A world away from the dusty heat of the western suburbs of Pretoria, where I lived, in icy Reykjavik, the Cold War was reaching its apotheosis. World chess champion Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union was preparing to take on his American challenger, Bobby Fischer, in Iceland in July 1972. Through the greatest of board games (at least in the non-Asian, non-African sphere), communism and capitalism were going to clash openly through their surrogates. East versus West on 64 black-and-white squares; queens and rooks, knights and bishops standing in for the inter-continental ballistic missiles that the planet's two superpowers had pointing at each other's territory.

What came to be known as The Match of the Century exerted a profound effect on youngsters around the world and in South Africa too, even though in its 24th year of apartheid the country was increasingly cut off. Globally, tens of thousands took up the game; locally, thousands. From the start of this chess mania in South Africa, however, all was not equal. The tentacles of National Party legislation meant that chess clubs and tournaments were segregated. Whites played whites in clubs and tournaments in the cities and suburbs; blacks played blacks in township clubs and events. That age-old dichotomy of the game itself – white versus black on a flat, square, playing field of 32 black squares and 32 white squares – played out in an obverse and perverse echo in South African reality.

White chess clubs and the South African Chess Federation (SACF) woke up early to this parlous position. They declared that clubs and tournaments were open to all, an open-ended stance that did not resolve the problem. There is wishful thinking and wishful saying, and the ‘open to all’ declaration was redolent of both.

At the first Border Championship, from 15 to 17 December 1974, history was made. As the January 1975 issue of The South African Chessplayer put it: ‘It was a seven round swiss open to all players resident in the Border area … A pleasing feature was that among the entries were many who had never played tournament chess before, and this was the case with most of the 12 Bantu, 2 Coloured, Indian and Chinese entrants.’