When a girl from Langa holds Zandile Ndhlovu’s hand as they float together, counts aloud before dipping below the surface, and comes up announcing she has seen a starfish, the moment captures what the South African freediver has spent years building. She shared that memory with the Mail & Guardian in August 2026. Counting gave way to looking closely, and in that shift lies the practical core of her work: teaching people, step by step, how to be in the water.
The Black Mermaid Foundation, which Ndhlovu founded in 2020, carries that work on the ground through educational snorkelling excursions and programmes about marine ecosystems. Its aim is straightforward. Make the ocean more accessible to underrepresented communities. Sometimes it begins with a hand to hold, then with what someone feels able to look at for herself. The excursions differ from deep freediving, a discipline that uses no breathing tank and calls for appropriate training with a trained buddy.
Her own path into the water was itself a matter of training and progression. A first snorkelling trip in Bali in 2016 introduced her to the underwater world. In June 2019, she joined a course at Sodwana Bay hoping to qualify as an instructor, but did not pass: her fear of depth still needed work. She kept training in quarries around Johannesburg, completed her qualifying dives at Miracle Waters near Brits, and became a PADI Freediving Instructor in January 2020. The gap between the ambition and the certificate was filled with months of practice, a difficulty worked through before she could guide others into the sea.
Once qualified, she extended the dive in another direction: photography. During South Africa’s 2023 sardine run, she photographed wildlife, and she treats the camera as a bridge back to shore. An image holds someone’s gaze, a conversation can begin, and she wants to return to the same places over time to show how they change. Her preferred frames are wide, giving animals the space around them. Underwater, light, currents and other presences shift the composition, and her principle never wavers: no touching, chasing or moving an animal to get a picture. What she brings to the surface depends on the room she leaves it.
Meanwhile, her relationship with the water also has a personal register. She has described feeling safe in her own body in the ocean, putting it simply in a 2023 interview with Condé Nast Traveller: “perfect as I am”. For her, the water offers a space where that confidence can exist.
That relationship has taken several delivered forms. On 15 May 2023, Pan Macmillan South Africa published Zandi’s Song, a children’s book she wrote, illustrated by Katlego Keokgale. It follows a girl who dreams of the ocean despite living far from the sea and not yet knowing how to swim; pictures and fiction offer a way into a world some children have never seen. She also appears in Shaped by Water, a documentary produced by 11th Hour Racing with Protect Our Winters, uploaded in its original English version on 28 June 2024. The film brings her freediving into conversation with Jess Hotter’s skiing and 11th Hour Racing Team’s sailing, three practices connected by water from the mountains to the ocean.
Up to 2026, the milestones read as a steady build: the 2016 first encounter in Bali, the 2020 instructor qualification, the 2023 book, and ongoing encounters around the ocean that keep shaping her work. What she has delivered is not a single achievement but a continuing practice, one in which a starfish seen by a child from Langa counts as a concrete outcome. Where that practice goes next, with camera, classroom and open water, is the question her ongoing programmes are still answering.