunch of kids from Masi had jogged to play beach soccer.

We drove slowly, negotiating potholes and stray dogs in the early evening gloom.  Though the living conditions were marginal what really struck me were the number of kids just hanging around with nothing to do, some visibly drunk or high, others just sitting on the street corner idling away the last hours of the day. The contrast to Kommetjie was alarming, just a couple of km’s up the road yet a world away where teenagers shot the shore break in branded wetsuits and sponsored surf boards or cruised the quiet backstreets on their skateboards. With barely a black face to be seen.

I remember Thomas laughing when I asked if anyone in Masi surfed and, as if prempting my next question, how he then told me about his own adolescence in Masi, lost of drugs, alcohol and petty theft in the absence of anything else to do.

For Thomas the end of the road came when his crew fell in with hard drugs and started breaking into homes to fuel their own habits. It was at this time that his family intervened and took him to church. It was a hard choice but Thomas remembers the day he left his crew and decided to change. He remembers the loneliness most vividly and the temptation to go back to his old ways but how a youth soccer team he had started kept him on the right path. Today several of his old crew are dead or in jail.

 

I remember the day I left Oxford to peruse my dream of surfing, living alone in a caravan in a deserted field, lonely but sorely committed to becoming a surfer one day and making the life I had dreamt of.

Through Thomas I got to know the community of Masiphumelele. The more time I spent the more I could relate to the issues that young people faced. In them I could see myself as a teenager looking for distractions only this time there were none. Masiphumelele, like townships all over South Africa, has next to nothing beyond shacks and shabeens. There is a community soccer field indentifiable only by the rusted poles. The only other funded institutions are the over subscribed primary and high schools and the HIV clinic.

Drug use, alcoholism, sexual abuse and violent crime are serious issues. At the apex is HIV, it’s prevelance compounded by the various social stigma that keep young people out of the testing clinics. People die in Masi daily but their deaths are behind closed doors. It’s a telling sign of the status quo that the first two signs you see when entering Masi are two billboards advertising funeral homes and burial services.

Isiqalo is the result of two years spent in the community of Masiphumelele meeting and learning from peers and friends. What is most apparent for me as a visitor to these communities is that young people are not disaffected but passionate and enthusiastic in embracing change and succeeding, all that is lacking is the stimulus and energy for something new, something different and something exciting.

Through Isiqalo we want to provide alternative and creative projects to children and young adults alike. We want to relieve a little boredom and create a vibrant, colourful and alternative community for young adults to belong to, a community that they can grow with and one day lead and a community in which they feel safe to openly discuss the social issues that contribute to issues surrounding HIV..

We are not on a mission to develop a new generation. A new generation exists in South Africa. Isiqalo exists to give this new generation its first step.

Ian Mackaye looks old

Ian Mackaye looks old
and i feel sad

A moment of existential uncertainty....

The guy was a menace, nothing less. And yet, for all his petulance, for every barbed comment he spat at the weekend crowd at this known and frequently zooed-out surf spot in the southern Cape Peninsula, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

As he paddled through the throng you could see the bile rising in his throat as he negotiated another blow-in on rented mini-mal. His leathered, sun baked complexion was not that of your average city worker. His matted maine of long blonde hair, weathered through several decades of ocean use, coursed out behind him as he muscled and barged his way to the top of the line up, openly mouthing obscenities at every man, woman and child that dared stop his relentless charge.

His surfing was neither Zen nor Zeitgeist, more as you’d imagine it to be; a gritty charge down the line with the express intent of annihilating anything that moved. Grim but effective.

And yet, for all the negative energy he purged into the water and those around him, I was transfixed. Not out of respect, or admiration, nor even disgust though I felt my pulse rise as he neared me. I was fixated as in him I could see my own frustrations, borne out so obviously before me in all their unsightliness.

That I could empathise with him made me all the more uncomfortable. That I could appreciate and even relate to this gown man’s petulant display of anguish, kicking and screaming like a child asked to share their favourite toy on this breathless and balmy southern hemisphere afternoon, made me distinctly uncomfortable. I had to leave. Had I become as jaded as him?

A weekday morning some weeks later and I found some great waves at a reef somewhere in the Deep South. Surfing alone but for a couple of other guys the mood was lighter with empty chitchat filling the lulls between the sets as we waited out patiently. As a wave would swing in, any conversation would abruptly end and we’d focus and pull away, each to his own wave, reuniting some minutes later sometimes tying the thread of the previous conversation, other times starting on something completely intangible. Filling the void.

As long as the euphoria lasted, the comedown from that high was an altogether more protracted affair and I began to think more and more of the interactions I had with the surfers with whom I shared that session. As I pondered, I realised we hadn’t shared so much as we’d each conceded a little ground so we’d each get our fix. There were enough waves to go round, yet there was still the occasional scramble when the real sets pulled through. A mute point maybe, but there were no heartfelt goodbyes as we caught our last waves in, no handshakes and little recognition of a moment stolen from the crowd. No names remembered. I recognised the hollow feeling creeping back into my stomach.

I remember when I first started surfing and the excitement of making it to the back and just sitting amongst the other surfers feeling a deep sense of belonging. In surfing I had found something, and through surfers I could relate. But somewhere along the way something changed. I lost that sense of belonging; the sense of community had vanished.  Why?

Surfing has always proclaimed itself as being a step ahead, as being more than just a sport, with a focus on freedom of expression and championing the surfing tribe as one enlightened mass riding an endless wave to spiritual nirvana. And yet in so many ways I feel surfing is now so far behind. The dream has been co-opted and sold out and surfers are no less enlightened than they are selfish and jaded.  

Why? Increasingly I realise that surfing not only has the capacity to indulge the most negative of human emotions, but it gives them a name: localism, giving carte blanche to brainless acts of brutality. Validating a wave-lust which has obscured our sense of common courtesy and decency, even reality. Why does common sense evaporate the moment we hit the water and why do we never call the perpetrators (all too often the ‘big men’ of surfing) to account?

But this isn’t about localism. The roots extend far deeper and end up at the base of the corporations that now drive the sport. The same corporations that are using surfing to boost the coffers of their multinational clothing empires, empires that are grinding the profits out of surfing’s now soulless core from their faceless clothing warehouses in the far east. Corporations whose soul interest is themselves, who willingly take from a community they purport to support with no intention of giving back: exploitation.

This is about the corporations whose advertising budgets drive and obliquely control the surf media that we surfers so happily and blindly consume. A skew-media that all too often sensationalises acts of stupidity and censors out the ugly and potentially damaging. Why, for instance, were Rip Curl able to put a gag on media following Rip Curl golden boy Mick Fanning’s anti-Semitic outburst a year or so ago? Poor example maybe, but check what happened to Mel Gibson.

More recently, when late World Champ Andy Irons quit the world tour to enter rehab, his sponsors did little to encourage their chief representative and worldwide teen idle to publicly account for his addictions and instead paired him in a marketing campaign with Metallica which championed Irons as ‘punk rock’, anti-establishment, screw the system. A marketing campaign which validated his decision to quit the tour and which made a conscious decision to brush potentially damaging problems deep beneath a heavy blanket of advertising and spin to keep selling board shorts: A decision that was neither punk, nor rock, just more corporate manipulation of a star whose light is now sadly extinguished.

Just as the ageing hippies of the 60’s sold out their own revolution by packaging and selling their counter-culture aesthetic to fund their increasingly comfortable and mainstream lifestyles, so it’s happened to surfing. The sport’s growing popularity has been crudely manipulated and raped by its leading exponents to the detriment of the sport as a whole. You want to find the surf culture of yesteryear? Look no further:

 ‘Repeat after me’ goes one surf clothing tag line. ‘I am free’.

Now buy the t-shirt.

Surfing for me was always a choice against the mainstream, of acting authentically and involving myself in a sport that championed innovation, independence and grace. But increasingly so I see surfing, and myself, merging into the mainstream. The more I can relate to idiots in the water, the more I realise I too have become jaded and co-opted – forgetting the reasons I started surfing in the first place. And for every branded t-shirt I can pull from the bottom of my wardrobe, I can see the paper trail to where it all began. So I pull back, I buy fewer brands, support independent retailers and try to smile more. It’s easy and way more enjoyable. Oddly enough, I once again find myself in the minority.

These are not times to blindly follow. Obama said as much at his inauguration. It’s a time to act authentically, not just for yourself but also for the guy sitting next to you. Time to open your eyes and make your own judgement as to what you want to gain from this world, not what you think you should want as by then you’ll never have enough. 

And you don’t need to surf to read this. Take a look around. If you can see yourself in the driver of the BMW flipping off the learner for wasting 30 seconds of his day, something is wrong. If you see yourself in the banker extracting his million pound bonus as the economy rots around him, something is wrong. If you see yourself in the bigot, the racist, the misogynist, the hate mongerer, the cleric…the list goes on. Something is wrong.

And it’s time to pull back and question.

I got my kick from surfing. Yours can come from anywhere, if you’re eyes are open.