🌊 Surfing’s Earliest Roots: Black and Brown Ocean Cultures
1. Ancient African and Pacific Seafaring Traditions
Long before Europeans or Americans even imagined surfing, Africans and Pacific Islanders had a deep, symbiotic relationship with the ocean.
• In West Africa, particularly along the coasts of Senegal, Ghana, and Angola, people were seen riding waves on wooden planks, canoes, and bellyboards centuries before Western contact.
• European sailors in the 1640s recorded seeing young men along the Ghanaian coast “playing among the surf” — balancing on planks and riding waves for fun and skill.
So yes — Africans surfed waves before the sport had a name. It was both recreation and mastery of the sea — an extension of their maritime life.
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2. Polynesian Surfing and Shared Oceanic Heritage
Meanwhile, in the Pacific, Polynesians — including Hawaiians, Tahitians, and Samoans — developed surfing as part of their spiritual and social culture.
This is the form we know today as heʻe nalu (“wave sliding”) in Hawaiian.
It’s crucial to understand that Polynesians are an Indigenous, melanated people whose ancestral migrations trace back thousands of years across the Indian Ocean and parts of East Africa. Many anthropologists recognize shared seafaring roots between early African navigators and Austronesian/Polynesian explorers.
So in a very real way, the origins of surfing are both African and Indigenous Pacific — products of Black and brown civilizations that lived in harmony with the ocean.
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3. Western Erasure and Reinvention
When Western colonizers arrived in the Pacific, they often misinterpreted or looked down upon native practices.
Surfing was suppressed by missionaries in the 19th century for being “pagan.” Later, white colonizers and American tourism appropriated surfing, erasing its Indigenous and non-white roots to fit a “beach-boy” image centered on whiteness.
By the 20th century, surfing had been rebranded as a “California sport,” disconnecting it from its African and Polynesian origins — even though its first practitioners were brown-skinned people of the ocean.
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4. Reclaiming the History
Modern historians and surf scholars have been working to reclaim surfing’s true lineage.
People like Dr. Isaiah Helekunihi Walker (Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i) and Kwame Boafo-Arthur (Africans and the Sea in Pre-Colonial Times) document how both Black Atlantic and Pacific Islander peoples have deep aquatic traditions.
This matters because surfing’s rebirth as a “white” sport hides the fact that it began as a spiritual, communal, and melanated tradition — born from cultures that revered the ocean, not conquered it.
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📚 Citations
• Finney, Ben R., and James D. Houston. Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings. Kodansha International, 1996.
• Walker, Isaiah Helekunihi. Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011.
• Boafo-Arthur, Kwame. Africans and the Sea in Pre-Colonial Times. Journal of African Studies, 1998.
• Smithsonian Institution. “Heʻe Nalu: The Hawaiian Art of Surfing.” National Museum of the American Indian, 2019.
• Thompson, Kevin. “Surfing Before the West.” Surfer’s Journal, 2022.
