The story of the classic film that crowned our coastline
By Cameron Luke Peters
“Surfing is an ideal South African sport. It raises those involved in it above the mundane levels normally prescribed by our social environment.”
- Cornel Barnett in ‘Hitting the Lip: Surfing in South Africa’ (1974)
The one surfing movie you can name off the top of your head is one that seemingly nobody’s watched for fifty years: Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer (1966). Did you think the poster represented a vague historic vibe rather than a real film? You wouldn’t be the first.
I don’t remember what drove me to uncover it on YouTube and watch it for the first time but it felt like a Proustian experience, even though I’ve never caught a wave in all my days. (Yes, I am from Durban. Yes, we exist.)
It was three months into Covid and I was trapped, worried and broke like everyone. Thankfully, I had just fallen in love with South Africa and its history as I never had before. After two years in England spent dying piecemeal of insomnia, I would have turned down a peerage to co-rent a pokey flat in the Southern Suburbs again. I got my wish.
As I idly watched the film (paired with Debonairs and loadshedding if I recall), the Sandals’ dinky theme-tune began to wash my heart like a tide of honey. The gauze-y, shaky 16mm reels gave me a rush of nostalgia-by-proxy like a static shock. And then the surfers came to Cape Town. I should explain that the movie is a jokey low-budget, high-concept affair: in 1964 two rising dudes from California, Mike Hynson and Robert August, set out to circumnavigate and travelogue the world from Hawaii to Tahiti, supposedly avoiding the wobble of the seasons and seeking out the best undiscovered wave left on the planet. I hope you can share my joy at the fact that they conclude the film by saying they found it here: at Cape St Francis, just down from J-Bay.
The one transcendent moment of the film comes at the fifty-minute mark, when Mike is shown balancing his board on this low-barrelled, ‘machine-like’ tube for an ungodly period, occasionally lifting his arms to his head in true awe. The director even complains in his voiceover that the rides the wave provides are so long that he couldn’t get any of Mike’s bouts on one strip of film. So instead he cross-fades and demonstrates that he had time to change reels and re-focus on his subject before he was anywhere near finished. This divine spot is the site William Finnegan describes in his memoir Barbarian Days (my favourite book) as “a fickle creature”, nothing like as consistent year-round as the movie makes out, but still “the real thing: a long right point of the highest quality, with heaps of swell in the winter and frequent offshore winds.”
As far as I can recognise, the surfing community functions a little like a global order of starry-eyed freemasons. Thus it was no surprise to read a year or two later that the film immediately served to fix Jeffrey’s Bay, Noordhoek and the greater Republic on the pilgrimage circuit for self-professed friends of Kelly Slater and Shaun Tomson everywhere - despite the fact that Grand Apartheid was just kicking into high gear. The surge of the scene was felt most acutely on Muizenberg’s boardwalk, where the hippie zeitgeist would get itself stuck in amber until the present moment. A resort town that had once dubbed itself ‘the Brighton of the Cape’ - drawing in hundreds of thousands of Vaalies, Cockneys and Jews every December - had just been brought to its knees by the Group Areas Act, new hotel standards and a stretch of satanic urban planning. However, as so often in iKapa, paradise was hiding in the midst of catastrophe. A plaque on the second level of the Lifestyle Surf Shop (Est. 1975) describes how:
“With the demise of the “Old Muizenberg Pavilion” and with the emergence of surfing, “THE CORNER” became the new hang out. New characters, a new way of life and the new use of the ocean drew multiple clashes with “The Law”to establish this section of the beach as the now world renowned “SURFER’S CORNER”
That last part might sound facetious but between 1970 and 1972, according to Andy Davis, “surfing was banned in Muizenberg, when the ratepayers’ association decided surfers were a ‘bad element’. The ban was overturned thanks to local surfer John Wylie, who pulled together a protest down at the beach.” Now here’s a Footloose remake waiting to happen! (As well as proof that white Capetonian home-owners have never changed).
This victory must have come as a particular relief to Peter Wright, who had just opened the evergreen Corner Surf Shop (Est. 1970) after escaping his parents’ garage in Kommetjie, and to the Muizenberg Corner Surf Club (founded in 1965) whose original honour-roll and old testament is printed on a purpose-built board in a corner of the Corner to this day:
In truth though, The Endless Summer didn’t kickstart South African surfing; it just announced our homegrown gold rush to the world. There are pictures and plaques at Muizies proving that Agatha Christie and George Bernard Shaw borrowed boards from American GI’s when they stopped by in the Twenties. A famous (but still very English) co-ed surf club colonised Durban’s South Beach with homemade ‘Crocker Ski’ boards in the postwar joy of 1947, featuring early powerhouses like Vera Salzman, Jean Baxter, Anthony Heard and Margaret Smith (SA’s first female surfing champion). But the man who indisputably transformed surfing from luxury to industry was John ‘The Oom’ Whitmore. He was a perlemoen diver from Bakoven who, from 1954, copied designs from American magazines, built his own surfboards from blocks of polystyrene foam, Cascamite glue and PVA, and started hand-delivering them around the country - in the process becoming the very first VW Kombi roadtripper on the Garden Route. (He also invented the first roof racks!).
By the time Bruce Brown came back to the Cape in 1994 to shoot a 30-year legacy sequel, The Endless Summer II, he could claim that a fellowship of a few hundred enthusiasts had ballooned into a cosmos of shops, competitions and magazines partly under his film’s influence. But this is not the whole truth. In a sense, it was Whitmore and South Africa that blew up The Endless Summer, not the other way round. In 1960 or so, a young American named Dick Metz had arrived in Cape Town after hitchhiking from Salisbury (Harare) 4 days before. By complete chance his last driver dropped him at Glen Beach, just because he needed to check in with his sick mother in Camps Bay. Wandering on the rocks, Metz spotted a surfer in the water searching for a lost board. He spotted it further on, closer to the beach, and brought it out to him. The two got to talking and the surfer, being South African, invited the foreigner to stay at his family cottage for the next few months. When Metz got home, he quickly hooked up his former host with a school friend, ‘Grubby’ Clark, who was busy pioneering the ‘Clark foam blank’ template for surfboards. Thus Whitmore became one of the first men in the global industry to import the California surf style straight from the source.
Metz, of course, was also budding friends with Bruce Brown. Thus The Endless Summer was originally conceived as a filmed visit to finally meet Whitmore in person, followed by a short quest to sample the waves at Cape St Francis he had raved so much about. This was apparently only changed up because a travel agent pointed out that “a round-the-world ticket would cost $50 cheaper than just a Los Angeles to Cape Town, South Africa round-trip flight.” I’d like to think the film would have still made its 4000% profit margin either way.
This revelation sadly puts the kibosh on the legendary scene where Mike and Robert, soundtracked by a parody version of the Lawrence of Arabia score, wander over the dunes to spot the aforementioned master wave for the first time. They knew exactly what they were looking for. And, on rewatch, the film’s African scenes can be a very painful experience, dated even for their time. Brown didn’t bring sound equipment on his travels and so his incessant voiceover is actually a laid-down imitation of the way he usually presented his films. For six years before the trip, he had made a living by filming surfers and then touring California presenting his footage in school gyms and public auditoriums, providing improvised live commentary and synced-up scores on tape recorders. Today, even the cavemen amongst us would cringe at his projections of the thoughts and voices of the Ghanaian, Nigerian and Senegalese ‘natives’ he, Mike and Robert meet on their first leg.
His remarks on our country’s peculiarities in 1964 remind me of what Gary Player once apparently said about our golfing culture: that we were doing incredibly well ‘for a country of only three million people’. He can’t get over how ‘empty’ all our beaches, highways and arterial roads are. He describes how Mike and Robert made sure to “make friends with the natives everywhere they went” over a shot of them chatting to white teenage girls in bikinis on the sand. He rhapsodises over how you’d almost confuse the Transkei for an American landscape if it weren’t for all the majestic African animals. To his credit, in Durban, looking out at the waves, he does point out how “sharks and porpoises are yet to integrate in South Africa”. But that’s it for politics. It’s a rare experience to see such an unserious film with such a lack of self-awareness.
Even in the sequel thirty years later, Brown repeatedly commits the unforgivable sin (in my tour-guide eyes) of calling Cape Point the divider between the cold Atlantic and the warm Indian Oceans. However, he does remember to deflate his own legacy, if only by implication. When the 1994 surfers needlessly repeat the iconic dune-trek scene at Cape St. Francis, they come over the last ridge to spy “thousands of luxury houses and condominiums as far as the eye can see.” The master wave itself has been broken up by development: the new gardens have hemmed in the dunes, stopping more sand from blowing into the water and leveling out the break. It’s still a magical ride but ‘not the perfect wave it was.’
Like the history of surfing itself, The Endless Summer has a neocolonial edge that darkens the aura of hippie bliss. In South Africa especially, even if the sport and the film were sold as getaways from the ugliness of human behaviour, they still make the case that our coastline would be a true paradise if it weren’t for all the people who got there first. The Endless Summer is revered today perhaps as a snapshot of surfing before it got too popular, like AfrikaBurn when it was just a word-of-mouth thing unruined by its own success. Of course, surfing in SA has somewhat transformed since like everything else. Our Springbok surfers were the first multi-racial SA team to compete in any world championship (in Brazil in 1994). And when the sequel’s surfers meet our greatest surf export, Shaun Thomson, at J-Bay he brings along a Zulu surfer named Walter, though the film still has some fun with the fact that he’s still never learned to swim. Who needs to in the Durban shallows? Watch Sara Blecher’s Otelo Burning (2011) if you want to see a South African surf movie that’ll rub you up the right way. Still, the love of the waves espoused by The Endless Summer and the Surfricans it features echoes the loves and fears most of us probably hold when we think of our country. As Lord Byron put it:
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean - roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin - his control
Stops with the shore.”
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