Arriving in South Africa

Durban is a large city in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal which comprises the Southeastern part of the country and includes many kilometers of Indian Ocean coastline, wetlands peppered with beautiful birds, hippos and rhinos, mountains, farmland, goats and bulls grazing in the highway, colorfully-dressed people walking in the roads, pesky vervet monkeys and a host of game reserves with every native animal including the Big Five -- lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino.   The largest ethnic group in the province are the Zulu people (who once owned the land) and isiZulu is their native tongue, though there are altogether 11 official languages spoken in South Africa.  It is widespread, though, even among non-Zulu people, to greet with the Zulu word "Sawubona." It is similar to the English hello except it means literally “We see you,” the “we” referring to the ancestors, gods, spirits or so on. It means to truly see a person at their deepest level.  You say “Sawubona” and the other person answers “Yebo, Sawubona.” (Yes, we see you)

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Josh before his first round at the World Youth Chess Tournament

Hi, I am Angel Jochi Hernandez-Camen or, as most of my friends call me, Josh. I am a 14-year-old chess master and started playing when I was 10. This is a fairly late time to start playing chess, but nevertheless I am on the verge of entering the top 10 in my age group for USA and striving for more. That doesn't mean it wasn't a humongous honor to be accepted into the prestigious World Youth Chess Championship held this year in Durban. To play against the best kids in the world...and it seemed even more daunting after my terrible play in the two tournaments I played preceding it (two wins in the 14 games I played, and not against the strongest players either!). However, I can safely say that I overcame these two tournaments with my nice performance in the World Youth!

We arrived in South Africa a few days before the tournament, to get accustomed to the difference in time, and to have some time to see Durban. Along with the chess I am also a music composition student, so I was very interested to hear the music of South Africa. South Africa music is full of singing and dancing, but it was only in Durban that I saw the most emphasis on drums as well (This was only in the places we visited).  Here's an example of what we saw and heard in Durban (please excuse the quality of these videos especially when you make them full screen. The originals are beautiful but when I upload them onto blogger they get compressed and blurry. If anyone has a solution to this let us know. In the meantime just watch them in tiny mode!):

                                                   (Opening ceremony before Round 1)

                                                                      (on a walk)

As much as I loved the melodic and especially rhythmic content of the singing in South Africa, I was really hoping to get to hear and see more traditional instruments. I was hoping to see an African marimba or harp but I would never see any traditional music played with anything more than voice and drums. Despite my initial skepticism though I would come to really love and enjoy South African music even without instruments...but I still wish I heard an African harp! Perhaps with another month to spare I might have been able to explore the African music scene more deeply.

Skins drying in a booth at the Muthi Market

On the same walk of the last video we also saw an African healer helping somebody quit smoking. This walk was on our way to the Muthi market of Durban. “Muthi” means traditional Zulu medicine and it is where many of the local Zulu people come after getting a diagnosis from a Zulu medicine man or diviner. We asked a person working there to show us what some of the muthi was, and what it might be used for. She showed us some of the animal skins they used, and a concoction of tree bark which was to be made into a tea and drunk to help something or other, I forget. In any case we decided to ask her what she would recommend to me to win the tournament. She thought for a while, asked a couple of people, and finally found a medicine man to give us advice. It was hard to understand him though since he spoke little English, and the only words we knew in Zulu were "sawubona," and "unjani (how are you) and unfortunately we did not write any of it down, as we were not super serious, but it was interesting nonetheless. I do remember two ingredients were water and some animals skin that needed to be grounded into a pulp. We did not leave the Muthi Market without getting something however, some man sold us an “African Potato”, telling us it was for problems with “bile” or stomach problems (Later we would see the plant that sprouts from this bulb in the Drakensburg mountains, and learn that it has been used for medicinal purposes since the time of the Bushmen and today is an ingredient in a pharmaceutical drug used to help cancer patients). Amazingly, US Customs allowed us to bring it into the States and I guess I’ll try it if I ever get a stomach ailment!

Anyway that's some of my most interesting experiences in Durban, South Africa. I relearned how to move the pieces, downloaded some games of the top 30-ish kids in the section, and after a good night's rest I was ready to play!

I want to thank the following people who helped me with my chess and to get to World Youth: Grandpa Clyde, Florri Middleman and the Watermark Foundation, Steve Shutt, Greg Shahade, Ronen Har-Zvi, Melanie Brennan, Coach El-Mekki and the students of the Paul Robeson Chess Club, Coach Douglas Cox, Malik, Javier and Sandra Kuehnle, Sue Sigmund, Edit Kurali, the Masterman Chess Team and all my other chess friends and opponents, Lucy, Tom, David, and Erik Brodsky, Wei Xu and Jason Li, Dov Gorman, Nick De Firmian, Ben Finegold, Aviv Freidman, Ben Cooper, Philly ASAP and anyone else I forgot. Thank you!

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Man walking in Center City Durban

But if you are going to wear blinders then you do not know the world.

--Miriam Makeba (Mama Africa), South African singer and civil rights activist

I first learned that my son, Angel Jochi (Josh) Hernandez-Camen, qualified to participate in the World Youth Chess Tournament 2014 in Durban, South Africa, from his Masterman team chess coaches Stephen Shutt and IM Greg Shahade. Two of the most supportive mentors you could ever hope to have for your chess-loving son, they did not present this to me as an option or a possibility but as a matter of fact: he qualified and we were going. Considering I am a low-income single mom, I found their optimism a bit over the top. The cost of such a venture was astronomical. But their enthusiasm soon wore on me and put Josh in gear to go. We began to get excited about the adventure.  Before you knew it, Josh and I were discussing fundraising schemes, borrowing money from relatives and researching scholarships. We made and sold tamales at chess tournaments, received a large grant from the Watermark Kids Foundation which covered the bulk of Josh's expenses, and generous gifts from Josh’s grandfather.

Besides the money issue we had another more personal obstacle to hurtle. Josh and I had been building relationships with the African American chess community in Philadelphia to help level the playing field and build more success for the students, to bring more attention to the fact that money and fine coaches are needed for chess students to go beyond just ordinary after-school type play. As obvious as this may sound to any parent or chess student who is trying to compete, there is still a general lack of support for many of our public school chess students especially children of color from challenged communities. I guess because Josh and I have had to build his chess career from the bottom up -- without private coaches or a lot of money, always scraping from one tournament to another, wondering how we were going to pay off the credit cards for yet another weekend of hotel stay and tournament fees -- we understood what obstacles needed to be hurtled for a lower-income black student to achieve at chess. For our own sake and for the love of the game we knew we had to help fight against these glaring inequities.


All this considered, I felt uncomfortable about Josh (my part Mexican-part Russian son) and I getting the opportunity to go to Africa when there are so many black students that given the opportunities and situation Josh has had should be having the opportunity to see Africa and explore their roots. Despite my apprehension we were warmly supported by many of our friends in the African American chess community, especially Coach Douglas and Coach El Mekki, of the Paul Robeson Chess Club and our good friend Malik who kept in touch with us daily through our entire journey (and also helped us to restore our home when we returned to find it trashed by our house sitter after a month away, but that is another story for another time).

South Africa is known for its success of a grassroots movement to overthrow an apartheid system against people of color, but it still has much work to do to insure that all people have equal rights and opportunities. Like the US there are huge income gaps and many low income black people live in poverty and lack basic opportunities. There are great gaps in the education system and racism is still rampant. Our collective long histories of colonization has taken a toll on society that still has a long way to be put repaired.

When we were searching for lodging in the Drakensberg mountains where we wanted to hike to see ancient cave art, we came across a backpackers lodge that ran a volunteer program at a Zulu primary school. After some correspondence back and forth we arranged to jump
start a chess program at the school and to set up an exchange with the Paul Robeson chess club. Coach El Mekki and the students of the Paul Robeson Chess Club sent photos and greetings with us, an autographed chess board, chess key chains and various chess equipment. We could not bring them all with us (this time) or have them go in our stead, but we could be a mouthpiece, embassies of the students dreams and wishes. It’s not much perhaps, but we take little steps along the way and hope one day we all get to a just end. We also brought a dozen chess sets donated by Dewain Barber, longtime scholastic chess coach and supporter, owner of  American Chess Equipment and sponsor of the national “Dewain Barber Tournament of K-8 Champions.” Josh and I will write more about this program and how it developed in later blogs.

Josh looking at a mural depicting the South African Bill of Rights which was drawn up as part of the negotiations to end apartheid.

In addition, to help us to understand the situation in South Africa, Josh and I studied the history of apartheid through several books and films and also read Things Fall Apart by the  wonderful African author Chinua Achebe. I’m not sure any of this totally prepared us for what we would experience on our journey, but we attempted as much as possible to enter upon it with open eyes and as much thoughtfulness as we could.

In the following blogs Josh and I will share our joint and separate impressions of South Africa, of playing and being a “chess mom” at a grueling World Youth Tournament, of the Zulu school we visited, of the people we met, the villages we traveled through, and what we learned during the tremendous month we spent in South Africa. We hope it will give you a glimpse into our South African adventure.