White starts first in chess, but in South Africa black is king. The highest-ranked chess player in the country is Watu Kobese, a former wunderkind from Soweto. He is also the only chess professional in the country, eschewing a more secure and financially rewarding career for international battle on the chequered board.
But the 28-year-old will not be representing South Africa at this year’s Chess Olympics. In fact, he’ll be working against his home country. He’ll be there as the coach for the Botswana team, and the prospect of a clash between the two neighbours brings out a flash of the ferocity that all good chess players have. ”Botswana is going to kill South Africa,” he says passionately.
There is an edge to his voice that goes beyond the desire to see the team he has trained triumph. Kobese feels bitter about the lack of support he has had in South Africa. He has no sponsorship and feels that the people running the national organisation Chess South Africa (Chessa) have failed to be supportive and proactive.
Kobese is a chess master –which puts him roughly in the second rank of chess players internationally. He’s gearing himself up to fulfil the conditions to become the sixth African grandmaster. But to do that he needs to be able to travel to tournaments, to compete against and learn from stronger players. And that in turn means finding financial resources.
His greatest triumph so far was beating one of the top five players in the world, Peter Leko. The Hungarian put the South African whippersnapper in his place in the next game, but the triumph is still there, boosting Kobese’s confidence. Kobese says that when he beat Leko, he reached an almost Zen-like state.
”I was totally relaxed, time had no meaning. At that moment I could not make any mistakes.”
Top-level international chess is a serious game. A player like Leko will be advised by a team of top international-level players, who will analyse his games and those of his opponents to get the edge. Kobese doesn’t have such a luxury, although he and his fellow players in Southern Africa do their best to work with each other.
Although angry at the lack of support he gets, Kobese is even more enraged about the way he perceives chess to have withered in South Africa as a whole. Young players, particularly young black players from disadvantaged backgrounds, are failing to break through. They run out of resources, have to find work to support themselves or their families, and above all cannot get the international experience they need to become really good.
Kobese knows about developing chess. His father, Arthur Kobese, not only turned his son into the country’s number one, but is also credited with driving the development of chess in disadvantaged areas, even under apartheid.
But the elder Kobese retired, and although the reasons are murky, tournament chess is not thriving. The younger Kobese blames Chessa, which he says has failed on two points.
”There is no development of chess in the townships, and there is no attempt to improve the level of top players.”
A Chessa director also admits that the game is not in a good way, but says the problems are historical and the present board is trying to rectify them.
Ironically, with chess at such a low point, there is a renewed interest in using the game to improve academic performance. The Gauteng Department of Education has approved a pilot project which will see the South African Chess Academy teaching the game –or sport, depending on your point of view — in eight schools.
The game is more than maths or logic. Research indicates that chess also improves concentration, and provides a means to express aggression. It’s a vicious game fought in silence: probably the greatest chess player of all time, Bobby Fischer, is quoted as saying that he enjoyed nothing more than crushing his opponent’s ego.
Kobese says a good player needs ”knowledge, character. You have to be able to come back. The real opponent is yourself. It also teaches responsi- bility … you know you are responsible for each and everything you do.”
The Community and Individual Development Association is one educational organisation that incorporates chess into its curriculum.
Housed in an imposing downtown Johannesburg building, classes are held in what was once a large open-plan office. Now the floor is filled with grouped rows of chairs, each facing a television screen. The lecturer speaks mainly to a camera, which transmits the lesson to each television screen.
Chess academy director Jackie Ngubene has recruited three international masters — Kobese; Robert Gwaze, Zimbabwe’s top player and Kudzanai Mamombe — to teach. Ngubene says only players of this calibre are able to stand and talk for an hour, without making mistakes.
They’re also good teachers. Not all the students are paying attention, many are bent over their homework, but in each class there is a row of intent faces gazing at the lesson. Kobese says he’s a better teacher than player — and he earns applause and laughter as he demonstrates a chess trick that turns conventional strategy on its head.
Twenty-year-old Gwaze is regarded as potentially brilliant, but he, unlike, say, the highly praised South African teenager Ken Willenberg, has managed to get funding to drive him further up the world rankings. He’ll play at the Olympics, and then a scholarship will enable him go to attend a chess school overseas. With his baseball cap on backwards and casual baggy clothes, Gwaze doesn’t look like a chess champion. Last week he narrowly missed being made Zimbabwe’s Sportsman of the Year — it was the first time that a chess player had been nominated, and he hopes it marks greater acceptance of the game as a sport.
Kobese is so good because he’s been prepared to sacrifice a ”proper” career in pursuit of chess. But without sponsorship he’s caught in a vicious spiral: to support himself he has to teach, yet doing so dulls his own development. And that need to teach is one reason South Africa’s highest-ever ranked chess player will not be playing for his country in the Chess Olympics.