Bureh is located on the Sierra Leone peninsula, a crescent-shaped cove known for its golden stretch of sand. It’s here that the country’s first ever surf club was born, kickstarting a journey that has seen the town become the nation’s wave-riding capital – despite the challenges it continues to face.
Text: Peter Yeung – Photography: Douglas Miller
IT’S EARLY IN THE MORNING AT BUREH BEACH, a stretch of sand situated on the far tip of Sierra Leone’s Western Area Peninsula. Something apocalyptic is brewing. Fearsome Atlantic waves batter the shoreline. The sky is overcast with the Harmattan, a northerly wind that blots out the sun with Saharan sand. A lone figure looms out at sea.
Again and again, the silhouette disappears beneath the towering waves, which crash down one after the other like soldiers marching out to battle. Each time he resurfaces, imperious and unmoved.
But on the horizon, one wave emerges larger than any other before it. It rapidly swells and foams, cresting several metres high and looking for all the world like it will crush him. At the last moment, however, he jumps up onto a surfboard and cuts across it, twisting and turning his way to shore.
“Dude, did you see that?” shouts John Small, strolling up along the sand in his black wetsuit. He takes a seat on a large rock, surfboard in hand, its leash still tied to his ankle. “I was so close to getting wiped out by that beast.”
The 27-year-old Small, with his distinctive knotted dreadlocks, chunky goatee and disarming grin, is one of a growing number of surfers taking to the waves in Sierra Leone. Bureh, a picturesque coastal town with a crescent-shaped cove, has become the nation’s surf capital. For residents, this has had a transformative effect.
Small, who was born and raised in Bureh, first began surfing when he was just seven years old. He’s a self-described “beach baby”, who became mesmerised after witnessing foreign surfers on the beach for the first time. “I’d never seen it before,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘What is this? What magic is this?’”
Around that time, a Belgian family who had moved to Freetown – Sierra Leone’s capital – began visiting Bureh almost every weekend to surf. Small would borrow one of their boards for five minutes every now and again. “At the start, I was crashing down every time,” he says. “But one day, I finally caught my own wave.”
By the age of 10, Small was teaching others, including his older brother. At the same time, plenty of other beach babies like him were following suit. The scene in Bureh quickly began to snowball, despite the f
