THE HUMÁNITARIÁN
Mandla Ndlovu still remembers the water, thick sheets of it cascading all around him
“All I could hear was this roar. It was like being in a giant barrel,” he says, recalling the sound of the Limpopo River as it plunged over the dam wall, past the narrow ledge he was crawling across with a group of fellow Zimbabweans.
“As we were crawling across, the guy behind slipped off and fell onto the ledge below. It was so slimy. He was trying to creep back up but the water swept him away. That was when I realised, ‘Oh, we’re really doing this. We’re jumping the border. There’s no turning back now’.”
It’s 11 years later as Mandla recounts his story on a balmy morning in Muizenberg. The fresh turmoil ripping Zimbabwe apart seems a world away as learners battle soft-tops in the shorebreak at Surfer’s Corner.
Mandla sits across the table from me at one of the beachfront cafés, his tight dreadlocks framing a broad smile. Now 26, he works as a professional surf coach and WSL judge, splitting his time between Cape Town and Sri Lanka. When he was smuggled out of Zimbabwe all those years ago, he had never seen the ocean before.
“I couldn’t swim when I was young but already knew I loved water.
