These days skating is alive and well in South Africa. But it's not always been that way. Thanks to military service and international isolation, bowl riding all but vanished for a whole decade as the country grappled with the policies of a racist government in its last throes.
The original art of deep-transition skateboarding has a small and dedicated following in South Africa. Mental sessions go down regularly, and like any place where urethane meets cement, the traditions of Dogtown pervade in SA. Find it. Drain it. Skate it. Get bust and chased away, or have a killer session and escape unhindered.
But despite the obvious connections with skate’s Southern Californian roots, the road to a thriving skate scene in South Africa has been anything but smooth. In this peculiar nation, where the developing and developed worlds merge and collide, even skateboarding has fallen victim to history.
While skating took off in South Africa at roughly the same time the Z-Boys were ripping up their pools, it slowly fell behind and almost disappeared completely thanks to politics.
In the early seventies a handful of South Africans such as Gary Stevens and Gary Smith were fully sponsored by the likes of Sims and Pepsi, and for a while travelled the country doing demos on the insanely over-vert half pipes of the day.
When not pioneering backyard pools, these early pros were riding the purpose-built skate park walls at Honeydew or Cresta in Johannesburg. Indeed, the fate of Cresta is a metaphor for the stunted growth of skating in SA. All but a few of its transitions were covered in fibreglass after a couple of years to make a water slide funpark. Not long after that, attention was further diverted as the early eighties craze of BMX racing grabbed the attention of the country’s kids.
Thus, skateboarding’s fluctuations in popularity, especially in the US, were total swings of the pendulum here. The sport itself, let alone pool riding, all but vanished a few times. In the lean years, it remained the preserve of literally a handful of fully committed diehards.
This might seem strange, but the fact that there was no Internet and our rulers were a bunch of fascist freaks explains a lot. Thanks to them, we became increasingly isolated from the world in the eighties. Equipment was hard to come by, making your own board was far from uncommon and magazines and videos were nearly impossible to find. So, understandably, things moved slowly.
Like every good subculture, skating spread from the grassroots up. I remember first stealing runs from an older, Dogtown-esque local skate crew, carving a backyard pool near the beach, barefoot, on a plastic board. It was somewhere around ’83, and I can still feel the stoke of getting up to the light, as well as the pain of the requisite slams.
All along the coast, in Cape Town and Durban, scenes like this were prospering. But the real spiritual homes of South African pool and bowl skateboarding (and, de facto, SA skateboarding in general) were two concrete surfaces in landlocked Johannesburg. One was the now-abandoned water park Cresta, stripped of the fibreglass layers by a new generation to reveal the perfect concrete waves beneath. The other was a derelict pool called the Banana Bowl. Without the ocean and beach to distract them, Jo’burg skaters in the early eighties were altogether a more dedicated bunch than their cousins on the coast. They were a tight crew, who helped progress the sport rapidly in these two bowled nirvanas, before spreading the gospel far and wide.
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Truth be told, pool sessions in apartheid South Africa hardly ever resulted in hardcore busts from trigger-happy cops – contrary to what you might think given the country’s historical predilection for violence. The authorities probably had their hands full with enforcing their racist nation, but this was also part of the problem. We were literally living in a State of Emergency, with restrictions including curfews and heavy police presence in some of the sketchier areas, which invariably contained insane pools or bowls.
Any busts that did happen usually only resulted in a bit of rough handling and a few hours in jail. But every now and then, a story would spread of a caning from the odd aggressive, conservative cop. I once got beaten up by a policeman who believed skateboarding was for Satanists. These tales kept you on your toes, and made sure you’d run for your life every time you saw a police van on the horizon.
But the single biggest contributor to the unique decline of skateboarding in South Africa was national service. Conscription, especially between 1988 and 1991, effectively neutered the scene with many skaters forced to swap their boards for rifles. Along with the international metamorphosis from vert to street, this served to almost eliminate the sport in the country yet again. As a result, bowl riding virtually disappeared for a whole decade.
It wasn’t really until 2000 that skating concrete curves made a return to the national psyche. Through the nineties, the global resurgence of street and vert fostered a small yet robust South African skateboarding industry.
It was in Durban that a Tom Lochtefeld Wave House featuring a standing wave was built. This included the Tony Hawk-designed skate park, the largest in Africa, which boasted a sick snake run and a kidney pool, as well as a vert ramp and a sweet double mini ramp.
Before long, the lost generation of old schoolers – some of whom had kept the flame burning, while others had to dust off their decks – came here to resurrect their pool and bowl skills without having to climb a fence. This in turn helped show a handful of local park rats (later inspired by the retro trendmaking film Dogtown and Z-Boys) how to carve these fine cement bowls properly, and to start looking for backyard pools.
These days, South Africa boasts a handful of purpose-built bowls, and backyard pools are popping up all the time. Although the risk of a bust is the same as it ever was – along with the odd gun being pulled on backyard raiders by rented security – the cops are now too busy fighting South Africa’s crazy crime problems to worry about pool skaters.
Like elsewhere in the world, it seems the concrete rush and addiction to riding bowls (and the crack of a grind on a virgin coping tile) are universal and timeless. And for a small but ever increasing minority, the original skateboarding art will never fade away, even in darkest Africa.
Text: Miles Masterson
Photography: Barry Tuck
©2009 RELENTLESS RELENTLESSENERGY.COM
21 October 2008
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