How Pro Surfing's Peaceful Protest Went Down In Apartheid South Africa

Keep politics out of surfing. It’s a phrase that floats around the surf community at large. The sentiment is that surfing should be a place to escape the craziness of life on terra firma—a place where, as SURFER Magazine founder John Severson wrote, “a surfer can be alone with his thoughts.”

Of course, Severson also sold photos of President Nixon on the beach at Cotton’s Point to LIFE Magazine. Living free and easy isn’t so easy when somebody’s trying to build a harbor on top of you break or telling you to go surf somewhere else simply because of what you look like.

In April 1985, Australian world champ Tom Carroll announced that he planned to boycott the upcoming South African leg of the world tour. Having just won his second world title, when Carroll broke the news at Bells Beach it quickly reverberated around the surfing cosmos.

“On the beach at Bells,” one reporter noted, “there was practically no other subject of conversation.”

Meanwhile, Santa Barbara’s Tom Curren had surfed South Africa in the early 1980s as part of the U.S. national team. However, by ’85, he could no longer ignore the reality of the apartheid state. When the African National Congress (ANC) called for foreign athletes to boycott events, Curren followed Carroll’s lead. 

“I really enjoyed going to South Africa and surfing the waves there [but] there was a bigger moral issue…I felt good about my decision…regardless of how it would affect my ratings,” he explained a number of years later.

The two were also joined by Aussie Cheyne, who boycotted the events in ’85, but returned the next year with “Free Mandela” written on his board.

South African Martin Potter also decided to take a hard pass on the events in his native land. Surfing under the flag of the United Kingdom, he was more entrenched in what what happening in South Africa at the time, as well as subject to the implications for standing up for what he believed in.

“The more I grew up and the more I got a bit older, and thought about things, I knew it wasn’t right,” recalled Potter, who spent a good amount of time around San Clemente during this period. “Competing in the events in South Africa was almost supporting the way all that stuff was happening.”

And while there’s no comparison to the oppression that black South Africans were living under, all four surfers did pay a price for their shared political stance. All of them missed out on prize money and important world tour points that could have helped them win a world title. Carroll ended a sponsorship deal with a South Africa-based surfing company, while Potter lost friends and even got word that his life would be in danger if he returned to country.

“Potter brought the 1985 anti-apartheid boycott into sharper focus,” writes Matt Warshaw in the book “The History of Surfing.”

“It was fine for Carroll to say his stance on South Africa came from ‘the realization that things weren’t getting any better for blacks.’ When Potter said he’d personally watched black surfers get arrested for riding waves on Durban’s whites-only beaches—the point was that much stronger,” Warshaw continues.

Ian Carines, who was Executive Director of the ASP at the time (the precursor to the WSL) stated, “We don’t have a political policy.”

But by ’89, the boycott had gained traction as 25 of 30 of the top ranked surfers avoided South African competitions. In February 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and in 1994 a new government, led my Mandela, ultimately ended the apartheid system.