Sam Brown Jr allowed himself a grin and a quick thumbs-up as he snapped onto a longboard to tame a monstrous wave rearing up behind him like a frothing beast.
The 21-year-old Liberian has joined a growing number of surfing devotees in the West African nation, attracted by the perfect waves in what is being touted as one of the world’s last genuinely unspoiled paradises for the sport.
“What makes surfing in Liberia so good is the waves,” Brown said as he settled back on the beach, evidently pleased with expressing an obvious insight, but one that bears repeating to surfers worldwide.
Photo: AFP
Liberia is still known around the globe for back-to-back civil wars between 1989 and 2003 that left more than 200,000 people dead and the country in ruins, with images of drugged-up child soldiers brandishing machine guns beamed across the world.
Despite this, surf tourism is slowly picking up and the country is gaining a reputation for its faultless left-hand point breaks — locations where waves break offshore — its spectacular beaches and water as warm as the welcome given by the friendly locals.
It is thought that the first surfers emerged in Liberia in the 1970s, but it was not until a film about the nascent sport began winning awards in 2008 that a steady stream of tourists began flowing into the country.
US student filmmakers Nicholai Lidow and Britton Caillouette came to the country in 2006 to shoot Sliding Liberia, which tells the story of Alfred Lomax, who became Liberia’s first surfer after finding a bodyboard in a Monrovia trash can while fleeing rebels.
The film began pulling in surfers from the US and Europe as well as expatriates living in the capital, who in turn encouraged locals like Brown — who lives with his parents and sister in the poor northwestern fishing village of Robertsport — to join in.
“We didn’t know anything about surfing in Liberia during the war. It was tourists who introduced the game to Liberia. When they come, we sit with them and they talk to us about the game and we listen,” Brown said.
Liberia’s best waves are found around Brown’s village, walking distance from Sierra Leone on the Cape Mount Peninsula and just up the coast from Lake Piso, a sparkling 100km2 oblong lake that dominates the western part of the country.
Reaching Robertsport involves a three-hour drive northwest from Monrovia, mainly along a dirt track that snakes through cassava fields, palm oil plantations and dense forest that eventually give way to a stunning coastline.
Decrepit plantation-style houses — many abandoned during the war — line wide boulevards that buffer the hills on the edge of town.
A deep underwater trench off a short stretch of southwest-facing coast creates five perfect point breaks within walking distance of each other, described by those in the know as the best left-handers in Africa, perhaps even the world.
Claudius Bright, a 20-year-old high-school student from Robertsport, has been surfing for three years and has ambitions to study agriculture at university.
“When I started surfing it was really tough because it makes the muscles tired. When we don’t have food at home to eat, we come to the water and don’t surf, because after surfing, you can be hungry,” he said.
Brown and Bright are part of a 30-strong community that surf at Shipwreck’s, one of Africa’s longest left-hand breaks across from the historic cotton tree where the first Liberian president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, carved his name after arriving by ship from Virginia in 1829 to what was then a colony of free African-Americans.
The Atlantic swells up at Shipwreck’s from the southern hemisphere, heaving itself onto the coast in a perfect peel, forming a wave surfers call a “pipeline” that can be ridden for 200m or more.
Moritz Fahsig, 38, and his girlfriend, Susi Brandt, 31, have taken time away from their jobs in online marketing in Munich, Germany, to surf at Robertsport, lured by stories of expanses of coastline a world away from the crowded beaches of Australia or South Africa.
“In other places, when you are alone you are lucky. Here, when you have even one person to share your good wave with then you are lucky,” Moritz told reporters.
Surfers used to have to camp on the beach, but accommodation has become more civilized since Sean Brody and Daniel Hopkins, both 29, opened Liberia’s first surf school with lodgings five years ago, which they called Kwepunha Retreat.
“I can’t say the sport of surfing is single-handedly keeping the peace, but I believe there is a strong correlation,” said Brody, whose brother is US actor Adam Brody of The OC fame. “When you have a large population of youth with nothing to do, there’s the temptation to get involved with drugs, to get involved with guns.”
Kwepunha runs a sharing system allowing local youngsters to borrow surfboards on condition that they are attending school, taking part in beach cleanups, and being generally responsible citizens.
“The kids in this community, I can’t say they are perfect angels — they are arguing with each other and bickering — but they are fighting over who caught the best wave, not going back to civil war,” Sean Brody said.
While some Westerners may want to keep the coastline a secret, locals in Robertsport hope the surge in surfing can help alleviate the economic and social problems of a war-ravaged community that scrapes by on the meager spoils of artisanal fishing.
Sean Brody, who has a masters in sustainable tourism, believes a tourist influx is inevitable, but is determined to ensure that new visitors, surf schools and hotels preserve Liberia’s culture and environment, and benefit the local economy.
“Tourism will come. It’s just important to us to be here early on to try to set up a sustainable model,” he said.
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