Long before our people were toiling away on plantations, many lived along riverbanks, lakes, and nearby oceans, swimming and diving with ease. And they carried this in-depth aquatic knowledge across the Atlantic.
We lived and thrived in coastal West African communities where fishing sustained our livelihoods. Beyond economic means, swimming was also a recreational activity for enjoyment.
Enslavers cargoed many of us to seaside cities and islands in the U.S. South, Caribbean, and South and Central America. But we weren’t new to the aquatic life. We were true to it.
Kevin Dawson, author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, says that Black people have been surfing since the 1640s in present-day Ghana.
A deep knowledge of canoeing helped keep enslaved families separated by water together. Canoeists could slip into secluded swamps to pray and plot liberation.
They used their aquatic skills to dive for crabs, lobsters, and oysters, while others dove for pearls and shipwrecks. It was life-threatening labor, but swimming provided a unique sense of autonomy with limited work hours and profit-sharing that some used to buy their freedom.
History shows that we’ve always known the water, often better than the mainstream. Water is crucial to our pleasure and resistance.
There’s nothing we can’t do. Although anti-Blackness wants us to believe that our identity limits our existence, it’s who we are that drives our limitlessness.