The freedom to move

What the unknown history of South African chess reveals about apartheid and the fight for freedom

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On a frosty July morning in 1972, about 400 people gathered in Johannesburg’s Joubert Park. Interest in chess was at an all-time high. Standing shoulder to shoulder, spectators had come to watch America’s Bobby Fischer take on Soviet Russia’s Boris Spassky. The Match of the Century was being played more than 16,000 kilometres away in Reykjavik, but the drama unfolded in real time on a patch of winter grass in the middle of Johannesburg. Vic Southern, president of the Johannesburg Chess Club, relayed the course of the 51-day contest move by move on a giant chess board. His two young sons played the parts of the grandmasters: Mark, representing Fischer in t-shirt and jeans, and Peter, dressed as a Russian Cossack, standing in for Spassky.¹

Chess has always sat on the margins of world sport. Yet, every so often, it bursts into the centre of global attention, as it did in 1972. In that Cold War moment, the game became something more than sixty-four squares and two sets of pieces. As Daniel Johnson put it, chess turned into a “mega-metaphor” for the global stand-off, a demilitarised, abstract form of war.²

The temptation to enlist chess as metaphor is hard to resist, and it is easy to do the same for twentieth-century South Africa. Strategies, sacrifices, long games played in the shadows; the vocabulary of the chessboard fits all too well.

Yet the story of South African chess refuses black-and-white simplicity. Just weeks before Spassky faced off against Fischer, Gordon Lawrence and Dawid Muller became the first coloured players to compete in the South African Open Chess Championship.³ We know little about Lawrence or Muller as individuals, but their careers remind us that, for all the constraints of the time, chess in South Africa could be remarkably vibrant.

The oldest surviving chess club in South Africa, the Cape Town Chess Club, celebrates its 140th birthday this year. There were earlier clubs – records hint at chess being organised as far back as 1847 – but the Cape Town club’s founding in 1885 marked a real beginning for organised chess in the country. From the late nineteenth century, clubs appeared across South Africa, although institutional growth was slow. A national body, the Chess Federation of South Africa, was only created in 1948. Another decade passed before South Africa sent a team to the Chess Olympiad, one of the sport’s most prestigious international events.⁴

By the 1970s, South Africa was firmly embedded in the World Chess Federation (FIDE), having participated in every Olympiad since 1958. At the same time, the country’s growing pariah status meant it was increasingly isolated elsewhere. After condemnation by the United Nations in 1962, South Africa was banned and then expelled from the Olympics in 1964 and 1970.

The state’s response was the policy of “multinationalism”, rooted in the logic of separate development. Racially exclusive teams could, the argument went, be redefined as separate “nations” and thereby continue to compete internationally. In practice, multinationalism meant limited integration in sport under carefully controlled conditions.⁵ For some observers it looked like a small concession. For others, it was window dressing. A clean break, they insisted, was the only honest response.⁶

In 1973, the South African Council of Sport (SACOS) was founded. Its president, Hassan Howa, coined the memorable slogan: “No normal sport in an abnormal society.” Those associated with SACOS refused to comply with apartheid legislation affecting sport and rejected multinational confederations and multinational tournaments outright.

Chess was not immune. Around this time, the Royal Chess Federation of Morocco approached FIDE to request the exclusion of South Africa (and Rhodesia). FIDE’s president, former world champion Max Euwe, travelled to South Africa to investigate. He met with the CFSA and with representatives from three “non-white” chess organisations. His conclusion was oddly cautious. Participation by “non-white” players was “not on a scale I and the CFSA would have wished”, he conceded, but he also claimed there was “no apartheid in chess in South Africa”.⁷

The documentary record is fragmentary, but there are clear signs of a lively chess culture across the colour line. According to Omar Esau, the first non-racial chess association, the Western Province Chess Association (WPCA), was founded in 1964. By 1974, the WPCA encompassed five clubs and several school teams.⁸ Ten years later, it could reportedly claim around 1,500 members across 12 clubs and 80 school teams.⁹ In December 1974, the first Border Championship attracted 44 competitors, “including 12 black players, two coloured players, one Indian player and one Chinese player”.¹⁰

None of this is to suggest that chess was somehow fully integrated. It is easy enough to find accounts of players arrested, harassed or barred from tournaments because of their race. Rather, as sports historian Gustav Venter has argued, the point is that chess, as a relatively minor sport, could be surprisingly lively, and for a brief moment stood at the frontier of efforts to desegregate South African sport.

In 1974, South Africa was suspended from FIDE, the first time in the organisation’s fifty-year history that members had been suspended. The story might have ended there. Yet when FIDE decided to hold the 1976 Olympiad in Israel, several countries boycotted and instead attended a “counter-Olympiad” in Libya. The resulting gap created an opening for South Africa to seek readmission.

With many familiar rivals absent, South Africa was able to compete in Israel. The Soviet Union responded by calling a special assembly in Lucerne to decide the country’s fate. In preparation, the CFSA, now renamed the South African Chess Federation (SACF), assembled a delegation and a strategy. The three-man group included federation president Leonard Reitstein and his deputy Bill Bowers, a leading coloured chess administrator from Cape Town.

The third member of the delegation was Donald Woods. Better known as a prominent anti-apartheid journalist, Woods also captained the East London Chess Club. A vigorous supporter of non-racial chess, he had helped to make the East London club the “first fully integrated” chess club in South Africa. Reitstein understood that Woods’ public standing gave moral weight to South Africa’s case.¹¹

There was, however, another layer to the story. Unknown to his colleagues, Woods had been given a second task by Sports Minister Piet Koornhof. He was to meet leading anti-apartheid sports campaigners in London to discuss secret talks about lifting the sports boycott. Koornhof and Woods could hardly have held more different views about apartheid, but on this question they shared a goal: ending South Africa’s isolation in sport.¹² The plan ultimately collapsed, the meetings cancelled, and nothing came of the initiative. Even so, the episode hints at the unexpectedly prominent role that chess briefly played in the wider battles over sport and apartheid.

In Lucerne, after presentations by Reitstein and Bowers, a test vote showed that South Africa was likely to lose its bid to remain in FIDE. The South African delegation and its supporters walked out in protest. In hindsight, that walkout looks like the beginning of the end for the non-racial chess movement. Later in 1977, Woods was banned for condemning the government after the murder of Steve Biko.¹³ In reaction, joint SACF vice presidents Simmy Lewis and Bill Bowers resigned, and the non-racial WPCA withdrew from the Western Province Chess Union.

Over the next three days, Grootbos Private Nature Reserve in the Western Cape will host the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Finals. Magnus Carlson, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, and several other famous players will be competing for the right to be crowned Freestyle Chess Champion 2025. Freestyle chess, or Chess960, is a variant that reshuffles the starting position of the back-rank pieces. It is also known as Fischer Random Chess, in honour of Bobby Fischer, who championed the modern version. Fischer began to think seriously about reforming the game during his unofficial rematch with Spassky in 1992, the same year that South Africa returned to world chess at the 30th Olympiad in the Philippines.¹⁴

Since then, chess has remained relatively small in South Africa, but the game continues to attract a loyal community of clubs and players. In late 2014, Kenny Solomon became South Africa’s first grandmaster. Given how rarely South African players face world-class opposition, it was a remarkable milestone.¹⁵

Today, the giant chess pieces still stand in Joubert Park. The park has a reputation for being rundown and dangerous, yet it remains a refuge for a small circle of devoted players. Some play for money, others for companionship or to let the hours pass, while children learn the moves among the oversized pieces. In 2016, Zanta Nkumane spoke to one of the regulars, Cephas Chawanda, who explained how the group had approached the metro authorities to turn their corner of the park into a proper chess hub.

Theirs was a modest request, but not much has come up of it since. The Johannesburg Development Agency has big plans for the revival of Joubert Park, the kind of visions that look excellent in a brochure, and earlier this year Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie made an made an emotional declaration that ‘the war has started’ in his effort to rescue the nearby Joburg Art Gallery. But Chawanda’s request is a reminder that what ordinary people want from government is not grandeur, but the freedom to make the next move.

‘The freedom to move’ was first published on Our Long Walk. The images were created with Midjourney v7.

1. “Big crowd sees curtain-raiser to chess dual.” Rand Daily Mail, 10 July 1972.

2. Daniel Johnson, 2007. White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was fought on the Chessboard. London: Atlantic Books, xv.

3. “Two coloureds make history in chess championship.” Rand Daily Mail, 10 July 1972.

4. Leonard Reitstein, 2003. A History of Chess in South Africa: From Van Riebeeck to the start of World War II and beyond. Kenilworth: L.R. Reitstein.

5. Gustav Venter, 2020. “White’s Gambit in the Middle Game: Chess, Apartheid, and South Africa’s sporting isolation in the 1970s”, International Journal of the History of Sport, 37 (7): 578.

6. Douglas Booth, “The South African Council on Sport and the political antimonies of the sports boycott”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 23 (1): 51–66.

7. Venter, 580.

8. Omar Essau, 2023. “Andre van Reenen, our Father of Non-Racial Chess.” Cape Town Chess Federation, https://chesswp.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Andre-van-Reeden.pdf

9. “New chess body formed”, Rand Daily Mail, 24 April 1984.

10. Venter, 583.

11. “Woods to help check Reds.” Rand Daily Mail, 19 July 1977.

12. For Koornhof, desegregating sports was a tactical concession that would extend the life of apartheid. For Woods, the end of sports apartheid was an important part of dismantling apartheid itself.

13. “No chess contact until Woods is free”, Rand Daily Mail, 28 October 1977.

14. Svetozar Gligoric, 2003. Shall we play Fischerandom Chess? Pavilion Books.

15. Nathan Geffen, “Role models and perseverance: How Kenny Solomon became South Africa’s first grandmaster.” GroundUp, 18 January 2015. https://groundup.org.za/article/role-models-and-perseverance-how-kenny-solomon-became-south-africas-first-grandmaster_2598/