The Afghan team at the World Surfing Games in Biarritz, France, this year was small. In fact, it had just one member: Afridun Amu. And the 29-year-old was not just the only Afghan competing at the games — he was also the first.
“I’m not actually that good,” he says. “I’m just good for an Afghan, and there isn’t much competition there.” It’s the taking part that counts, he says — and setting a precedent for future Afghan surfers.
Amu qualified two years ago at the first and only Afghan national surfing championship, which was held in Portugal as Afghanistan has no coast. Fifteen Afghans took part, but Amu came first.
His story is more than just an antidote to stereotypical ideas about Afghan men, which tend to feature Korans and Kalashnikovs. It also shows how, with the right support, refugees are able to reinvent themselves and create real success stories.
Amu’s parents were among the tens of thousands of people who fled Afghanistan’s devastating civil war in 1992, ending up in Germany. Like many others, he now has dual nationality.
Amu was very young when he arrived in Germany. He went to kindergarten in Goettingen, central Germany and later completed three degrees in Berlin: in law, cultural studies and design theory.
He says he takes an obsessive approach to everything he does — and without passion as a driving force, he can’t function.
Today, Amu works at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and the Rule of Law in Heidelberg, where he focuses on Afghanistan, and at a design institute in Potsdam, near Berlin.
He loves climbing, plays the Afghan drums, belongs to a chess club and also helps Afghan refugees with legal advice.
Amu first tried surfing at the age of 19, on a trip to France after he’d finished high school, and it quickly became part of his already very busy life.
It’s hard to imagine somebody better integrated into German society, but he felt compelled by a sense of responsibility to compete for Afghanistan.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to save the world, but I thought that I could do something positive with this life that I waste constantly jumping into the ocean,” he says.
“When people meet a long-haired Afghan surfer, suddenly they don’t want to know about burkas and war and radical Islam,” he says. Instead, they want to know whether there are Afghan hipsters, what kind of music Afghans listen to, what they like and what they are afraid of.
Amu wants to change people’s perceptions of a country which many talk about with a certain weariness 16 years after the US first invaded it.
He also wants to take surfing to Afghanistan. The Wave Riders Association of Afghanistan, of which Amu is president, is hoping to set up a youth team in the country at some point.
Yes, Afghanistan has other things to worry about, Amu says, but the idea isn’t that crazy. It’s about offering the hope of a normal life in a normal country — a country in which even surfing wouldn’t be unusual.
There are enough waves there, Amu adds, and not that far from Kabul — great river waves. — dpa
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