Steve Pike

IT was sad this week to hear of the passing of one of Cape Town’s own, Ahmed Collier. Collier was a respected elder in the surfing community and one of the early pioneers of non-racial surfing who fought the hard yards to earn his place as a legend in our chequered surfing history.

He was one of the early members of the Wynberg Surf Club, which was at the forefront of fighting apartheid. Collier, the founder of the club Shani Nagia and many others, were instrumental in highlighting racist wrongs.

They frequently challenged the ridiculous laws that made “nonwhites” and “whites” attend separate beaches.

Collier was repeatedly detained by police for surfing at whites-only beaches as were the crew – a tough no-nonsense core, like Mogamad Davids, Tahir Davids, Faeez Abrahams and Rafiq Bagus.

As Shafiq Morton – then Steve Morton – wrote in an article to commemorate Zigzag surfing magazine’s 35th anniversary in 2011, it was Collier who “first paddled out at Long Beach, breaking all the racial taboos and really getting in your face if you didn’t like it”.

This was ultimately why he and his young son and talented surfer Cass Collier decided to ignore the toxic competitive world of South African sport to surf overseas. As Morton, who hosts the drive time on Voice of the Cape FM from 4 to 6pm, wrote: “Cass ‘went on the ASP Tour without surfing a single heat in SA against a white competitor’.

You might remember Nicolaas Hofmeyr’s film Taking Back the Waves and the archival foootage of Ahmed cheering for Cass at a surf event in Australia, with the latter wearing those horrible lumo colours that no-one can believe we wore back in the day. Those were the days also of Country Feeling and tight, bright boardshorts as made by Cheron Kraak, who later as head of Billabong in South Africa became one of the first sponsors of non-racial surfing.

Perhaps it was Ahmed’s tough, never-say-die attitude that helped Cass become one of the world’s most respected big-wave surfers of his generation. Cass was – and remains – a fearless surfer who would take on anything that Sunset, Crayfish Factory or Dungeons could throw at him.

The fearless gene came also from Ahmed’s wife Fawzia, who has never been afraid to call a spade a spade. I last saw Ahmed and Fawzia at the ceremony to commemorate the unveiling of the Surfers Walk of Fame in Muizenberg.

It was good to see men and women gather together to recognise personalities involved in the evolution of surfing history – such as the often unheralded Shani Nagia.

There have been many difficult

GOING THROUGH: David van Zyl of South Africa advances to round three from round two heat nine of the Hawaiian Pro 2017 at Haleiwa Beach, Hawaii.