{"id":146337,"date":"2024-02-01T13:25:42","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T13:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2024\/02\/01\/how-surfing-is-challenging-tradition-in-a-ghanaian-town\/"},"modified":"2024-02-01T13:25:42","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T13:25:42","slug":"how-surfing-is-challenging-tradition-in-a-ghanaian-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2024\/02\/01\/how-surfing-is-challenging-tradition-in-a-ghanaian-town\/","title":{"rendered":"How surfing is challenging tradition in a Ghanaian town"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Credit: KELLY HAMMOND
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It started with a magazine cutting.<\/p>\n

Appearing in Surfer, the article was titled \u2018Africa \u2013 Home of Surfing?\u2019 and illustrated with a heavy-handed caricature of a tribesman dragging a board out of the surf.<\/p>\n

Written in the 1960s and forwarded to Ben Lalande by colleague Sarah Hughen over Instagram nearly 60 years later, it set the filmmakers thinking.<\/p>\n

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A few months later in Busua, a small Ghanaian fishing town, they focused their camera on some surfers bobbing in the Atlantic and the blue morning light.<\/p>\n

As the article had explained, it is a centuries-old scene. But there was also something new in the images they were capturing. This group of surfers was all girls. And in Ghana, that difference is making a difference.<\/p>\n

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KELLY HAMMOND
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\u201cOne day I went surfing, and my mother beat me with a pan,\u201d says Vanessa Turkson with a smile as she swings side-saddle in a low-slung hammock.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was saying, \u2018I don\u2019t want to lose you.’\u201d<\/p>\n

One of her friends tells how her own parents would inspect her feet for grains of sand, ready to punish her it they discovered any.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t without reason. The sea is a force to be feared. The Gulf of Guinea swirls with dangerous currents off Ghana\u2019s coast and, until 20 years ago,\u00a0swimming skills were scarce,\u00a0external\u00a0in the town.<\/p>\n

The water is where livelihoods are earned \u2013 tuna fishing is especially important to Busua\u2019s economy \u2013 but also where lives are lost.<\/p>\n

Every few months, another body would wash up on the beach.<\/p>\n

Parents feared for their daughters with reason, but also with discrimination.<\/p>\n

While they have prevented their girls from enjoying the beach, their boys have learned to harness the local waves, with Busua becoming one of several surf hotspots in Ghana.<\/p>\n

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Ben Lalande<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Justice Kwofie is at the heart of Busua\u2019s scene, running a surf school alongside his six brothers.<\/p>\n

Kwofie saw the division that kept girls at home after school, cooking food, helping their parents and working the land, and was determined to break it down.<\/p>\n

\u201cI lost both my parents when I was young and grew up with my grandmother,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen she passed, another woman took care of me and now my surf shop is supported by a woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realised that in Africa the women do all the hard work. It shouldn\u2019t be only the men on the beach and then you go home and your sisters cook for you. We need to do something to make the girls part of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ben Lalande<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Five years ago, Kwofie and his brothers started a programme called Black Girls Surf to teach female surfers to first swim and then catch waves.<\/p>\n

Turkson, once chased around the kitchen by her pan-wielding mother, was one of those to win her parent\u2019s round and sign up.<\/p>\n

She learned to surf, but she didn\u2019t only learn to surf.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel happy because I am with my friends sitting in the water, chatting and things,\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>she says with a smile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen, whenever I am standing on a board, it makes me feel like I am flying.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes me comfortable, like I am not stressing. Everyone can do surfing; it is like dancing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSurfing has taught me that in the olden days they say that girls cannot surf, only boys. Now I know that whatever a man can do, a woman can do better!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Vanessa
KELLY HAMMOND
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Kwofie says the teenage pregnancy rate in Busua has declined since Obibini club \u2013 Ghana\u2019s only female surf club \u2013 was set up to give young women a place to play, learn and socialise.<\/p>\n

The club is part of a scene that has sprung up after decades of lying dormant in some areas of Africa.<\/p>\n

Since the Surfer article was published, the evidence that surfing developed independently in Africa many years ago \u2013 rather than being imported from Polynesia, California or elsewhere \u2013 has only increased.<\/p>\n

One key account comes from a Scottish soldier. While stationed 150 miles up the coast from Busua at Accra in 1834, James Alexander\u00a0recorded a curious activity,\u00a0external\u00a0that was previously unknown to him.<\/p>\n