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S T O R Y PHOTOS BY CHRIS MORTENSON
Making Waves
Selema Masekela debuts South African surf brand Mami Wata
Venice resident and TV host Selema Masekela is the co-founder of Mami Wata, a South African surf lifestyle brand dedicated to challenging the culture and norms surrounding the sport. By Kamala Kirk he first time Selema Masekela visited South Africa was for his father’s homecoming tour in 1991 after Apartheid ended. The son of the late South African jazz legend, Hugh Masekela, Selema recalled being uncertain if he wanted to go at the time. “Up until that point, my dad had been a political exile for 30 years and had not been allowed to go home,” Selema said. “Then finally as things were starting to break down, the South African government started inviting exiles to come back home without having to fear for their lives or risk being thrown in prison. That was a moment that my dad had been fighting and waiting for all those years. He called me up and asked me to be a road manager on his tour, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go because there was a lot happening at the time. South Africa was going through a big transition and it was dangerous.” An avid surfer, Selema knew that South Africa had good
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waves. Over the years, he had seen the results from various surf contests that took place at Jeffreys Bay and he had watched footage from surf movies, which spawned his desire to ride the waves there. “The laws had just changed a few months before I visited and beaches that had been for white people only were suddenly open to everyone,” Selema said. “I went on that trip with my dad and by the time we got to the coast, I went to a surf shop, bought a board and went surfing in Durban. No one had seen a person who looked like me surfing there before and after the fourth day, the cops tried to arrest me. It was a wild experience to say the least. I also met many members of my family for the first time – uncles, aunts, grandparents and all these people from this fabric of who I was as a person that I’d been denied because of the crazy unjust system of Apartheid. I fell in love with South Africa and have been going back ever since. In 2019, I was commentating the World Surf League
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event at Jeffreys Bay, which was something I never would have imagined. Now there are many kids that look like me, surfing and embracing the surf culture after a hundred years of being denied that right. It’s very powerful and amazing.” In 2017, Selema was visiting South Africa to help care for his father, who was undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. During his time there, Selema’s friend and South African fashion designer, Maria McCloy, told him about a group of guys in Cape Town (Andy Davis, Nick Dutton and Peet Pienaar) that he needed to meet who had a store and surf label called Mami Wata. They had made a short surf film called “Woza” that told the story of an African surfer. “I was blown away because the film had a black protagonist as a surfer and it was normal, not a novelty,” Selema said. “It was so pivotal for me because that was something I never thought I would get to see. I reached out to the guys, we connected and started talking, then when I went to Cape Town to spend time
with them we all hit it off. I was really impressed by their brand and knew it would be successful in America, so they brought me on as a co-founder and we’ve been working together ever since.” Dutton added, “I met with Selema in Cape Town just after we launched the brand, we had some mutual friends and connections who brought us together. We knew then it was a meeting of minds and ambitions. His experience in global surf culture and the U.S., as well as his world view about the role the brand could have, led to a long and exciting discussion from which the only conclusion was that he joined the brand as a co-founder. The collaboration amongst the four of us is very productive. We’ve each got very different skill sets and experience that come together to create what Mami Wata is. What we have in common is the ambition for the brand and business and alignment around our vision to be a creative force for good in Africa.” In West African Pidgin English,
Mami Wata means “Mother Ocean.” Coincidentally, Selema’s father wrote a song by the same name in 1975. Although the brand was founded in 2017, it recently debuted in the United States earlier this fall. “The majority of the narrative of the surf lifestyle and culture has been dominated by places like Southern California, Australia and Hawaii,” Selema said. “Most of the aspiration of what it looks like to be a surfer has been through this limited lens, but the irony is that there is more surfable coastline in Africa than anywhere in the world and their surf culture dates back historically to the late 1600s. Mami Wata is a brand that celebrates the ocean and surfing through a distinctively African lens. It has been incredibly well received in the U.S.” Dutton said, “People love a range of different things…the mission, the designs, challenging a very tired category and perhaps most importantly, challenging the surf culture and what it means to be a surfer. The response in Africa has been
