On the dive boats no one else looked like her. “People would say ‘are you really going to dive with all that hair?’ It’s funny until it’s not, sitting in that space and being very ‘other’,” says Zandile Ndhlovu, South Africa’s first black female freediving instructor.
“Even the wetsuits, they were not designed for a black woman. It fits your hips so you wear it, but the water is gushing in everywhere else. So all these challenges can’t help but remind you that you are the only one,” she says.
Now the 34-year-old – who was called the black mermaid at home long before the Disney live action remake of the Little Mermaid elated her by casting black actor Halle Bailey – has taken on the role of bringing more children into the water.
Born in Soweto, Johannesburg, Ndhlovu grew up far from the coast, and like many children in South Africa, was raised on tales of why she should never go near deep water.
Ndhlovu first saw the ocean when she went to visit family in the Eastern Cape, aged about 12. “That was the first time seeing wild, gushing waters, but everyone, black people, would say ‘why are you trying to kill yourself?’ if you went as much as up to your knees in water.”
“Then I went snorkelling when I was on a trip to Bali in 2016. I was 28, and had never seen anything that looked so beautiful. All these weird and wonderful animals coexisting at the bottom of the ocean, while on land the world is so banded, in identity, race, gender.”
Despite a string of Olympic swimmers and about 2,800km (1,739 miles) of stunning coastline, just 15% of South Africans can swim – and most of those are white. During apartheid, white children would play in the private pools that remain a fixture of middle-class suburban homes, while few black children would even have seen a public swimming pool.
With up to four people drowning every day in South Africa’s lakes, dams, oceans and private pools, almost all of them black, that legacy remains.
Drowning is a hugely neglected public health risk in low-income and middle-income countries, especially across Africa, where the rates are high, opportunities to learn to swim are low and folk tales about the destructive power of the waves prevail. Racial disparity in swimming is prevalent across the world; in the US, for example, 64% of African American children cannot swim compared with 40% of white children.
There have been a few cases – before Disney – of cinema pushing back against the stereotypes, from the beautifully shot swimming lesson in 2017’s Oscar-winning Moonlight to the underwater scenes of box office smash Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Ndhlovu has her own documentary out on WaterBear, a free streaming platform, and her foundation, the Black Mermaid, focuses on bringing about change.
“In South Africa, black people are displaced from the ocean, it is a haunted place, and its history wraps around this narrative firmly, a place of the transatlantic slave trade.
“So how do we unbox the water from only being a white people’s space?” she says. “For me, I need to be in the ocean, it is where I feel peace. In 2020, I qualified as a freedive instructor. I wanted to change the narrative around black people in water that was being thrown around so recklessly.
“And people have held on to that narrative, everybody absorbs it and it is where we find ourselves around water, today. My own grandmother would say ‘you shouldn’t be there. The ocean is not a place to play.’ Black people say to me all the time ‘why are you doing white things?’ My family was freaked out,” she says.
“I started the foundation to challenge all that, to actively take part in hard conversations about the status quo, and what it would take to diversify the ocean. I might have to take 500 kids snorkelling to get one kid passionate, but it is worth it. Now, we are building in swimming lessons. So very many kids can’t swim.”
The environmental degradation of the ocean is something that concerns Ndhlovu greatly and she believes that connecting children with the underwater world helps raise their awareness.
“You see the corals bleaching,” she says. “You are seeing a lot of plastic pollution and this aspect is important for the kids to see. These worlds colliding.”
Change often occurs in tiny, gradual steps, she says. “I see the parents in shock, they say, ‘Never in my life did I think to see my kids under the ocean.’ It’s a generational thing but it gives them pride and equal status because being in the ocean has been a very exclusive thing, even for people who live close by.”
Ndhlovu adds: “They feel empowered. Most of the kids are afraid, they jump out and cling on to the buoy screaming if they see a fish. You can feel the fear. But fear, sometimes we need to walk into it. It’s so important to get the kids in the water.”
A former industrial relations expert, Ndhlovu is now a full-time instructor and runs the foundation mainly out of her own pocket. But she hopes the idea of black African children reclaiming the sea will take hold in her country and beyond.
“That’s why to me, too, this Disney film is important,” she says. “When people see this, it explodes their idea of what a mermaid is. It allows a greater proportion of the world to be that mermaid – ‘Ariel looks like me’.”
