“Staff-riding”, the practice of boarding or alighting from a moving train, grew out of necessity rather than the lack of sporting facilities. Passengers would do it in order to avoid ticket officials, robbers to elude their victims and hawkers to get back to their trading spot before the train left the station.
However, as with many cultural phenomena originating out of the townships, pushing the style envelope soon became as fundamental as mastering the basic technique. It was thus that “the spiderman”, a Soweto version of the worldwide phenomenon of train surfing, was born.
This rather extreme sport is today the preserve of daredevil thugs known as mvonqas, who hide on top of moving trains after robbing passengers, and school-dodging boys, referred to as cheese-boys.
Soweto Surfing, a documentary that looks at some of the purveyors of this deadly game, focuses on the cheese-boys, regarded as the stylistic innovators of the sport, dreaming up new moves in a haze of vodka and papsak.
Sporting neo-mythical monikers such as Sisqo, Bin Laden, Bitch Nigga and M’Rider, most of them are part of a loose-knit 20-odd member collective known as Rough Riders, some of whom have been surfing and stockpiling styles for up to six years. “Most people played with one foot [on the platform], we play with two,” says the 18-year-old Mzembe, trying to articulate the evolution of the sport. “Way back there were no styles, but we added them. They come here to learn from us.”
Mzembe, together with Bitch Nigga, the film’s principal protagonist, started staff-riding during the security guard strike of 2000. He boasts two scars from his exploits one across the forehead from being hit by a cable pole and a massive one across his left ankle, after his leg was hit by a railway traffic light. Even though two of his friends died recently from riding, Mzembe’s pledge to stop the sport seems disingenuous to me, just as Gatsheni’s does in the film.
Out in the Soweto stations, as the electrocutions and wipe-outs pile up, peer pressure, lax security, nonchalant police officers and an increasing audience are conspiring to raise the bar for surfers. It’s a virtual renaissance out there and the only way out is death.
This is why so much about Soweto Surfing is disturbing. Sara Blecher and Dima Raphoto, who made the documentary for SABC3’s Special Assignment, say they hope the film will offer these youths a chance to reflect on “what they are really doing, how they are breaking their mothers’ and girlfriends’ hearts”. However, there is no urgency in Bitch Nigga’s mother’s voice. In fact, there is a traceable elation about her son’s legacy being immortalised. Nigga, meanwhile, is all too happy to play for the camera. He tells of a fellow rider’s death with a tinge of glee and boasts about his petty-theft activities, suggesting that the line between mvonqa and cheese-boy may be an imaginary one. The questions about why these boys callously risk their lives for ghetto celebrity and why the system turns a blind eye are not adequately interrogated in the film, which goes on to ask, rather nonsensically: “Should train surfing be legalised?”
While Soweto Surfing is recommended as a snapshot of South African youth culture, it fails to ask the right questions about its subject. One hopes that its audience will view it as such.
Soweto Surfing airs on SABC3’s Special Assignment on October 3 at 9.30pm