The tides of change

Daniel Shailer meets the “black mermaid” turning the tide for swimming access in South Africa

Growing up in Sowetu, South Africa, Zandile Ndhlovu wasn’t just hundreds of kilometres away from the sea — she was afraid of it. “There were these continuous stories to stay away,” Ndhlovu recalls. “We’d be told there’s a snake that lives in all bodies of water. When you hear stories about the sea, there’s a big snake that lives in there,” she laughs, then stops. “Then stories like that would be reaffirmed when there was a drowning and the kid was not found: the snake had taken that person.”

Ndhlovu saw the ocean for the first time when she was 12, on a visit to her mother’s family in East London on the coast of the Indian Ocean. “I remember just looking,” she says, as her cousins charged ahead of her. What would one day become the kind of story she recites in interviews began with incredulity — that something so terrifying to her could, for her cousins, be fun. “They just took off their tops and ran into the water.”

Since overcoming her fear that day, Ndhlovu has become something of a watercelebrity: freediving on camera, appearing on the BBC’s list of 100 Women of 2023, and doing social media spots with the likes of John Cena. Her latest appearance, Shaped By Water, is a documentary exploring the effect of ocean health on the world through the story of three extreme sports competitors: Ndhvolu, freestyle skiing world-champion Jess Hotter and the 11th Hour Racing sailing team.

But her main focus, Ndhlovu says, is the Black Mermaid Foundation: a nonprofit she founded in the midst of the pandemic, around the same time she dyed her waistlength braids ocean blue. In practice, the Foundation arranges field trips for South African kids to the sea, where they swim over heaving kelp forests, spying the small sharks and octopi that call them home. In mission, though, Ndhlovu sees the Foundation fighting to change South Africa’s swimming season in two ways: widening who feels safe in the sea, and sowing resistance to the climate crisis changing the water around her.

First, Ndhlovu wants the next generation of South African children to be less afraid of water. Only 15 per cent of South Africans know how to swim, most of them white, according to the country’s National Sea Rescue Institute. That reality was starker than ever when the country emerged from lockdown; more than 800 South Africans drowned in 2022, 600 of them children. The foundation started in lockdown with just four children. Now each trip takes more than 30 kids to the coast.

Second, Ndhlovu sees the children as the seeds for a new generation of climate conscious South Africans. But that starts with simply swimming. “I just want kids to connect with the water,” she says. “The idea of guardianship comes last. I need to build that connection, because if you find home in a place, the natural thing is to protect it.”

Already Ndhlovu has noticed South Africa’s environment shifting as the global climate changes. “Our winters have not been as cold; our flooding is just getting worse and worse,” she says. The sea is no exception. Humpback whales, which only used to travel to South Africa to breed, now stay to feed on schools of sardines. Orcas, swimming in a newly expanded range, have begun attacking and killing great white sharks. “We’re seeing a change in animal movements in the water,” Ndhlovu says uneasily. “We are in such a critical time when it comes to climate. We need all hands on deck.”

Ndhlovu doesn’t see these two goals – broadening swimming access and growing climate consciousness – as separate. Perhaps that’s because her own journey to the water was so transformative. After overcoming her initial trepidation, Ndhlovu wasn’t particularly attached to watersports until another epiphany of fear. In 2016, facing the breakdown of her marriage, Ndhlovu, then working as a consultant, traveled to Bali to try and find the words to tell her family. She went freediving, at first just for 20 seconds. “It wasn’t long. But for me what land was a feeling of, of home, it was a feeling of belonging,” she says. “The water is a powerful place for me.”

That’s the feeling she hopes to give children with the Black Mermaid Foundation. “The end goal is to have ocean guardians that are diverse,” she says. “Those are my little soldiers: the humans that you put out into the world to expand the narrative.” Because in her work with the foundation and wider public engagement with projects like Shaped by Water, Ndhlovu has an unshakable feeling that the tides of change are ultimately turned by storytelling.

And ocean conservation is playing catchup. Because it’s as easy to think of precious forests and jungles as it is to be afraid of the faceless oceans. Ndhlovu believes the Black Mermaid Foundation can tell a different story. “So when someone says: ‘there’s a snake that lives underwater,’” Ndhlovue hopes, “someone can say ‘But I went out with Zandi and that’s not true.’”