鈥楳y talent is in the water.鈥� Black South Africans embrace kayaking.
| Soweto, South Africa
As a kid growing up in South Africa, Nkosi Mzolo and his friends had a front-row seat each summer to Africa鈥檚 largest river kayak race, a 75-mile endurance paddle over bone-rattling rapids.
But as he sat on the banks of the Msunduzi River near Durban watching the paddlers stream by in a rainbow of bright spandex, he couldn鈥檛 imagine being in their shoes. 鈥淚 thought that was a sport for white people,鈥� he says.
But Mr. Mzolo happened to grow up straddling a revolution. When he was born, in 1988, Black South Africans like Mr. Mzolo couldn鈥檛 vote or live in most parts of the country, let alone play sports with white people. By the time he was 12, though, paddling was changing in post-apartheid South Africa.
Why We Wrote This
Black South Africans, who were once excluded from kayaking, have embraced the sport in Soweto, where a Black-run club brings new talent to the fore.
A local Black kayaker invited Mr. Mzolo to learn the sport. Then in 2007, Mr. Mzolo caught the attention of a wealthy, white hobby kayaker in Johannesburg, who paid for him to train as a firefighter and paramedic, and eventually hired him as a kayaking coach. Now Mr. Mzolo聽runs聽a canoe club that trains Black paddlers, opening up a world to them, just as it opened to him.
鈥淐anoeing pulled my life off the course it was on and put me on a different one,鈥� he says.
Today, he coaches more than 75 young, Black kayakers in Soweto, near Johannesburg, hoping the sport, known to South Africans as canoeing, might do the same for them. 鈥淚 want to give them something in their lives to look forward to,鈥� he says.
In a sports-mad country still wrestling with the legacies of segregation and colonialism, integration in sports is a deeply political issue. During apartheid, South Africa was banned from international competitions like the Olympics for refusing to send racially mixed teams. Today, there are controversial racial quotas for the national teams in most major sports. But Mr. Mzolo鈥檚 paddlers are part of a generation that grew up thinking they could play whichever sport they chose. 聽
The club Mr. Mzolo now leads, the Soweto Canoe and Recreation Club (SCARC), was started in 2003 by Brad Fisher, the advertising executive and paddler who sponsored Mr. Mzolo鈥檚 education. He later hired Mr. Mzolo, who was working as a gardener in Johannesburg, as one of the club鈥檚 early coaching recruits.
Since then, the club has trained some of the country鈥檚 top Black paddlers. Mr. Mzolo himself has gone on to finish the Dusi Canoe Marathon, the long-haul race he watched as a boy, 17 times. But more importantly for coaches like Mr. Mzolo, the club has given thousands of kids a passion they might never have otherwise found.
鈥淢y talent is in the water,鈥� says Chwayita Fanteni, who is 16 and has been paddling for three years. 鈥淚 like the energy I get from winning.鈥澛�
On a recent afternoon, as cars buzzed past nearby on an arterial road, Ms. Fanteni dipped her paddle into the Orlando Dam and pushed off, joining her teammates on a paddle around the . Behind them, the sun ducked behind a pair of decommissioned electrical cooling towers.
The young paddlers trained at SCARC compete in a league with teams across Gauteng, the province where Johannesburg is located, and often travel across the country for races. Gauteng has 16 recreational paddling clubs, scattered across formerly white and Black areas. South Africans have had kayaking success on the world stage, including Hank McGregor, who has won 11 gold medals at the Canoe Marathon World Championships.
For the young paddlers training at Power Park in Soweto, there is also an idol closer to home. Siseko Ntondini, an elite kayaker who was the at the Dusi, grew up in an informal settlement not far from here, and got his start at SCARC.
鈥淢y goal is to go to Russia. For the Olympics,鈥� says Nhlamulo Mahwayi, who is 12 and has been training with SCARC since he was nine. So far, he鈥檚 only been as far as Cape Town, which he rates as 鈥渟o fun and so clean. I saw people surfing.鈥�
Like many of the young paddlers here, when Mr. Mahwayi joined the club in 2018, he didn鈥檛 know how to swim.
鈥淣inety-five percent of these kids, I would say, they come here not knowing how to swim at all,鈥� says Mr. Mzolo. That too is a legacy of apartheid, which barred Black South Africans from most pools and beaches. Today, many parents never teach their kids how to swim because they themselves don鈥檛 know how to.
New recruits to SCARC, then, often spend months in a nearby public pool before they ever dip a paddle in the water.
鈥淣o, it wasn鈥檛 hard. It just took time,鈥� says Juliet Mzibeli, who is also 12 and has been canoeing since she was nine. Her answers are short and blunt. She doesn鈥檛 have time to speak to a journalist for long 鈥� the few hours between the end of school and sunset are precious, and they鈥檙e for canoeing.
Mr. Mzolo comes here when he can, when he isn鈥檛 working a night shift as a firefighter and paramedic, or sleeping one off; on other days he sends his junior coaches, young men who came up through the club themselves. It鈥檚 exhausting, he says, but nowhere near the worry he felt last year when the club was closed for five months during South Africa鈥檚 coronavirus lockdown.
During those months, he spent his days rushing COVID-19 patients to hospitals, and his nights wondering how his athletes were doing, many attempting to do homeschooling with no internet, computers, or even sometimes electricity. Some lived in informal settlements with no reliable water or power. Many of their parents had lost their jobs.
With public facilities like parks and dams closed, the club couldn鈥檛 train. Mr. Mzolo went door to door visiting his athletes and bringing food parcels to their families 鈥� just as he often did before the pandemic. The club, which is free to join, raises money from corporate sponsorships and personal donations to cover the cost of equipment and entry fees for competitions.
In 2007, a young paddler in the club drowned during a training here. 鈥淎fter he died, we tried to understand what had happened, because he knew how to swim,鈥� Mr. Mzolo says. 鈥淭he only thing that we could think is that he didn鈥檛 have much strength because maybe he came to training hungry.鈥�
Since then, he says, the club has provided monthly food parcels to all its members. On a recent afternoon, the coaches arrived in a minibus loaded with heavy bags of cornmeal, rice, tinned beans, and oil, enough for every athlete to take home a share.
鈥淟ooking at myself, I started where these kids are,鈥� he says. 鈥淣ow I鈥檓 trying to be part of their journey.鈥�
