From the sand-covered road that loops around Dakar’s Cap Vert peninsula, Elimane Dieng’s surf shack looks like it was abandoned long ago.
But Dieng sits inside on a white plastic chair surrounded by weathered surfboards, gazing out to sea at his flock of young Senegalese surfers.
“Our power is the sea,” said the slight man who looks much younger than his 38 years. “And when you’re the son of a fisherman, of a Lebou, it’s easy to learn to surf.”
Descended from Senegal’s Lebou tribe of fishermen, Dieng has been renting out boards at the shack on the westernmost point of mainland Africa for 20 years, welcoming visitors to a coast renowned as one of the continent’s best surfing spots.
With a year-round swell and variety of waves unrivaled in West Africa, coupled with Senegal’s political stability, low crime and developed tourist infrastructure, Cap Vert is drawing growing numbers of foreign tourists to its shores.
But they are by no means the first to revel in its waters.
Lebou people loyal to the sea
The Lebou inhabited the peninsula long before Senegal’s capital moved from the northern town of Saint Louis to Dakar in 1958. The Lebou villages of Yoff, N’Gor and Ouakam were slowly swallowed up by the high-rise buildings and rundown suburbs that now house one million people.
But the tribe, who number only in the tens of thousands, have maintained their highly organized culture with its own local administration.
And they remain faithful to their master, the sea.
“When the Lebou first came here in the 15th century, we were farmers and fishermen. Now all the land has gone to housing, so what remains is the sea,” said Dieng. “We know that we can only survive here because of the sea.”
Water acrobatics
Surfing is just the latest development in this culture.
“We are sea people,” said Oumar Samb, a resident of N’Gor fishing village, as he walked through narrow passageways where the sizzle of frying fish and the smell of spiced rice drifted over the walls of family compounds.
“And for sea people, surfing is easy. I learnt on a piece of plywood,” he said as he emerged on the beach, which was crowded with animals and brightly painted wooden fishing boats.
A group of small boys raced through the shallows on flimsy scraps of wood.
Besides the growing number of tourists and foreign residents who regularly surf the turquoise Atlantic waters here, scores of Senegalese have taken up the hobby, often sharing or borrowing boards in one of the world’s poorest countries.
“The Senegalese are not in the habit of giving something to their kids to do in the school holidays,” said Dieng.
“But there are lots of tourists who come with boards, so I ask them when they leave if they will exchange a djembe drum for their surfboard,” he said, referring to the hourglass-shaped wooden instrument common across West Africa.
This is how Dieng built up his fleet of battered long-boards and foam body-boards, often missing the leashes that surfers use to attach them to their ankles.
“Sometimes I teach kids whose parents can pay for lessons. Then I must also teach those kids whose parents don’t have the means,” he said, as one of his students, 14-year-old Mustapha, caught a wave and then rode his board standing on his head.
Dieng laughed. “We call this 'bil-fal': acrobatics on the water.”
‘Endless summer’
The former French colony first won a reputation as a surfing destination after featuring in the 1966 film “The Endless Summer,” a documentary about two Americans on a quest for the perfect wave.
But it took years for the hobby to catch on in Dakar.
Surfers say the sport became popular in the 1980s when windsurfing French residents inspired locals to take up surfing on whatever pieces of wood or foam they could find, creating a pool of anything between 80-250 regular Senegalese participants.
Although most surfers are members of the French, British or large Lebanese expatriate communities, a day spent watching any of the beaches around the peninsula proves just how determined young Senegalese are to learn a new sport, board or no board.
“Before I started surfing with a board, we kids would catch waves with no boards. We have a technique we call 'bara-bopp,' where we paddle, catch a wave and surf on it just using our bodies,” said Dieng, laughing at the memory.
“After that, we made our own boards from wood.”
There may be another reason why Dieng and his compatriots want to catch the perfect wave, and it has more to do with spirits than sport.
When Dieng was struck down with malaria, and modern medicine failed to cure it, he put his faith in traditional healers.
“Each person has a spirit beside him and only the women of the village, the healers, can talk to the spirit and find out why it is making you sick,” he said.
During Lebou ceremonies known as “ndeup,” healers communicate with the spirits by drumming and singing. They also sacrifice a bull on the beach. When the blood of the animal washes out to sea, the Lebou say, it reaches the spirits who live on the islands surrounding the peninsula.
“These islands are sacred,” said Dieng as a fierce storm rolled in and surfers scattered from the water. “No one has the right to go there because that’s where our spirits live.”
