Sisyphean Existences in Surfing Soweto: Train Surfing as a Late-Apartheid Township Subculture

This article discusses the representation of Soweto township youths in Sara Blecher and and Dimi Raphoto’s Surfing Soweto (2010) through 1) Sisyphean allegory in the context of laborious and futile existences and 2) train surfing as a township subculture. It argues that the train is a medium to experience Soweto as a fleeting space that can be transposed atop the speeding locomotive and experienced in Johannesburg as a portable subculture. Surfing Soweto is thus a film about the culture of stagnated existence among the Soweto youths and how they translate the futility of their existence into a risky hobby. Through the juxtaposition of train surfing with indulgences in drugs and leisure, the film curates a metaphor of cyclical struggles where township life is experienced as an entrapment in a laborious but purposeless life.