Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o in acrimonious split from surfing’s Selema Masekela, “A love devastatingly extinguished by deception”

"It is necessary for me to share a personal truth and publicly dissociate myself from someone I can no longer trust," writes Lupita Nyong’o.

At the turn of the new year, the surfing world was treated to news that beloved broadcaster Selema Masekela, the Los Angeles-born occasional surf commentator, had hitched his considerable caboose (protein bars!) to the film star Lupita Nyong’o.

Selema, who is fifty-two, is the sort of person who would put anyone under his spell. As I may’ve mentioned a couple months back, I met the extreme sports identity at Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch in 2017.

Occupying one of the bench seats in the Surf Ranch’s heated jacuzzi aprés our allotted waves was Sal, he was Sal back then, and just as I was about to enter the swirling maelstrom, heated to a pleasing one hundred degrees and offering needed respite from the winter cold and a possible cure for a dreadful hangover, his telephone rang.

Sal asked me to rummage through his colourful outfit which was bundled on a barrel, enough clothes to suggest, or was I hoping, he was nude in the tank, and to pick it up.

It was Kelly Slater.

“Answer it,” he commanded, which I did.

Kelly Slater remained silent when he heard my voice, an early portent of the blood feud that would simmer for the following six years.

After a howl of laughter and some chortling Sal hung up. Despite an expanded adiposity, he gobbled protein bar after protein bar, informing me of the health-giving properties of the foil-wrapped chocolate chip treats.

Stories flowed like a river of honey and I left, like everyone who spun in his orbit that day, a fan for life.

I didn’t heard from Sal again and only knew in passing that he’d transitioned to Selema.

In January this year, Chas wrote that Selema and Lupita Nyong’o had not only made public their declaration of love but had spent four million dollars on a a sprawling $4 million Los Angeles home together.

Nine months later, the relationship is in ruins, with Lupita Nyong’o publishing an unflattering picture of their affair on Instagram.

“At this moment, it is necessary for me to share a personal truth and publicly dissociate myself from someone I can no longer trust,” writes Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her performance in 12 Years a Slave. “I find myself in a season of heartbreak because of a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception… I am reminded that the magnitude of the pain I am feeling is equal to the measure of my capacity for love. And so, I am choosing to face the pain, cultivating the courage to meet my life exactly as it is, and trusting that this too shall pass.”

The actual act of catastrophic deception is left for the reader to decode but is it possible Selema may’ve forgot to mention he is estranged from BeachGrit’s own Chas Smith, often described as the “voice of surfing”, or was it his savaging by Black Girls Surf’s Rhonda Harper whose online tirade included the unkind epithet “Uncle Tom.” 

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