ZANDILE NDHLOVU
Q
Did you always have a love for the ocean growing up?
I grew up in Soweto, a township in South Africa that's nowhere near the ocean. I was about 12 the first time I saw the sea while visiting my mother's side of the family in the Eastern Cape. Even then, as we frolicked in the shallows, never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what lived underneath. Later in 2016 when I was 28, I was going through a hard time and ended up on a trip to Bali where I went on my first ever snorkelling experience on a whim. I jumped into the water and started freaking out, screaming, ‘I'm drowning! I'm drowning!’ because I didn't know how to swim. As soon as the panic passed, I was in awe of the world that existed beneath the surface.
Q
How, then, did you get into freediving?
I experienced thisthat snorkelling trip. From then on, I was filled with curiosity and an incredible sense of belonging in the water, which led me to learn how to scuba dive when I went back home to South Africa. Between 2016 and 2018, I got quite highly certified here, starting with the PADI Discover course, then my Open Water, Advanced, Deep Diver and Nitrox certifications. I learnt to dive in a quarry in Jo'burg, and so my first dive at sea was mind-blowing. Towards the end of 2018, I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw these girls diving to the bottom of the ocean with no tanks! It felt like daylight witchery, and a Google search revealed that this was called freediving. I went on a brief course in Cape Town, and in June 2019, followed that up with a full freediving course in Sodwana Bay. It was a Zero to Hero course, and the plan was to go from not knowing anything about freediving and holding my breath, to becoming an instructor. I didn't qualify at the end of the course as I needed to face my own fears around depth, but I continued training in quarries in Jo'burg and ended up qualifying in January 2020.
