When nightfall kicked in at Mitchells Plain, a suburb of Cape Town with the very best crime price in South Africa till a decade in the past, Kenny Solomon’s father would bolt the doorways from inside and inform his eight kids to not open the home windows. The curious kids would maintain their ears on the window panes. Sometimes they might hear a gunshot, incessant clank of low cost alcohol bottles, unceasing foul-mouthed chatter, screams and shrieks. “Just noise and noise,” recollects Solomon, the primary and the one Grandmaster from South Africa and the second from the sub-Saharan belt, who grew up within the final days of Apartheid South Africa.
When the streets had been quiet within the mornings, he and his brothers would stroll round and snack from sweet-meat retailers, however when the daylight pale out and the streetlights blinked, the township would get up and keep awake deep into the evening. But his father, a day by day wage employee however with a passion for Shakespeare, knew that he wouldn’t be capable of maintain them unexposed to the gangs of the neighbourhood. “So all evening, he would recite from Shakespeare and other poets,” says the 42-year-old.
But the curiosity of the world past the bolted doorways all the time piqued him. “I would sneak out and be with my friends in the streets and parks, having our bit of adventures, sometimes fighting. We would talk about one gang or the other, or a fight between them that someone had seen. It was part of growing up in our neighbourhood,” he says.
One day in highschool, whereas having lunch, he noticed an adolescent with a knife chasing one other boy. Other days, he has seen youngsters wielding weapons and staring with bloodshot, drugged eyes. His dad and mom had been anxious about his future, whether or not he would be part of a gang, however that’s when one among his brothers Maxwell certified for Chess Olympiad in Manilla and the household went to see them off on the airport. “I thought that’s big. I should learn chess and travel by airplane. Actually another brother Graham had taught me the moves when I was seven, but I was not too keen. That night I got home, picked a chess book off Maxwell’s shelf and started playing,” he says.
From that second, chess consumed his entire consciousness. “I was not able to stop playing the games that were shown in the book. It was Anatoly Karpov’s Collected Games. And then when Maxwell returned from Manilla, he took me under his wings,” he recounts.
His life modified straight away. He largely stored indoors, his buddies would knock on the window panes and whistle out loudly. But he wouldn’t trouble, a lot to his dad and mom’ pleasure. But little had been they conscious that by the nook of a cramped room of their three-room residence, a future Grandmaster was plotting his strikes. “I realised that if I didn’t create my own future, I would merely become a pawn in this scene, trapped in the violent, oppressive cycle of gangsterism,” he says.
The awakening coincided with the tip of the Apartheid Era and there was a way of optimism among the many non-white communities in South Africa. There was freedom and there was hope too. He enrolled in a chess membership in Mitchells Plain the place the “coloured people” used to congregate in a library to play blitz. “A totally new world opened up on me. Travelling to tournaments and meeting different people broadened my horizons about both life and chess. The game helped me to see beyond the apartheid’s classification of black and white. It puts a lot of things in perspective,” he says. A black-and-white recreation revealed the gray on the earth exterior.
Though Kenny obtained much more hooked into the sport, moreover enjoying and profitable native tournaments, he by no means fancied himself changing into a Grandmaster. “It was very difficult and required a lot of patience and perseverance! As there were not many opportunities for international chess. I studied chess every day, played all the local tournaments and tried my utmost to qualify for international events which would be once every year. So naturally, my progress became slow. But I never gave up,” he recollects.
That’s when future kicked in. “I had met a chess player from Italy in a tournament in 1998. We had lost contact and then I saw her again at a tournament in 2006 and we fell in love and decided to marry. I then moved to Venice with her. It was tough to leave my country, but Europe was better for chess I thought, and of course you want to be with your wife,” he says,
More tournaments, extra video games, higher setting, Kenny ultimately accomplished his GM norms in 2014. “It was a deeply emotional moment for me, and the whole journey flashed through my mind. I thought of my parents, brothers, and the Mitchell Plains. My mother was very happy, she had put in a lot of struggle to raise us. But my father had died three years before that,” he says.
Eight years on, these days in Mitchell Plains look distant but so clear in his thoughts. “There is nothing like home, like your childhood. No matter how difficult life might have been, a slice of you shall remain there,” he says, the entire journey flashing in entrance of his eyes.