picked it up really quickly needless to say.
How did playboating start in Africa and why did it take so long to develop? Africa being Africa, there aren’t many bridges. The mentality was to hammer the six or seven hours between bridges if you wanted to go paddling for the day otherwise you’d be stuck in the jungle. That being said, we did a lot of overnight trips but fibreglass wasn’t conducive to playing. If you hit a rock on an ender, you were liable to rip the nose off. Once we got plastic, things changed. It still wasn’t like today, though. The boats were so big you could only side-surf holes and the only way to get out was to do an ender and hope it spat you free. That was essentially all we were doing back then.
You come from a country where you were a part of a racial minority and yet all the paddlers were white….
The maid in the communal paddling house I lived in back in the 1970s once asked me, “Jerome, you spend an awful lot of time pad- dling—they must pay you a lot of money.” I told her, “Mavis, they don’t pay me anything.” She looked at me, in total disbelief, and said, “Jerome, you mean that you’re only playing?!”
Paddling is quite an elitist sport. These days you probably need two $1,500 boats, a car and lots of leisure time. In South Africa, you see black people lining up at 4 a.m. in front of taps along the road to get their water for the day. They are barely surviving; they don’t have time to even think about owning a boat or paddling. In North America, economics plays a big part in who participates but I also think socially and culturally minorities are funneled into sports like basketball and soccer that are more a part of their communities.
Do you see anything in paddling today that has been lost from the early days? There was no retail industry for boating when I started. We would make our own boats, fix and modify them, break them, swim—it was great! We were paddling rivers that no one else had done before. We were once opening a section of river and stopped to ask a farmer what it was like further on and he said, “No one knows because it’s impossible to go down there.” You can’t find that any more. We never wrote our trips up as first descents. It was just part of the joy of discovery.
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Where’s the best place to learn to paddle?
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