The Deep Duck Dive Podcast

In a return to recording episodes after a long hiatus, we take a somewhat different approach and discuss watery-oriented ecocritical poetry. Karen chats to Glen about his debut collection of poetry, In the Slowness of Melting (Cape Town: Karavan Press, 2026).

We touch on four topics surfaced by the poems: writing poetry versus writing history; the history and memory of beach apartheid in South Africa; thinking with the ocean to advocate for a politics of care and climate justice, and surfing and the aging body.

An Extract

Paddling

to what pleasure?

sporting hope in dying

waters

From the poem: "Paddle Action"

About the Book

In the Slowness of Melting (Cape Town: Karavan Press, 2026) is a collection of lyric poems that echo the waves in form and reflect in content on surfing, the beach, the ocean and our planet. Moving between the past, present and future, the collection registers internal and external shifts of focus to foreground change and a sense of loss. It reflects on our social world and seeks a more utopian future in the face of our climate crisis. The book is ecocritical poetry infused with a surf goth aesthetic, presenting a sunburnt disposition while thinking with/in the Anthropocene.

The collection curates poems Glen has penned over a few decades, but mostly from the post-Covid-19 period. The poems provide him with a voice he's not been able to include in his historical writing on surf culture. The poems historicise surfing or the beach and reflect on sea-level rise and climate change to frame a poetics of our planetary climate crisis in the Anthropocene.

In this episode, Glen interviews Andy Mason, comix artist, author of What's So Funny: Under the Skin of South African Cartooning (Double Storey, 2010) and surfer about his latest underground comix, Apocalypse WOW! Revisited (2025). There are several authorial identities that shadow Andy, and you may also know him as N.D. Mazin or Pooh! And Poynton Shute, as you will hear in this episode, is attempting unravel the question: Who is the real Author? While Glen seems to be on a quest to untangle the narrative web spun from Apocalypse WOW! Revisited in revealing utopian impulses. This episode opens up a means to how the South may be represented in the study of comic art.   

Complicating the audio nature of podcasting, Andy reads from his comix works during the interview - describing action in panels and giving voice to characters that he was lived with for many years. This is unsettling as reading is the textual practice for comix; and it challenges the will to place content on YouTube to supplement the podcast. The enchantment is listening to how an authorial voice can translate the visual to allow an audience the imaginative space to bring to life the comic form. 

The interview picks a theme that's important to The Deep Duck Dive Podcast: surfing in the South - in this case, the imagined utopia of Azania in the comix and some real surf spots in South Africa: on the Wild Coast and Muizenberg. Surfing may be a reference point in this episode but the conversation strays beyond the beach. It touches on Andy's life history, the history of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, Left politics, the Sixties and Seventies, environmental threats due to capitalist extractivism, and surfing's counter-cultural ethos and its sell-out to commodification as well as Cape Town's water crisis, living in COVD times, metaphysics, auto-ethnography in comic studies, narrativity in the comix imaginary, and today's visual argot and the possibilities of publishing on demand. 

It obliquely mentions Muizenberg Beach (Cape Town, South Africa), well the episode starts there, and then only meanders back later in the conversion to Muizenberg. But it's not a Muizenberg as you may know it: rather its the site of big waves due to climate catastrophe and/or a re-imagined place seen through surf-lingo, meditative mantas, the rise of women's surfing, and surrealist art. 

There are lots of intertextual references that float to the surface from Andy's comix work in this episode; which opens up a cultural history of cartooning in South Africa. Here's a sample of what you can listen out for: 100% Mambo surfwear designs from Australia; African Soul Surfer (a mid-1990s South Africa surf magazine); Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and cybernetics; the Spy vs Spy comic strip; the influence of the Black Consciousness Movement; the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972); Lenin's underground newspaper Iskra; Roger Lucey's song "Lungile Thabalza" (The Road is Much Longer album, 1979) that was banned by the apartheid state; South African Anton Kannemeyer's comix critiquing Afrikaner culture; Carl Jung's psychic archetypes; Steve Fattar of the South African Sixties rock band The Flames; Slavoj Žižek on Artificial Intelligence (AI); American underground cartoonist Rob Crumb; a quote from Ursula Le Guin's Tales from EarthSea (2001); folk-rock singer Bob Dylan; and the Silver Age of comic books. 

The full oeuvre of the Azaniamania trilogy that Andy mentions in the episode, which collects his works from 1976 to 2025, are:

• The Legend of Blue Mamba (2013), Book 1.
• Apocalypse WOW! Revisited (2025), Book 2, Part 1.
• The Big Frag and Other Stories (forthcoming), Book 2, part 2.
• The Kompleat Prezanian Komix (2025), Book 3.

You can follow Andy Mason on Instagram. 

Love it, hate it, ambivalent, only when desperate, all-time favourite - every Cape Town surfer has an opinion on Muizenberg!

In a bit of a break from our planned episodes, we're starting what will (hopefully) be a mini-series chatting to local surfers about Muizenberg - their history and experiences at the beach, and their thoughts, feels and opinions about it, personally or in the context of surfing more broadly - in South Africa or globally.

To kick things off, in this episode, Karen and Glen chat about their own histories and experiences of surfing at Muizenberg, what they like and don't like (spoiler alert: Karen likes it more than Glen), some history of the beach and area, representation of Muizenberg in films, TV shows and academic writing, and its use as a site for contests and as a drawcard for Cape Town tourism. So join us as we take a deep duck dive (wahey!) into the place you're most likely to be forced to catch a party wave.

Links to sources mentioned in the episode:

Benninger, Elizabeth and Shazly Savahl. 2016. "The use of visual methods to explore how children construct and assign meaning to the “self” within two urban communities in the Western Cape, South Africa." International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being 11(1): https://doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v11.31251

Davis, Roxy Davis. 2024. "A world of possibilities: an exploration of experiences of children with disabilities participation in a surf therapy programme in South Africa." PhD Thesis, University of Cape Town, Faculty of Health Sciences, Division of Disability Studies: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/40740

Martín-González, Roberto, Kamilla Swart and Ana-María Luque-Gil. 2021. “Tourism Competitiveness and Sustainability Indicators in the Context of Surf Tourism: The Case of Cape Town." Sustainability 13, 7238: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137238

Mahler-Coetzee, Jacques. 2017. “From Fringe To Core: Contemplating Surfing's Potential Contribution To Sustainable Tourism Development In South Africa.” Tourism in Marine Environments 12 (3-4): https://doi.org/10.3727/154427317X15062902755932

Rolfe, Elana. 2015. "A formative evaluation of the development and implementation of the waves for change coach training programme.” MA Thesis, University of Cape Town, Faculty of Commerce, Department Organisational Psychology: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/33142

Stroehlein, Leonie. 2021. "The increased feminization of the surfing economy: An exploration of the lived experiences of female surfers in Muizenberg, South Africa.". MA Thesis, University of Cape Town, Faculty of Commerce, School of Management Studies: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/36171

Thompson, Glen. 2023. "Dreaming of 'Level Free': Lockdown and the cultural politics of surfing during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa." In David Andrews, Holly Thorpe and Joshua Newman (eds), Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times: COVID Assemblages, (Palgrave Macmillan).

Twidle, Hedley. 2021. "Barbarian Phase." Wasafiri, 36 (2): https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2021.1879478

Worm Sandy. 2014. “Black People Don’t Surf.” Photography series exhibited at the Beyond the Beach Exhibition curated by Paul Weinberg, Casa Labia Gallery, Muizenberg, 21 September - 21. Artist statement at: https://monthofphotography.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/sandy-worm-pdf.pdf

Film and TV Series referenced in this episode

Black People Don’t Swim, dir. Lucilla Blankenberg, (Community Media Trust, 2008). For the full documentary about longboarder Kwezi Qika, see https://www.cmt.org.za/list-of-documentaries/ (scroll down to the film).

Amaza, dir. Lucilla Blankenberg, Laddie Bosch and Tim Spring, (Community Media Trust, 2014). This 13 episode TV series was aired on SABC1.

https://www.tvsa.co.za/shows/viewshowseasons.aspx?showId=2228&season=1

https://www.cmt.org.za/our-work/#primetimetv

For a behind the scenes of making Amaza video, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzA-eWrFj00

We received funding for podcast recording equipment from the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape, as part of the New Imaginaries for an Intersectional Critical Humanities Project on Gender and Sexual Justice, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thanks to Christine King for our logo design. Check out her book, Stormcaller - you can buy it via her website: https://www.christineking.co.za/.

Karen Graaff is a Research Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Glen Thompson is a Research Fellow, History Department, Stellenbosch University.

In this episode, we discuss the development of the current heteronormative culture in mainstream surfing, tracking its historical connection to colonialism, Christianity, and capitalism, and how that's resulted in a space that's often very unwelcoming for anyone who isn't cisgendered and heterosexual. We then look at how queer surf groups have developed their own safe spaces, as well as how most mainstream surf organisations have failed dismally to do this. Case in point: we end with a short note on the WSL's controversial decision to include Abu Dhabi as a stop on the Championship Tour in 2025, and what it says about their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Links below:

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest - Anne Mcclintock:

https://www.routledge.com/Imperial-Leather-Race-Gender-and-Sexuality-in-the-Colonial-Contest/Mcclintock/p/book/9780415908900?srsltid=AfmBOorpef6Z_EQqHCbDEz3LpAMzbW6xLqad3yTHWoyCd79Ev8W1vda-

Ways of Being: A Thematic Analysis of Queer Identities in the Heteronormative Surf Space - Rachel Rouquet:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365361511_Ways_of_Being_A_Thematic_Analysis_of_Queer_Identities_in_the_Heteronormative_Surf_Space#fullTextFileContent

Women in Wetsuits: Revolting Bodies in Lesbian Surf Culture - Georgina Roy:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160.2013.731873

WSL's call to take surfing to UAE forces gay athletes like Tyler Wright to pay too high a price - Lucy Small:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/oct/31/world-surfing-league-2025-uae-abu-dhabi-move-gay-athletes-tyler-wright

F*ck you, Billabong. Seriously, f*ck you - Sarah Banting:

https://you.women2.com/f-ck-you-billabong-seriously-f-ck-you-84995f3d7946

Petition to remove Abu Dhabi from WSL calendar:

https://www.change.org/p/remove-abu-dhabi-from-world-surf-league-tour-calendar-support-your-lgbtqia-community

We received funding for podcast recording equipment from the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape, as part of the New Imaginaries for an Intersectional Critical Humanities Project on Gender and Sexual Justice, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thanks to Christine King for our logo design. Check out her book, Stormcaller - you can buy it via her website: https://www.christineking.co.za/.

Karen Graaff is a Research Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Glen Thompson is a Research Fellow, History Department, Stellenbosch University.

In this episode we continue our deep duck dive into the history of surfing in Africa as part of wider scholarly work within critical surf studies and the blue humanities. This episode is Part 2 of a two part series on the topic. Part 2 focuses on surfing in Africa during the modern era, from c. early 1900s to the present.

If you have not listened to Part 1, which covers surfing in during the colonial period, we recommend to you check out the episode [ADD link] before joining us for Part 2.

We cover a lot of coastline in this episode: from Agatha Christie's surfing during her Grand Tour of the colonies in the 1920s to examples of indigenous surfing in West Africa in the late 1940s; from the era of "surf discovery" in Africa in the Sixties and Seventies to the diffusion of surfing through the processes of surf tourism, non-profit led social development, and sportisation in Africa from the 1990s and 2000s. We consider how the term AfroSurf is both productive in creating black and brown surfing identities in Africa and the USA, but also is in need of critique for it ideological and material base. We also look to how the entry of surfing into the Olympics is driving the growth of surfing in Africa. And we offer a case study of surfing in Liberia to illustrate these trends.

References for this episode:

Dawson, Kevin. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Laderman, Scott. Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing, (University of California Press, 2014).

"Liberia to Host Africa’s First-ever Surf Tour," Daily Observer, 18 April 2024, https://www.liberianobserver.com/liberia-host-africas-first-ever-surf-tour

Mami Wata. AfroSurf, (Mami Wata International, 2020).

Moore, Michael Scott. Sweetness and Blood, (Rodale Books, 2010).

Prichard, Mathew (ed). Agatha Christie: The Grand Tour, (Harper, 2013).

Rouch, Jean. “Surf-Riding sur la Côte d'Afrique,” Notes Africaines, vol. 42, 1949.

Sliding Liberia, dir. Britton Caillouette and Nicholai Lidow: Liberia/USA, Woodshed Films, 2007.

The Impossible Wave, dir. Jay Johnson and Jessica Johnson, (International Surfing Association, 2023), available https://theimpossiblewave.com/ - a film on the ISA's path to the Olympics.

Waves for Change, “Liberian surf therapy brings the stoke to Robertsport,” 5 October 2022, https://waves-for-change.org/liberian-surf-therapy-brings-the-stoke-to-robertsport/

In this episode we dive into the history of surfing in Africa as part of wider scholarly work within critical surf studies and the blue humanities. This episode is Part 1 of a two part series on the topic.

We focus primarily on the history of surfing in West Africa, which has colonial records of African aquatic activities. This history draws on the historical work of Kevin Dawson which explores, and reclaims, West African aquatic practices. We also speculate on what other historical sources scholars could look to when opening up the archives to find evidence for surfing in the past elsewhere along the extensive African coastline. In this episode we focus the period from the early modern period (c. 1500) to the beginning of the twentieth-century (c. early 1900s).

For the history of surfing in Africa in the modern era (c.1900 to the present), check out the Part 2 episode in this link: ADD LINK.

Scholarship referenced in this episode:

Booth, Douglas. "Mediating Contested Narratives of the Globalization of Sport: The Case of Surfing" in Joseph Maguire, Katie Liston and Mark Falcous (eds), Palgrave Handbook on Globalisation and Sport, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Dawson, Kevin. "Surfing beyond Racial and Colonial Imperatives in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and Oceania" in Dexter Zavalza Hugh-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman (eds), The Critical Surf Studies Reader, (Duke University Press, 2017).

Dawson, Kevin. Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Dawson. Kevin. "A Brief History of Surfing in Africa and the Diaspora" in Mami Wata, AfroSurf, (Mami Wata, 2020).

Corbin, Alain. The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750-1840, (Penguin, 1995). Originally published in French in 1988.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House, (Duke University Press, 2022).

Maguire, Joseph, Katie Liston and Mark Falcous (eds). Palgrave Handbook on Globalisation and Sport, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. “It Never Existed,” Aeon, 13 January 2023, https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-precolonial-africa-is-vacuous-and-wrong.

In this episode, we discuss the issue of fairness in sport, and how a term that sounds neutral is in fact heavily politicised. We start with the definition of fairness in sport generally, and how many factors it does not include, particularly in terms of access. We then turn to discussing fairness in surfing in particular, and how loaded the term is, given that surfing is a subjectively judged sport, and that the playing field is anything but controlled (a key feature of fairness in other sports). The episode ends with Karen going on a rant about the ridiculousness of bans on trans women in sport, and how it really isn't the big issue everyone seems to think it is.

Links below:

IOC policy on trans women - https://olympics.com/ioc/human-rights/fairness-inclusion-nondiscrimination

WSL policy on trans women - https://www.worldsurfleague.com/posts/511243/wsl

ISA policy on trans women - https://isasurf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ISA_Transgender-Policy_Updated_3_9_23.pdf

Caster Semenya's book [The Race To Be Myself] is a great resource for learning more about both her journey, and the development of the IOC's position on women with higher testosterone levels.

We received funding for podcast recording equipment from the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape, as part of the New Imaginaries for an Intersectional Critical Humanities Project on Gender and Sexual Justice, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thanks to Christine King for our logo design. Check out her book, Stormcaller - you can buy it via her website: https://www.christineking.co.za/.

Karen Graaff is a Research Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Glen Thompson is a Research Fellow, History Department, Stellenbosch University.

In this episode we discuss why history matters, who makes surfing history, in what forms surf history is produced (from the surf media and surf films to surf museums), and the uses of surfing history. We discuss Kevin Dawson's Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and how Dawson adds to the historiography of Atlanic Africans, the West African slave trade and the African diasporia in the Americas, and African agency through aquatic practices such as swiming and surfing. We close off the episode by providing our take on why unsettling surf history is important for the production of knowledge about surfing’s pasts in the Global South. 

We also make reference to Kevin Dawson's essay "A brief histroy of surfing in Africa and disapora" in AfroSurf (Mami Wata, 2020), which was republished in the South African news site, the Daily Maverick. 

We received funding for podcast recording equipment from the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape, as part of the New Imaginaries for an Intersectional Critical Humanities Project on Gender and Sexual Justice, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thanks to Christine King for our logo design.

Karen Graaff is a Research Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Glen Thompson is a Research Fellow, History Department, Stellenbosch University.

In this introductory episode of the The Deep Duck Dive Podcast, we introduce you to the podcast and ourselves as academics living and surfing in the global South (South Africa). The podcast seeks to engage with the oceanic turn in the global South by focusing on issues that matter within surfing as a lifestyle sport. As co-hosts, we have approached podcasting as forms of public pedagogy and public scholarship.

To read more about our approach to this podcast as a soundwork that provides an alternative pedagogical practice within a justice-to-come public scholarship that seeks to contribute to the intellectual currents of hydrocolonialism, hydrofeminism and critical surf studies, please read our open access journal article below:

Thompson, Glen, & Graaff, Karen. (2023). "Thinking with/in surfing: Podcasting as public pedagogy and scholarship in/for the global South." Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 11(2), 38-54.

We received funding for podcast recording equipment from the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape, as part of the New Imaginaries for an Intersectional Critical Humanities Project on Gender and Sexual Justice, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Thanks to Christine King for our logo design.

Karen Graaff is a Research Fellow, Women's and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Glen Thompson is a Research Fellow, History Department, Stellenbosch University.