Dropping-in with no shoes on: Building skateparks in East Africa
What with import taxes on skateboards and gnarly, traffic-filled roads, the East African skateboarding scene could have grown to be isolated and elitist, if it even grew at all. Instead, thanks to local skaters and a few passionate NGOs, skateboarding is blowing up for everybody, writes Tim Romain.
You’ll find Kenya’s only skatepark in a school compound at the end of a thin road lined with rusty corrugated-iron houses in the Kibagare slum of north-west Nairobi. It’s hardly a few minutes’ drive from Waiyaki Way, a stretch of road where finance and telecoms giants Barclays, Spire Bank and Safaricom host their towering, security-guarded headquarters, but over in the park it feels like a different world altogether.
Turn up during one of the primary school sessions and it’s beautiful mayhem: kids running around the bowl, kids rolling down ramps sat down three to a board, kids screaming and leaping out of the way of the older ones who can stand up and push around the park. Some have shoes and knee-pads, many are just in flip-flops, and a hardcore few are even skating barefoot.
At 1,200 square metres, it’s East Africa’s largest park, boasting a bowl, mini-ramp and street section with boxes and rails, as well as a basketball court and viewing platform. Built in 2013, the project was supervised by German skate-head Daniel Glucher, now the regional director of Skate Aid, an organisation that supports skateboarding projects in economically deprived communities worldwide. But the park’s genesis owes equal thanks to a local crew called SSK — the Skateboarding Society of Kenya, who Glucher stumbled across by chance one day in Nairobi.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Daniel tells me in a moment of quiet after the kids have gone home. “I was walking to Uhuru Park in my suit, and I heard skateboarding sounds. I was like this can’t be, so I followed this noise and found a skateboarding crew. It was funny, I went there and said hi and they were like, it’s a white guy in a suit, what do you want, and I was like, hey, let’s skate.”
Daniel can be forgiven for his surprise — skateboarding is hardly typical of the Kenya portrayed in European media. That a bunch of kids managed to source some skateboards and start tearing up the streets with only the internet to show them how to do so is pretty awesome, but it’s hardly going to break through the near-impenetrable narrative of wars, corruption and famine that dominates headlines about the entire African continent. In reality, skateboarding has been steadily gaining popularity. South Africa has had a scene for a while, but over the last decade the culture has quietly spread north, with crews popping up in major cities across the continent.
The problem, after you’ve sourced a skateboard, is finding good spots. Skateboarding works on well-paved but quiet streets, a rare find in the traffic-saturated and pot-holed Nairobi. For Daniel, what they were lacking was obvious — as was the next step: “Why is there no skatepark? Let’s build a skatepark!”
So began the mission to build Kenya’s first park. But how to do it? European parks are usually built either as commercial enterprises or by local government, neither of which are viable options in a place where skateboard culture is still nascent, so they looked at what happened in neighbouring countries for inspiration.
East African park-skating (as opposed to street skating) started in Uganda in 2006, when a South African student called Shael Swart teamed up with local skater Jackson Mubiru to build a mini-ramp in the Kitintale suburb of the capital Kampala. Entirely self-built and self-funded, they persuaded a local department store to donate a couple of skateboards to the park so that the kids could join in. They called it the Uganda Skateboard Union.
By the end of the year, aided by donations from across the world, they had built a second section with a quarter-pipe, fun-box and flat-bank. East Africa had its first fully-fledged skatepark.
From the outset, the project involved the participation of the kids who lived nearby, and once it was built, it served the double purpose of being a spot where the older boys from the crew could skate, as well as providing the opportunity for those less fortunate to get started. This model of skatepark-cum-local development project is one that you’ll find at the other East African parks, and is promoted by Skate Aid, who refurbished the Ugandan park in 2013.
Skate Aid itself was born out of the 2007 “Skateistan” project, which began when a researcher named Oliver Percovich took a few skateboards with him to Kabul, Afghanistan. Seeing how easily skateboarding cut through social divisions like age, ethnicity, gender and class, he saw its potential for promoting a shared sense of identity and purpose among people of different backgrounds.
Since then Skate Aid has grown, with projects and parks world-wide, including in India, Palestine, Costa Rica, Sudan and South Africa. Its aim is to “utilise the power of skateboarding” and “to bring hope on four wheels to young people.” In East Africa, Skate Aid was involved in building the parks in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania, while the Ethiopian park in Addis Ababa came with help from Belgian/US organisation Make Life Skate Life.
Skating on the streets of Nairobi, Daniel and SSK always gathered an audience. “The idea at the beginning was just for our local skate crew here, it would be nice to have a place to skate, but at the same time a lot of street kids — we have a lot in a city like Nairobi — they always came to our sessions, and the moment we sat down they asked us if they could use the skateboards… So the idea was that maybe it could be a good youth project.”
Following the Ugandan example, he went looking for NGO funding, found out about Skate-Aid, and the project took off. They teamed up with the Shangilia home for children living in Kibagare, who had space for the complex in their school, and got to work designing and building the park with local skaters. A few months later, they had a park to skate and a system in place to lend boards and shoes to those who don’t have their own. They take donations of old equipment when possible, recruit volunteers, and hold sponsored events to help pay for the park’s upkeep.
The park still struggles to get hold of skateboards though. Import taxes are punishing, and they don’t have enough boards for the amount of kids that turn up to the park — around 200 a week according to Daniel. “If we solve the problem to bring more skateboards to East Africa, I’m sure there would be [even] more skaters”.
Still, despite the difficulties in sourcing equipment, skateboarding has become an empowering and unifying activity that encourages participation from the less fortunate. It could so easily have become the reserve of an elite who can afford it. When skateboarding originated in the US it was an activity for misfits and outcasts, but in Africa it has grown its own distinct character.
That’s the beauty of skateboarding for you. Despite the efforts of big commercial competitions like X Games, Street League and now even the Olympics to turn skateboarding into a marketable sport with its winners and losers, skateboarding culture has always been more communal. It’s the same whether you’re in the UK, Kenya or wherever — head down to your local park and you’ll find perfect strangers egging each other on, applauding tricks and swapping tips.
As Daniel notes from his experience in Nairobi, where tribalism is still an urgent issue for many of the park’s users: “Skateboarding culture doesn’t care if you’re black, white… if you’re Muslim, if you’re Christian, rich or poor… If you have a skateboard, they all skate together”.
To donate money or skateboard equipment to the Nairobi and Kampala skate-parks, or for more information on volunteering, check out Skate-Aid here.
