I had a skateboard in Kenya when I was little. There was no concrete flat enough to actually skate. We just sat on it and took off down the steepest hills we could find.
The Uganda Skateboard Union make us look very lazy. The teenagers of Kitintale got together and built East Africa’s only skate park out of mud bricks and concrete, with no NGOs or government sponsorship in sight.
Check out their skills in this little documentary by Swiss photographer Yann Gross, who has also taken a wonderful series of portraits.
In many ways these guys are taking skateboarding back to its roots as a working class teenage subculture, but with a distinctly African spin. Where the original skateboarders were california drop-outs, the Kitintale skaters are full of ambition, community spirit, and entrepreneurial vision. I think it’s a great story and well worth ten minutes of your time.
If you thought you were lazy, you should know that I enthusiastically bought a pair of roller blades and used them two or three times then gave up because there weren’t any flat roads where I lived (Malawi)
That is SO COOL!
VERY cool! Thanks for sharing!