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.
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