Early last year, a friend of mine invited me to join him for a surfing lesson in Kokrobite— a coastal town 30km from Ghana’s capital city, Accra. In Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, Kevin Dawson notes that the earliest record of communities surfing in Ghana (at the time, Gold Coast) dates back to 1640. But outside of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, I had never seen people riding waves, let alone considered getting on a board myself. I haven’t stopped since. The ocean keeps me present. For a few hours each time, all I do is stay afloat, metaphorically and literally. 

A few months later, I came across Black Girl Surf on Instagram, an NGO founded in 2014 by Rhonda Harper, current coach to Senegal’s first and only professional female surfer, Khadija ‘Khadjou Sambe. Calling in from Cape Town, Sembe and Harper have been training for the upcoming Summer Olympics in Tokyo across three countries— Senegal, United States, and now South Africa. In 2016, the International Olympic Committee voted for the sport’s inclusion in the Olympics for the first time, alongside baseball, skateboarding, and karate. 

With a multifaceted background as a journalist, carpenter, and designer, Harper was well-equipped to build something as far-reaching as Black Girl Surf from the ground up. The organization has since grown to include chapters in Senegal, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, South Africa, California, North Carolina, Jamaica, and Brazil— all operating under a similar structure of offering free camps for young Black girls.

“I started Black Girl Surf out of the lack of representation for girls around the African diaspora in professional surfing,” Harper tells me. Initially, the organization began as an idea to host a contest in Sierra Leone, starting with a surf therapy camp for youth recovering from the 1991 decade-long civil war. Once Harper started doing research, she found an article in a surf magazine pushing the narrative that Africa as a whole wasn’t a place to surf. This galvanized her into action and she decided to work on having Sierra Leone be the launching pad for an Africa surf international contest. “The history of Sierra Leone is slavery, and colonialism but now we had a chance to reset the map or the history that was once told, right... It's warm, and it's just gorgeous and the beaches are long, and they're uninhabited,” she says. After getting into contact with a group of young surfers in Bureh Beach, she began thinking about ways to bring sustainable income into the community. At the time, they only had a surf club and would use makeshift boards so by putting together this international contest, not only would surfers of African descent around the world have a platform to compete, but also the exposure could be used to invest into local sporting infrastructure.

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There were no funds or fees to be in the contest if you were coming from the continent, a rare occurrence in surfing competitions. “I didn't want to be one of those Americans that go into an African country and say, ‘Hey, this is what you need to do.’ Yes, I'm the one that's going to write the checks but I'm also going to be the one that carries the cinderblock, from this side of the property to that side of the property, I didn't want to be one of those hands-off, you just do it and we'll build it and then we'll take credit for it. Now we're all going to build this thing as a community. So we had this beautiful program put together and we had all the boys registering from all around the world, which is beautiful. We loved it. We were at capacity and we were still adding people because we wanted to have a waitlist. And then all of a sudden we've noticed that we only had one girl,” Harper shares. This one girl was Sierra Leonean surfer Kadiatu ‘KK’ Kamara, who Harper also trains now. At the time, Kamara was 14 years old and finding participants for her to compete against proved a challenge. After reaching out to surfing associations across the world, Harper found that none had surfers of African descent. “There was one that had two but they weren't in the actual program, they were on the development side. And they were so young that we couldn't risk bringing them two little girls from South Africa— who are now like legends here in South Africa —to Sierra Leone for a contest to surf against somebody that's older than them,” she continues. 

Going back to the drawing board, Harper now began searching for small surf camps on the continent in the hopes of finding more African women surfers for Kamara to compete against. On a website for a camp in Senegal, she spots a photo of a young Black woman holding a surfboard and immediately got in touch with the organization to identify the person. This is how she met Khadjou Sambe, who is sitting in front of the screen today in a black hoodie, matching black cap, with a rose surfboard in the background.

Belonging to the Lebou ethnic group, Sambe’s family comes from the island of Ngor off the coast of Dakar, famously featured in the 1966 surfing classic, The Endless Summer. Despite coming from a lineage of fishermen, her family was wary of her growing interest in watersports. “I started surfing around 13 years old but my family didn’t like it because I was always around boys, you know, people would be asking, ‘what is she doing, ‘why is she always around boys.’ But when I first stood on the board I was like ‘woah.’ Nobody could tell me anything,” Sambe says. 

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After dms facilitated by google translate, Sambe agreed to join Harper in Sierra Leone but unfortunately, the Ebola virus hit, leading to travel bans and halting plans for the competition. Shortly after, the inclusion of surfing in the 2020 (now 2021) Summer Olympics were announced and Harper decided to redirect her energy into bringing Kamara and Sambe over to the United States for dedicated training to qualify for the prestigious competition. Unfortunately, immigration prevented Kamara from joining, although she continues to work with Harper and Black Girls Surf. What followed was a rigorous program of practice, nutrition, and relationship-building between Harper and Sambe. “So I'm just going to ride her back and forth, up and down California so she can try different waves and different locations and she gets to experience a different part of life and as I'm developing this new program, I'm learning the importance of access, right? Khadjou is from West Africa and if she hadn’t had the opportunity to come to the United States, she would not be the icon for Black women in surfing right now,” Harper says, echoing the importance of the access and local support networks that her organization prioritizes.

“I’m from Ngor and there is a lot of water around us. Everybody swims and my uncles and cousins, they used to surf. When Rhonda reached out to me, I was so happy to be able to surf every day and learn from her. The board is my love, the waves are my friends, and the sea is my second family,” Sambe tells me. This love is one Sambe works hard for. Every day, she and Harper work out together before she gets into the water. She’s also on a nutrition program and learning all the rules of the International Surf Association. Additionally, when she’s not training young surfers herself, she works with specialist trainers to get her prepared for qualifiers. 

I ask her what she hopes to see five years from now and she enthusiastically responds, “I want more Black girl surfers, I don’t want to be the only one. If anyone wants to start surfing, go for it. Don’t listen to what anyone else says— just focus on what you want. That’s what I did.”