The surfer and tribal chief fighting to save a 550km South African coast

A motley crew of surfers, academics and fishers fight back against mining companies pillaging the country’s West Coast.

Martinus Fredericks meets me outside the police station in South Africa’s Atlantis, a somewhat forlorn semi-industrial town on the outskirts of Cape Town. On this winter’s morning, Atlantis is shrouded in fog. After a firm handshake, he leads me across the road into an unmarked building.

On the second floor, at the end of a wide, airy corridor that also houses the community radio station, we enter an empty coffee shop with six plastic tables adorned with black tablecloths and gold place settings. Over tea and sandwiches, Fredericks tells me how an astounding midlife revelation led him to become the face of a social and environmental battle.

Born in 1965, he grew up in the agricultural town of Robertson, speaking Afrikaans and identifying as “coloured” – the apartheid regime’s catch-all term for people who did not fit into their “white”, “Black” or “Indian” racial boxes. After school, he studied agriculture and environmental sciences, later working in nature conservation.

His life was upended in 2012 when representatives of the !Ama Chieftaincy in Bethany, Namibia, visited him in Atlantis. “They told me that I was a direct descendant of their leader !Abeb,” he says, adding that they asked him to take over the South African leadership of the !Ama tribe.

The !Ama people are pastoralists who, before the arrival of Europeans, followed their herds across a vast swath of Southern Africa (present-day South Africa and Namibia) in search of the best grazing.