African Surfing and the Ocean as a Source of Joy, with Professor Kevin Dawson

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The blissed out, swell chasing surfer with a single-minded focus on the next great ride is a pervasive outdoorsy archetype that’s completely at odds with the lived experience of many surfers. Take historian Kevin Dawon, a professor at UC Merced, for whom surfing serves as his connection to a rich tradition of African aquatic culture. Dawson is credited with resurfacing the first account of surfing in Africa, from 1640—more than 100 years before Captain Cook’s famed account from Hawaii—and his research centers centuries of oceanic accomplishment by Black communities there and in North America that have been ignored or actively erased. Dawson’s experiences in the waters of Africa, the Caribbean, and his native California bear little resemblance to what many people think of when they hear “surfer,” but they’re drenched in a joy that’s recognizable to anyone who has ever played in the waves.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the outside podcast with Paddyo.
0:12.4	When you were reading these things and making these links in your head,
0:16.6	were you also making kind of like the emotional connection within your own experience of like,
0:22.2	oh my God, this is my passion, but also this is like deep within my DNA.
0:26.6	Oh yeah, very much so.
0:28.5	I mean, the best way to describe it was like getting barreled.
0:31.3	When you're surfing, there's sound around you when you're just surfing a wave that
0:35.0	it hasn't barreled over you.
0:36.2	Then as it barrels over you, you have the sound of the wave
0:39.8	creating this kind of background ambience rumbling,
0:43.5	and that's going on all around you.
0:45.5	So it's loud, in a sense, but then it's also quiet.
0:48.7	You're in this enclosed space,
0:51.1	and you're looking forward trying to get out,
0:53.4	but then you also want to stay in it.
0:55.5	And so it's just this very kind of surreal otherworldly experience. I mean, when I have that aha
1:01.8	moment looking at these accounts of surfing, it was the same thing. I'm in a room, the history
1:06.6	lab at the University of South Carolina. And so I'm in this space with all these other people. But as I'm reading it, it's almost like tunnel vision. Like my world collapses and they're no longer there. And it's just me and the book. And I'm reading the book through my experiences as a surfer, as a black surfer. Yeah, I mean, I think I was probably the first or one of the first historians who surfs to actually read those accounts and then to read it
1:28.2	through that perspective, right? To understand, you know, that there's this perception that
1:32.9	black people don't surf and yet here they are on the pages of history that were written,
1:37.5	you know, hundreds of years ago.
1:40.7	I've talked before on this show about how the wee unmustached child version of myself was
	...

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