Liberia’s most popular sport is football. The current president, George Weah, is considered one of the best footballers that Africa has produced along with being one of the best strikers to ever play the game.
When he retired from his professional career in 2003, Liberia’s surfing culture was at its infancy.
After the Second Civil War, more and more tourists travelled to Robertsport — a small fishing town two hours away from the capital city of Monrovia.
A lot of tourists came to see its large lake, mountainous regions and ride its spectacular waves. They often would leave their surfboards behind, giving the locals access to materials not easily available in West Africa.
The surfing community was initially small, with only about five or six surfers on the coast. Alfred Lomax, Benjamin McCrumada and Alphanso Appleton, were the first generation surfers and their contributions would go on to help grow the sport in the region. Appleton shares:
Surfing started back in the early 2000s and it was sort of a new sport in the community. And, you know, fortunately, Robertsport was the first place to have travellers and surfers coming to the area and that’s how the sport started within the region.
It has 200 surfers and it’s continuing to grow. Surfing is a big part of the community and it’s an emerging sport the youth are getting involved [in].
By 2009, McCrumada and Appleton had created a surf club to boost the standing of the sport in the community. A year later, they established the Liberian Surfing Association (LSA) to legitimise and make the sport more competitive on a local and international level. Speaking about this period Appleton tells me:
There were about four or five guys that started the first evolution of surfing in Liberia. Surfing helped us get away from our past life and trauma. It was an outlet to find healing and promote positivity. And we wanted to use surfing to better help the community and a tool to foster positivity and growth.
We started the club and then the association with the goal to oversee all the surf activity within the country and to run competitions, create scholarships and provide opportunities for the community.
The LSA was accredited by the International Surf Association (ISA) in 2012, and were able to receive donations and assistance from the ISA and Provide The Slide.
In an effort to make the sport more competitive, the association started hosting multiple tournaments. The longest running tournament is the Robertsport Surf National Competition which has been running for the past eight years.
The strong efforts to grow the sport have yielded positive results. Participation is currently at an all-time high — with about 200 people — and Robertsports’ waves are not only attracting local surfers but participants from neighbouring surf communities like Sierra Leone, Ghana and the Ivory Coast too. The growing surfing culture has also garnered attention from international media outlets like CNN, BBC, and New York Times.
The next stage for the sport is to become competitive on an international level. The association is trying to get the financial means and the resources to prepare some of the surfers for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
