Transcriber: Claire Yang Reviewer: Taher Koja
I grew up in Soweto, a landlocked area in Johannesburg,
which is about six hours from the nearest beach.
Growing up, we were told about how we shouldn't be in these waters.
These stories varied from stories about snakes and ancestors and healers.
And there were further reaffirmed at any point when we went to go paint the river.
And one of the kids didn't come back. A reminder of how we shouldn't be there.
It's an interesting thing how as we revisit these stories, as adults,
we're told that there were only told to us to protect us from
the dangers that were around these waters.
Except these stories never left our bodies.
They grew up with us and were further reaffirmed by
the drownings that happened around us.
My first ever ocean experience, I remember the joy that was there,
while fear silently lingered.
And so when the water was at your ankles, you were doing great.
And when the water got to your knees,
you'd be pulled out the water because heaven forbid,
you get taken by these white waters.
The idea of exploration was a foreign concept to us,
and so we would always just splash in the shallows.
Fast forward to a few years later,
I was twenty eight years old when I first had
the opportunity to see beneath the surface of these waters.
Twenty sixteen in Bali were on this boat and as the captain says,
everyone kicked up. I remember looking around.
I had never been that far out to sea and and as I'm looking around,
people are grabbing their snorkel gear and the lady in front of me says,
Have you ever been snorkeling before? And I say no.
She says, Why didn't you say anything? And I said I would have figured it out.
It was in this moment that she gifted me
the most important part of this experience.
She held up the snorkel and she said,
You're going to need to breathe in and out through the snorkel.
So the mask is going to cover your face.
It's going to cover your eyes and your nose
so you will not be able to breathe through your nose.
And so the no your friend and a little bit later,
the captain told us to jump off the boat one.
I don't know how I don't get my head open as we jump off the boat,
but two is the wild panic that happened as I touched that water.
I'm drowning, I'm drowning.
As another lady turned around and said it's physically impossible to drown
so deep waters. And so what was interesting was.
You know, there was a conversation that followed self to self, what's happening,
you know, how to swim, so why are you freaking out?
Thank heaven for that moment,
because as I looked beneath the surface was the most incredible colours,
yellows and blues everywhere,
beautiful fish and mores and shells so perfect
I couldn't believe how this all could be.
And the ocean floor, it felt like she was on a stage being lit up by
the most perfect lighting. It was here that I first felt a sense of belonging.
I've always been a misfit. The odd one out.
When I got back to South Africa, I knew that I had to go back to this feeling,
and so I learned how to scuba dive, which was an incredible experience.
The gift of time witnessing the most wild and unimaginable world.
And in twenty eighteen. I'll never forget this video.
These three girls diving at the bottom of the ocean,
except they did not have any tanks on their backs.
And I remember thinking, what? What, what sorry is this? What's going on?
How were they breathing? Where are they tents? What is going on?
And Google quick Google search and Google said free diving.
I knew that's where I wanted to be.
And so from my first experience, free diving, there I was back to 2016.
That feeling of home and belonging,
like you could never imagine the most sacred way in which
I have explored these waters.
And so I knew I not only wanted to tell everybody who would listen.
I wanted to teach. I wanted black people to be able to experience this too.
I actually could have been a meme.
And so later on, I started the Black Mermaid Foundation.
For years, I had always been the only black person on the boat who was a guest.
And so that meant there was always random commentary headed my way.
Are you going to dive with all of that hair?
What are you going to do with all of that hair?
And then there was my hips that didn't fit so perfectly into these wetsuits
and later, but black people don't swim. And yet there I was.
Sitting in the boat and over.
Spaces can be violent, and they can be violent under the guise of jokes,
assumptions of black people being incompetent and perhaps not capable.
This hair that had been policed my entire life about how it shows up in society,
this body that looks good on everyone else,
but the people from whom it originates,
and this blackness that had been oppressed and marginalized for years.
This black body that have drawn many times in these seas and told pools were
for whites only was told that it had to assimilate in order to exist here.
A failure to recognize that narratives around black people in water were
incomplete. It failed to tell of dispossession of ocean facing lands
and pools that were not for everybody.
And so when we arrive at the narrative around black people in water,
it was not by mistake and the representation that we see in ocean
arenas. It's by design on diverse faces cannot only be violent,
but they can also be exclusionary. In my experience, it was language.
I was on a course on one day and everyone kept
on asking questions in Afrikaans.
I don't speak Afrikaans and so English as a connector was disregarded and
so was I, as someone turned to me and said , I'll translate to you later.
Almost as though I paid any less to be on that course,
the world of firsts is not easy because it requires
for normative to expand themselves were normative on not one, but on multiple.
So from race to class to language, a journey begins.
Diverse representation in the ocean arena is the most important thing not only
for wellness and for health and the mind expansion that happens when we submerge,
but for the healing that needs to happen and for ocean conservation too.
And so I started the foundation for three reasons to create a space
for black and brown communities to be able to access these waters without being
othered, without being policed to to create that needed representation
on social platforms. What would it mean for me to create and create
and create again until someone sees themselves there?
As humans, we have a tendency of placing other people above almost
as though they walk on water.
And so what would it mean to create until someone saw themselves represented?
Because once we see ourselves represented, we begin to believe that we can too.
And last, I wanted to normalize black and brown bodies being water bodies, too.
This would allow us to expand
the worlds of what we thought was possible in careers, too.
Growing up, I knew that you could be a policeman, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer.
No one said you could be a marine biologist or
an underwater cinematographer.
No one said that you could be a dive instructor travelling the world,
teaching the world how to dive. And, of course, in the fictional world, too.
And so I created Lynsey Indonésie, a mermaid and a mermaid,
because growing up, I had never seen a black mermaid, either.
And this representation was important to building out of nothing worlds that
had not existed before. And so what would it mean to create these worlds
so that we could expand to into what is possible?
I needed to see marine biologists of color.
I needed to see local ocean facing communities hold discussions about their
waters, too. And so I went looking for more black
and brown people that were living in ways that I never thought possible before.
And so it started with a spearfishing woman in Trinidad Tobago to
a dive instructor in the Maldives, who was also Muslim.
And here in South Africa, a black woman who was an oceanographer.
Worlds unimagined. As the conversations continued,
more and more people would tune in and more and more people were in awe
and there was an expansion that was happening.
We all could not believe what was possible for us, too.
I'll never forget the day I had a guest host,
and as we tuned into the live from my grandmother's house,
my niece was sitting next to me and as the conversation was happening,
my niece looked up at me and she says, Mum Lenny, what's a marine biologist.
I love this moment because I didn't know when she was her age.
And later on, as my sister walked in from the kitchen, she had been cooking.
And as she sits down, she is watching with us and she says,
that girl's a marine biologist.
And I say, yes, I'm sick, but she's black,
and I was just I beamed because it was it was our expansion
because all of these encounters land in and on our bodies like spaceships.
They are worlds unimagined worlds that we had never, ever seen before.
And so over 50 conversations later was a knitting of stories.
And yet we had not arrived at at the root cause of this fear
for me here in South Africa.
It said maybe it was something about that research that spoke of how trauma travels
in the DNA. And when I looked at South Africa and her history with slave trade,
those writings are limited. And so I didn't even know.
So maybe apartheid, but segregation,
which led for black people to have no access to swimming pools and
the disposition of ocean facing lands.
But what continued in my body was the possibility of
the trauma that could form from seeing family members be taken away by boats
that disappeared off into these distant waters
and somewhere along this long journey packed like sardines.
If anything went wrong, more black bodies would be thrown over the boat.
And then you arrive at a place having lost your home, your family, your food,
your mother tongue, a disposition of identity as
the last of your hair is shaved off, a fellow ocean advocate in Mansoura,
Vito Wade, says, Can you imagine when the smell of the ocean is the same smell
as death? The story of black people and water is incomplete.
Like Chimamanda beautifully says
the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,
but that they are incomplete.
And so I think it is all linked and deeply believe that
a few things need to happen in the unpacking of these waters. One.
Healing needs to happen, and perhaps it begins with representation,
and in this representation, it does not end in drowning or death. Two.
There needs to be a bridging a safe space for black
and brown people to be able to access these waters
for exploration in ways that we never thought possible before without our
bodies being policed. And once this happens,
ownership and authority begin to come front
and center where these oceans are not only safe for our explorations,
but how we enter them, how we access them and what happens with them matters.
Lastly, a holding of space for culture and tradition,
recognizing that these bodies don't interface these waters the same.
And so lineage matters too.
Because where we come from matters in our history with these waters,
and once we get here, when a connection has been formed,
perhaps we begin to protect these waters because we can't we cannot care
for things that we have never seen or experienced.
So the unthinkable begins to happen.
A web of connections across the world documented creates
a shift in energy enough for future explorers to be less afraid,
but also for narratives that were incomplete to be revisited
and finally laid to rest. And if they are ever to resurface,
it would be because they are now complete. But also with a little bit more respect.
And so my work in the foundation centers around this educating about oceans
and landlocked areas, but also taking kids out
on snorkel excursions with local ocean facing communities
because we recognize that proximity doesn't equate to access.
But also, spatial planning has not changed much since apartheid,
and so we create this needed access allowing for
a safe introduction into these oceans
and exploration in hope that one day when these ocean communities are called
upon, they will show up and they will protect these oceans as guardians.
And they will also create a culture of exploration into these waters in ways
that I never thought was possible when I was 15 years old,
leading to an ending of this intergenerational fear of deep waters.
But most importantly, a protecting of these waters for the generations to come.
I thank you.