A lazy afternoon on the beach, hazy skies and endless breaking waves, a sea of wash.

The thousands of black figures scattered across the wide sands playing football, wrestling, doing acrobatics, gathered into one dark mass as a fight broke out amidst them.

By the time I got there, picking my way through stranded mauve jellyfish, a group of gangly kids torturing a large one with a piece of driftwood, the fight had broken up and I was amongst thousands upon thousands of teenagers and younger children, mostly boys, spending their Sunday afternoon in activity.

Some paired themselves off into couples, grappling at eachother, pawing the others' raised hands as they went into a bodylock which would result in one of the boys being thrown on his back. Others sat and watched, some played football, pitch upon pitch lined up along the shore, shoes, tires, blocks of wood, lumps of concrete forming the goalposts. The odd group of teenage girls in childish bikinis, breasts and curves spilling out unaware.

Absolutely everyone was covered in sand, some faces with only the eyes clear behind a mask of fine white sand, most in their underpants, all caked in the stuff. Everywhere I went, with my camera around my neck, the bolder boys hissed and asked for me to photo-them, the girls looked away shyly. One group of children sat tranquil in a group on the sand, an oil painting of sun-faded red shorts and pants and white sandy bodies, the black skin barely visible beneath. But once I had aimed my lens, they leapt into a pose, grins and thumbs up, and the moment was lost.

Near them, some older teenagers were doing somersaults. I lined up behind them and crouched down, a crowd of a hundred or so people gathered beside me. The acrobats made dramatic twists and leaps in the air, kicking up the sand, as they effortlessly leapt off eachothers' cupped hands and flailed elegantly in the air. Some kids tried and failed to leap, the younger ones giggled.

So many black bodies, all around me, suffocating except for everyone was so happy.