Catching waves, chasing dreams

Coaches and young surfers practising on the Almadies coastline in Dakar. Its world-class, year-round waves not only serve as the backdrop to the girls’ lives, but also attract surfers from across the globe, including to the famed Ngor Right point break where the girls often practice. — AFP

FOR generations, Seynabou Tall’s ancestors have fished, dived and rowed off the coast of Dakar, where the 14-year-old, who quit school nearly four years ago, is now learning to surf.

She and some 20 other girls are participating in an inaugural Surf Academy which requires them to enrol in school, incentivised by the chance to shred waves.

Nearly all come from the little community of Xataxely, a fishing village of narrow walkways that is part of the capital’s larger Ngor neighbourhood.

The area is a stronghold of Senegal’s Lebou ethnic group, a fishing people closely tied to the ocean who live throughout the Dakar region.

Young participants of the Surf Academy programme posing in the hallways of Stella Maris Primary School in the Ouakam neighbourhood of Dakar. School education and course attendance at all levels are an integral part of Surf Academy. — AFP

The capital’s world-class, year-round waves not only serve as the backdrop to the girls’ lives, but also attract surfers from across the globe, including to the famed Ngor Right wave where the girls often practise.

Khadjou Sambe, Senegal’s first female professional surfer, also a Lebou from Xataxely, is the vice-president of the Dakar chapter of Black Girls Surf, which put on the four-month Surf Academy.

The US-based organisation aims to train and increase the number of black women who participate in surfing, a sport historically dominated by white men.

While its Surf Academy centres on sur­fing and academics, it is also a “development programme” meant to focus on the whole person, said the organisation’s founder and director, American Rhonda Harper, 57.

The first-ever Dakar academy was attended by 23 girls aged seven to 17, of whom 17 had never gone to or were no longer in school. Nearly all were Lebou and live within 20m of the ocean.

They were provided with surfboards and wetsuits.

Soukeye posing with her surfboard on a beach on the Almadies coastline in Dakar. Soukeye has been taking part in Surf Academy since 2019 and is responsible for training new participants. — AFP

And they participated in activities like fitness, meditation and surfing during the day, while receiving schooling at night in a program for students no longer in the formal education system.

While the academy ended at the end of January, the school portion lasts through July.

Six participants already enrolled in school participated in the academy as a weekend and after-school activity.

Like many Lebou, Seynabou’s father is a diver, plunging for fish which have drastically disappeared from Senegal’s coast due to industrial trawling.

Her mother, who only went to primary school, sells fatayas and nems – savoury pocket pastries and spring rolls – outside the family’s compound where their extended family lives.

Since leaving school Seynabou has been “just staying at home”, said 43-year-old Marieme Wade, adding that she advised her daughter “to continue with surfing, maybe it will open doors”.

“We don’t have the means to pay for her studies,” she explained from their home’s back courtyard, where young children capered about and two rams watched from an enclosure.

Harper looks on while sitting in the small working-class neighbourhood of Xataxely in Ngor. Harper, who lives between Senegal and California, founded the academy with the aim of teaching surfing to disadvantaged Senegalese girls, many of whom have dropped out of school. — AFP

The girls in the academy are beginners at surfing.

“I had never surfed before this programme,” Seynabou Tall said.

Many are also beginners at education: Most had to be enrolled in the “first grade”, said Silmang Pierre Ndior, an official at the Soeur Marie Luc Vaderloge literacy centre where they attend night school.

The nascent surfers’ lack of elementary education is not rare in Senegal.

The country’s primary school completion rate was just 60% for girls and 55% for boys in 2022, according to the Unesco International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa.

Soukeye Ndoye, 16, coaches in the Surf Academy, having participated in Black Girls Surf since 2019, and said she is delighted to “hold an important position I never thought I would be able to hold”.

“At first, I knew nothing about surfing ... I was always falling and often getting hurt. But now, I go out on my own and I have good support.”

Surfers holding their boards before a practice session on a beach along the Almadies Corniche in Dakar. — AFP

Later this year Senegal will host the Youth Summer Olympic Games, the first African country ever to hold an Olympics event.

Surfing has been a part of the Olympics since 2020 but will not be included in the 25 competition sports in Dakar, to the dismay of the city’s surf community.

Thirty-year-old Sambe, who grew up two to three metres from the beach in Xataxely, has her eyes on the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

As a child, her parents forbade her to surf, an activity they believed was for boys.

Soukeye (in black) coaching a dozen young Senegalese girls at the beach. About 20 participants from Xataxely – a tight-knit fishing village within the capital’s Ngor neighbourhood – are part of an inaugural Surf Academy that requires them to attend school, with the promise of riding waves serving as the incentive. — AFP

In order to participate, she would sneak out the window or leave the house dressed in formal attire to throw her family off.

“In the beginning, it was difficult because we are girls and we didn’t see other girls who surfed,” Sambe said.

Now several girls who started out in Black Girls Surf are participating in or even winning national competitions. — AFP