The Chessmaster of Woodlands Road

A man walks up Woodlands Road, a folding table and two chairs wedged under his arms. It is cold and dark, the skeletal branches of trees lining the street create glowing jigsaw shapes in the tenement windows above him. Undisturbed by the chill in a thick, fleece-lined leather jacket and trapper hat, he unfolds the table in front of Pepe’s Piri Piri takeaway, and begins unpacking his rucksack.

“Hello Michael!” sings out a passing woman, placing her hand to her chest. He acknowledges her greeting with a toothy grin, whilst methodically arranging items on the table: a large wooden chess set, a scoreboard written on a scrap of cardboard and a laminated sign bearing a green design of a galloping horse, beneath which is printed ‘Master of Chess’ in serif font.

Finally, he places a microphone in a small stand on the table and extends another beside it, into which he fixes his phone. Now seated, he addresses an unseen audience in a gentle Zimbabwean accent: “Good evening clients! We are here at Woodlands community. Two hours of entertaining — we come here to relax.” 

This is Chessmaster Michael. 

Michael — who prefers we don’t use his surname — has been a Woodlands Road fixture since 2018, the year I also moved to the area. I was on nodding terms with him then, as I passed by often, though never introduced myself. But tonight I finally do. It’s time to watch the Chessmaster at work. 

Or rather, at play because Michael is legally not allowed to work. The 66 year-old is, like many in this city, an asylum seeker waiting for a decision on his application to remain. He’s come up with a novel way of filling the many long hours he has on his hands: challenging passers-by to games of chess on the street. 

It was in his native Zimbabwe, aged 13, that Michael first picked up a chess piece. That was 53 years ago. Now, thousands of miles away, he commutes to this stretch of pavement four or five nights a week from his Shettleston flat. Between 8pm –10pm he live-streams the games on TikTok to a small, but engaged, following.

His opponents are often repeat challengers, returning to hone their skills.“Hi Michael,” calls out a young woman approaching us, about 15 minutes in. He introduces me to Tess, a masters student in Serious Games and Virtual Reality at the Glasgow School of Art (registering my confusion, Tess translates this as learning to create educational video games). She takes a seat as he sets up the pieces. 

Michael rolls cigarettes for them both, they snap a selfie and the game commences. A few minutes in, Tess lifts her rook to take Michael’s pawn, prompting him to raise his hand and suggest another move, “Because now you have officers commanding the front line.” Michael adapts his game depending on which “community member” he is playing. For those with less experience, like Tess, they are more lessons than contests. 

She eyes one of his bishops with her fingers on a pawn. “You have to seize the opportunity,” he advises. 

“Is this a trap?” she asks warily. 

Michael chuckles. “For the time being, no.” 

Tess captures the bishop then studies his face intently for signs of deceit. Some lads munching chicken watch from Pepe’s brightly lit interior, intrigued. 

I leave Tess and Michael to it for a bit, heading into surrounding businesses to ask what they know about the Chessmaster. 

The young staffer manning the counter at Pepe’s smiles at the mention of his name. “I grew up in Woodlands, I’ve seen him around since I was 12,” he says. He hasn’t had a game himself, but mentions that workmates will sometimes cram a rapid round of chess into their breaks.

Over in The Arlington, the bartender is even more effusive: “He’s a lovely guy!” he exclaims. Sometimes, he says, punters will leave the bar; an hour later he’ll take out the bins and find them locked into a game of chess in the street. 

Michael is an all-weather man. “I’ve seen him out there playing in the rain, under an umbrella,” the bartender says. 

Tonight, the elements want Michael to prove it; back outside a light drizzle has started to fall, creating a sodium-orange mist around the streetlights. Tess shifts in her seat and Michael passes her a fluffy hot water bottle then immediately makes off with her rook. “Check,” he says, grinning wolfishly.” She yelps and moves her king. 

Michael swiftly reaches over and takes her knight with his. “Check,” he repeats. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tess mutters.

A couple in their late twenties walking to Pepe’s glance over. One party stops to study the game. I suggest he take the next one. “Maybe, but it’s a bit cold innit,” he replies, and the pair continue inside towards the promise of a chicken dinner.

The game ends with a turn up: Tess checkmating Michael. “Congratulations,” I say. “He let me win,” she laughs. Whilst he turns to chat with another acquaintance, I ask Tess about how she met Michael. It’s the third time they’ve gone head-to-head. She first noticed him on her way to The Arlington: “A lot of my friends had seen him there. One day I was kind of curious and just played him.” 

She says that the “wholesome” atmosphere he’s created makes a welcome change from boozier student nights out: “It does bring random people together on the street. It was nice to meet people in a fun way”. 

After Tess has said her goodbyes, Michael explains that students are one of his “many categories of client.” So you have regulars of all backgrounds, I ask. “Oh yes! If the weather is ok, or when the sun is shining, they queue up.”

Woodlands became Michael’s regular evening patch after an abortive attempt on Byres Road. There, he found the wrong sort of competition.

“A boy says, ‘This is my place!’,” he remembers. “If you argue with the boy, then two guys come.” 

Has there been any other trouble than that, I wonder? He shrugs before mentioning someone once stole a pawn when he went to the toilet, and recalls “a drunkard” hurling abuse another evening, “But I didn’t understand what he was saying.” Problems are rare, he says, and the police check in occasionally, “They ask me: ’Are you ok, are you feeling good?’” 

His spirits seem light enough tonight. “We’re going to play music!” he announces, tapping his phone and connecting to a Bluetooth speaker. “Probably you haven’t heard this before.” 

I haven’t. An explosion of interwoven rhythms and unfamiliar percussive sounds fills the air, albeit tinnily. It’s Mbira dzeNharira, a popular band in Zimbabwe. 

Before moving to Scotland, Michael says he never listened to them. Back home he “wanted to discover new things like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney,” he tells me, puffing on a cigarette, “and Dire Straits.” I wonder, watching him tap his hand to the music, if listening to Mbira dzeNharira now provides greater emotional resonance since coming to Scotland.

Michael says he’s had his asylum claim refused 16 or 17 times. Another appeal is in progress as we speak. I ask what could be the reason for the rejections. He appears nervous discussing this, understandably. “It depends, you see,” comes his hesitant reply. “A lot of people around, they got settled the moment they got in. It depends on the system, which nobody understands.” Does he have any theories, I ask. “Maybe because when I came to the UK I was a little bit old and not good for working,” he speculates. This sounds unlikely to me, but then I’m no expert and his discomfort is apparent, so I hold off this line of questioning for the moment.

Certainly, he’s been in Britain for a long time — since at least 2005, as I understand it. Before then he had been running a successful travel agency in his hometown of Sanyati. His role as an elder in an international Pentecostal church network called Faith for Others (later renamed ‘Agape’), took Michael back and forth between Zimbabwe and Britain on multiple-entry visa. There were three months in Dundee, but he found it “a bit quiet and full of students,” so based himself in Edinburgh whilst living on the proceeds from his agency. Then, in 2008, Michael received a phone call which would change the direction of his life, removing him from everything he knew, owned and loved.

The call was from his secretary. “Your name has been tarnished,” she said. 

Before Michael had left Zimbabwe, he made a donation to a local politician with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, then the country’s official opposition. MDC supporters faced grave danger from the governing Zanu-PF regime, who have dominated Zimbabwean politics since the country’s independence in 1980. 

In 2008, an election loomed and violent reprisals increased; post ballot (which the incumbent President Robert Mugabe ‘won’ in a sham contest), MDC’s leader estimated around 500 of its party members had been killed. An Amnesty International report documented unlawful killings, torture, beatings and intimidation of MDC activists, saying these were perpetrated primarily by ZANU-PF supporters and allied organisations. The Zimbabwean state, Amnesty concluded had not just allowed attackers to “kill, torture, assault and burn homes and businesses” of suspected MDC supporters “with impunity” — they had also, in some cases, directed the attacks themselves. 

“It was dangerous to go back,” Michael says, slowly. “If you own a business you are well known, you understand?” 

I ask what became of the chairman he donated the money to. “He was killed,” he replies matter of factly.  

He hasn’t returned. The situation, he says, remains “unliveable, especially in the cities.”

I ask how he feels about Zimbabwe now. 

Michael answers my question with his own. “How can a man leave his family so long?” he asks, his eyes widening. 

And how does he feel, living here, I ask. “Glasgow is my home,” he says. After so long, Michael feels he has naturalised in spirit, if not in documentation. But there must be things you like and dislike about it, I insist. “It depends how you treat yourself when you are in a city,” he replies. “If you pursue good things, the results will be the same. But if you pursue bad things, the place will be bad for you. Anywhere, any city!”

As well as feeling safer, Woodlands also made sense as a haunt since Michael was initially spending days at the Mitchell Library, writing three successive novels, all self-published. The stories focus on African protagonists acclimatising to unfamiliar surroundings, and appear to be a means of processing his enforced, disorientating exile. 

The plot of one, quirkily titled ‘Walking into a Pub in Glasgow: you may not be interested’, sees protagonist ‘Billy’, attempting to find community. “Billy finds himself in a quagmire with his patrons because he has a different cultural background,” reads the blurb. In an early scene, Billy heads to a karaoke night, but the intense curiosity from pub regulars about his background is unsettling. “Excuse me mate,” Billy says to one interrogator. “I thought this pub was for everyone.” However, by the book’s conclusion, Billy is promising to sing ABBA after he finishes his lager, having quickly learned how to win local favour in Glasgow.

Along with the library, the ‘Woodlands Rostrum’, as Michael dubs his chess set up, has provided him with a consistent physical anchor. He’s been shifted from flat to flat around the city, with stints in Maryhill, Anderston and Parkhead as his claim grinds on. 

“If they accept your application, they can give you somewhere to stay while they look at your case,” he explains. “But, if this is not alright, they throw you out of the house. That is the system.” Each rejection invalidates his right to accommodation, and “when you re-apply, you won’t get back to the same place — someone is already there!” he chuckles. 

His cheerful nature has won him the affection of all of Woodlands, it seems, but the question of the state’s inhospitality remains. I’m still puzzled by the 17 year length of his asylum claims so the next day consult the Govan Community Project, a charity supporting refugees in Glasgow. They mention they have heard of the process taking over ten years, but without specific details they cannot comment further.

Michael and I arrange to speak on the phone, I bring up the subject again. Long silences meet my questions, and he becomes suspicious: “Who are you, why do you ask these questions?” My pulse is racing. I need to do my job but I don’t want him to feel I’m mining for traumatic information. And he owes me nothing of his story. Uneasily, we leave the conversation there but I decide to return to Woodlands the next evening, wishing to smooth things over. 

At my arrival he looks exasperated, but invites me to sit at his rostrum. Once I explain that I want to establish clear facts to tell his story accurately he appears reassured, and in turn explains that he feels the urgent need to be careful. “Look what happened down south,” he exclaims, referring to the far-right rioters attacking asylum seeker hotels in England last summer. “There are some haters!” 

His wariness of me, another stranger taking an interest in his story, does seem completely rational: he has fled a corrupt and dangerous country and sought safety in another with long-established hostile policies towards migrants. “I’ve had so many refusals,” he exhales deeply. I ask what the rejection letters say. “It’s like a book!” he sighs, “the same story, it’s so boring.” The arrival of another chess client puts an end to our conversation.

The enforced stasis and uncertainty he lives in must be exhausting, but his efforts to engage with various communities since arriving in the UK — he shows me photos of his work with the Ark Family Church in Bolton, and talks fondly about coaching baseball with MSP Bob Doris in Wyndford — all suggest a man with energy and an eagerness to use his experience for the common good. As we discuss this, perhaps in frustration, he exclaims: “I feel fit — I can run, I can jump, I can do everything and my mind is sharp!”  

During the first night I meet Michael, the couple who went into Pepe’s re-emerge and approach his rostrum. “You up for another game?” enquires the guy, looking rejuvenated. Michael gestures to the empty seat and sets up the pieces. Decided to brave the cold then, I ask. “Aye! Couldn’t be missed,” he replies. 

The players and chess pieces are now all lined up facing each other under the streetlights. “What’s your name?” “Jake. What’s yours?” “Michael.” They shake hands and start to play.