africa

GM Kenneth Solomon grew up in Mitchells Plain, a township notorious by having the highest crime rate in South Africa. Gang violence and drug abuse were rampant, and chess became his way out.

He first learned to play chess when he was 7, but really didn’t get into the game until six years later, when one of his seven siblings qualified to play at the Manila Chess Olympiad in 1992. That was the year when South Africa was readmitted to enter the competition, after having been suspended by FIDE in 1974 due to the apartheid. It was the first time in the organisation’s fifty-year history that a member had been suspended.

“Thanks to the change brought about by Mandela and the abolition of Apartheid, the game was no longer divided between white people and black people, and my brother belonged to the first team”, he explained in an interview to the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

“After seeing my brother get on the plane, I went back home and started studying chess with great enthusiasm. I went mad too, if you will. I started looking for chess books in libraries and I would make very long trips to get there. I would read interviews – it had become a real passion.” A book about former world champion Anatoly Karpov was particularly influential to him. Basically self-taught, and practicing playing hundreds of blitz games with his elder brother, Kenny developed as a player and won the under-16 national championship just two years later.

Kenny went a long way since then. After scoring two GM norms, he finally earned the title directly by winning the African Chess Championship held in Namibia at the end of 2014. He has also represented South Africa at eleven Olympiads, all the way from Elista 1998 to Chennai 2022, being Budapest 2024 his first miss.

It was at a Chess Olympiad that he met his future wife, Veronika Goi, a chess player from Italy. They married in 2011 and settled in Venice. Their first daughter, Eleonora, was born shortly after; they have three kids now. Kenny is currently a member of the A.D. Esteban Canal group in Venice, collaborates with A.S.D. Scacchi Capablanca in Mestre, and also offers coaching at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and in summer camps.

Although I had met Kenny at countless olympiads, it was during my eventful trip to Botswana for the current African Championships when I had the opportunity to share time with him and get to know him better. My flight to Johannesburg experienced a technical problem after more than four hours in the air, and the captain decided to return to Paris, very much to my dismay. While we were waiting to be allocated a new flight, I ran into Kenny, who was calmly going through some recent chess games on his laptop.

He was perfectly at peace with the idea of possibly missing the first round – just going with the flow, accepting the circumstances, and enjoying telling me about his new life in Italy. We are roughly the same age, and we both built a family far from where we were born, so we didn’t lack topics of conversation.

Listening to him, it was hard not to think back to that boy from a rough neighborhood in South Africa who once dreamed of following his brother onto a plane to a Chess Olympiad – and who, decades later, no longer needed a stroke of luck to find himself among the continent’s elite, calmly waiting, laptop in hand, for whatever came next.