My story about chess and apartheid in the 1970s – part 1
Looking back about 40 years ago when I was a schoolboy in South Africa, I discovered the game of chess, purely by chance.
It was in the years when apartheid was at its peak of strength.
When living in Welkom, a mining town in the Free State, I was given a chess set as a Christmas present when twelve years old. I had no idea how to play so I took the set to school, hoping that someone could give me a few ideas on how to play. A chap with the name of David Roche Kelly, the son of an Irish doctor working on a mine hospital, started to teach me how to play the game. We became fast friends and I started to play the game incessantly.
I remember going to the Welkom chess club where I saw I blind man playing chess for the first time.
There were only white people there.
I eventually became the number two in the Welkom High School Chess Team, where David was the top player. Chess was a game where school matches were played at night, and unlike today in 2016, kids back then were allowed to go by themselves, to various schools walking in the dark, in complete safety.
In those days Black people had to carry a pass when travelling in white areas. I did not think anything of it, it was just how things were.
My Dad, by trade was an electrician, and we as a family used to live in two towns, East London and Welkom. The mines in Welkom used to pay my father well, but conditions were harsh underground. East London by comparison was a beautiful coastal city but the earnings for my father were poor by comparison. In 1974 our family left Welkom for the last time and went back to East London.
I joined the East London Chess Club where I was ranked number 50 in the club, the lowest ranked player.
However I played the game incessantly and spent several hours per day studying the game. I joined the library in East London and studied every single chess book I could find. The East London Chess Club was located at a large room in the City Hall just like the Welkom Chess Club was but there was one significant difference, in East London there were black members of the Club.
This also had no significance to me, as the world had only two components, those who played chess (admirable) and those who could not... obviously inferior intellectually.
There were three tiers in the club and when I ascended to the second tier, I met Mr Mazingi, a school teacher from Mdantsane, a huge city of Xhosa folk, about 20 kilometres away from East London.
We used to love playing chess against each other.
I can remember Mr Mazingi playing an old grumpy German and Mr Mazingi called him “Baas”, an Afrikaans word meaning master.
I clearly remember thinking at the time “why are you calling him Baas?”
It actually annoyed me at the time, it was the first time when I started to be critical of the society I was living in.
I could never get enough of Chess and neither could Mr Mazingi, so I invited Mr Mazingi to my house to play chess, this was in 1975 when such things were generally taboo in South African society.
My mother was very impressed with this idea and I can still remember Mr Mazingi’s car, a red Nissan 1400 bakkie (small truck) with a white canopy.
Mr Mazingi came wearing a sports jacket and a tie.
My mother served us tea on a tray with our crockery, I still remember thinking that this was the first time that a non-white person was using our own crockery, quite a revolutionary concept at the time.
In our society we used to employ black people as domestic maids and as garden “boys”; the garden boys used to get thick slices of bread with apricot jam and the 820 gram sized tin to be used as a tea mug. The irony of our society is that black people could live as domestic workers on your property but they dare not live next door to you.
Mr Mazingi and I remained good friends but my chess was progressing rapidly and when I moved into the top tier, our contact with each other diminished.
I started to play against a gentleman by the name of Donald Woods, I found out that he was the Editor of the Daily Dispatch, a man who my father didn’t like because of his liberal views towards Black people.
He seemed a nice enough person to me and I was at the age when I did not accept the views of my father at face value, so I started to pay more notice to the articles in our local newspaper, the Daily Dispatch.
Donald believed that sport was prominent in South African Society and that multi-racial sport would be a powerful instrument to break down the barriers in South African society.
Strangely enough, Chess was quite prominent in introducing change, other more prominent sports such as rugby and cricket, could never tolerate such a blasphemy at the time.
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