Looking for Surfing’s African Roots, We Found a Forgotten Jewish Tragedy

"This may be the craziest story I've ever heard."

Some years ago, I went to the tiny West African country of Sao Tome & Principe to do a documentary exploring whether surfing was actually an indigenous African sport, inspired by an encounter Sam George and Randy Rarrick had a few years prior to that. 

The two intrepid explorers had paddled out at an islet off the main island, Ile de Rojas, and were  immediately joined by a host of kids riding hand-shaped wooden surfboards, but didn’t have the time to find out where this surf culture came from. 

I found a now-defunct small TV network that funded us (on a shoestring) to go back and explore whether surfing had developed on its own in this remote place. This became the Selema (then Sal) Masekela-narrated documentary, “The Lost Wave: An African Surf Story,” featuring Sam (who also co-directed with me) along with Holly Beck and Joe Curren (Tom’s brother). 

While the film would go on play in a couple of small festivals, winning the Malibu Film Festival and a finalist in the Surfer Poll & Video Awards, lt is actually a somewhat modest effort. 

But the greatest story we found didn’t, couldn’t, as you will see, make it into the doc.

In fact, it may be the craziest story I’ve ever heard.

On the last day of filming out local fixer took myself and a cameraman to an abandoned factory for us to get the de rigueur shots of colonial decay. The island had originally been settled by the Portuguese back in the 1600s, but in the 90s threw off its colonial shackles.

But when they left suddenly and en masse, encouraged by Cubans, who were for independence but against coordinated, large scale farm operations which was the foundation of economy, the country fell into ruin.

Anyway, as we got footage of the ruins, we saw locals walking through the dilapidated detritus, but it was noticeable they were dressed in their version of their finest, if still humble, clothes. Which seemed very odd amid the ruined machines illuminated by shafts of dramatic, dust-filled beams of light coming through the holes in the dilapidated roof.

Curious, we followed them in the direction they were heading and found ourselves in a room unlike anything else in the building, and utterly surprising. This was clean and pristine, filled with pews and at the head of the room was a humble wooden pulpit with a cross. And while the walls were painted a cleanly-scrubbed white, what was on one large wall were two images that startled me: a giant Jewish star (in proper blue) and an oversized but entirely unmistakable image of a Menorah.

Together, unmistakable. Shocking. Baffling. Confusing. Even a tad disconcerting. Indisputable Judaic imagery on the walls of a church in an abandoned cocoa factory sitting on the ass-end of an island 140 miles off the coast of Gabon in the Gulf of Guinea.

When we got back to our camp, I asked what the….?

Our fixer, Oswaldo, said matter-of-factly, “Well you’re Jewish, so you must know about the Jewish slave chidren of Sao Tome,” as if discussing what was an obvious and well-known historical story.  

So here’s the story. 

And something Derek didn’t quite get right yesterday. 

It turns out when the King of Portugal decided to kill his Jews, he didn’t actually kill them all. 

See, he has this island his explorers had found, Sao Tome, which he had populated with slaves, found, rounded by and removed from the jungles of Angola. He had tried to get them to work in efficient fashion growing and working the fields and processing cocoa, and btw the way, to this day chocolate from Sao Tome is considered a delicacy. 

But, it wasn’t going well.

So, instead of killing all his Jews the King decided to take a couple of thousand of the Jewish children and ship them to Sao Tome.

Most were young but also educated. 

The plan: to have them intermarry with the Africans and combine the learned ways of the Jews with the physicality of the Africans and create an army of super slaves. 

Braun and brain, so to speak.  

Now, what’s equally fascinating is not only what happened by how this story became discovered and how it lingers today in Sao Tome.

In the 80s, before the Portuguese left the country they decided that the harbor in the capitol needed to be dredged to make it deeper. But as they started the work and pulling up sediment, huge piles of human bones came to the surface. 

They were digging in a mass grave.

And curious about this mysterious pile of bones, a researcher went to the church and began going through the old records. You can say a lot about oppressive Medieval priests, but to their credit, they keep meticulous records and the story came out, as recorded by the priests of that time.

Their account revealed that the overseers at the time, managing the Jews and Africans, had also decided the port needed to be deeper and had taken both groups and forced them to start digging, using the management tools of the day of whipping and beating to keep things moving along. 

The reports revealed the Jews decided this kind of labor wasn’t for them, rallied the Africans, and together they proceeded to revolt. The Portuguese overlords didn’t take kindly to the sass and had all the protesting slaves (both Jewish and African) slaughtered and buried en masse. 

That mass grave is what was dug up.

But the influence of the Jews being on the island has lingered. 

The Jewish star and the large Menorah on the wall in the church room of the abandoned factory are symbols which while apparently not understood exactly, remain part of Sao Tome culture, and the Jewish practices of sitting shiva, bringing grieving families food and burying the dead quickly, remain part of their culture to this day.

And the story of the Jewish Children of Sao Tome is widely known.

I think you can see why we couldn’t weave this into a somewhat of a trifle of a surf story.

BTW, the answer of whether surfing is indigenous turns out to actually be a soft yes. The elders say their people have always surfed, not the result of eyeballing and mimicking a visiting surfer. That it’s generational and they believe it goes back to their tribal heritage from the coast ofAngola. 

And it’s been around for as long as anyone can remember. 

I brought a board back with me, which is sitting by the front door of my house today.  

The full doc is not available on any platform, but here’s a link to an Insta post with a snippet from the movie with the dulcet tones of Selema on full display where we did get a bit of a history lesson wedged in among while delivering a bit of surf blasphemy. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Paul Taublieb (@steezyvideoclips)

(Pssst, if someone really wants to see it, send me a DM via @SteezyVideoClips on Insta and you might find a link in your inbox.)

One other BTW. As a feature film and doc producer, I actually wrote this up into a movie pitch creating a whole narrative. A Jewish “Amistad” I thought!

Turns out Hollywood is not big on eugenics as the core foundation of a feature film and was promptly thrown out of a few pitch rooms.