Abstract
The South African government implemented a hard lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One lockdown measure was a national beach ban which received national attention due to anti-lockdown protests at three beaches on May 5, 2020. In contextualising these beach protests within the period of March to August 2020, this chapter critically examines how surfing’s historical non-conformist values and ideas of freedom shaped surfer social attitudes in COVID times. Protesting surfers’ desire to return to the waves is read as the making of a politics of refusal. This refusal to acquiesce to the state’s regulations was the most visible response of surfers to the lockdown and shaped national tropes about surfer entitlement entangled with South African surfing’s history of whiteness and middle-class privilege. Refusalist responses, however, were contested within the South African surfing community as alternative configurations of the relationship between surfing and the lockdown were also expressed.
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Notes
- 1.
There are similarities between the anti-lockdown attitudes of white, middle-class South Africans and the anti-lockdown protests in the North, pointing to the transnational circulation of conservative and libertarian political ideologies.
- 2.
I use the term surfing inclusively for all ocean-based wave-riding boardsports.
- 3.
There were on average 2.26 protests per day reported for the seven-year period from 2013.
- 4.
While Zigzag called for solidarity with the BLM global paddle out protests in June 2020, no local protest occurred due to the beach ban. Surfer-led BLM protests took place in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Costa Rica, France, Indonesia, Senegal, U.K. and U.S.A.
- 5.
Nationally, the Democratic Alliance (DA) is the official opposition to the ruling ANC. Of the nine provinces in South Africa, the Western Cape is governed by the DA while all the other provinces are governed by the ANC.
- 6.
However, it was estimated that there were some 60,000 surfers in the country in 2007 (Pike, 2007, p. 37).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Andrews, Holly Thorpe, David Johnson and Karen Graaff for their comments on this chapter.
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Thompson, G. (2023). Dreaming of “Level Free”: Lockdown and the Cultural Politics of Surfing during the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Africa. In: Andrews, D.L., Thorpe, H., Newman, J.I. (eds) Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times . Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14387-8_7
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