While most of her teenage schoolmates spent their allowances on snacks and other small treats, Susan Namangale made an unexpected move with the little money she had.
She and a few friends pooled their change to buy two chessboards for their school in Malawi.
“If my mother knew then what I had done with the little pocket money she had given me, I would have been in trouble, especially looking back on how much we struggled,” said Ms. Namangale, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt with a checkered necktie, an outfit evocative of the game she adores. “But that’s how much I had fallen in love.”
Now 49, Ms Namangale is on a mission to change the narrative that chess is only for the elite. She has introduced the game to rural schools, prisons and some of the world’s most underserved communities.
“Chess is for everyone,” she said, in a recent interview in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.
Her first encounter with the game occurred when she was 9. One school holiday, an older sister, Gladys, returned home with a chessboard, a gift she had received from Peace Corps volunteers after excelling in mathematics at secondary school.
Her sister began teaching her the basics of the game, but after Gladys returned to school, her little sister had no one to play with in Chombo, a small village along Lake Malawi, where opportunities and resources are few and far between.
“No one from my village had ever seen a chessboard. It was very foreign to them,” she recalled.
Ms. Namangale began actively playing chess in secondary school, participating in tournaments. She continued playing through university, where she was one of only two women in the chess club. After graduating, she entered the corporate world, but she never let go of her passion for the game.
“I continued playing in tournaments even after I started working,” she said. “But balancing chess with a full-time job and raising a family became difficult. Eventually, I stopped playing competitively and decided to focus more on administration and advocacy.”
That decision led her to serve as president of the Chess Association of Malawi, a position she held from 2018 to 2022. She currently leads her regional zone in the International Chess Federation, a voluntary role in which she became the first woman to coordinate chess development in 10 southern African countries.
Ms. Namangale worked in a variety of managerial roles at energy and telecommunications companies, as well as the World Bank. But in 2023, she opted to devote herself fully to growing chess at a grass-roots level in Malawi. “My whole life has been about taking risks,” she said of her decision to leave behind her salaried jobs.
Ms. Namangale began setting up chess clubs in rural schools, starting with Chombo. Today, there are over 150 chess clubs set up by her across Malawi.
“Having more chess clubs is important for students because it promotes mathematical analysis and thinking,” said Lexon Ndalama, an education rights campaigner in Malawi who advocates more extracurricular activities in the country’s schools. “It teaches discipline, management and leadership.”
In 2023, using her own savings, Ms. Namangale founded Dadaz Chess Academy in Lilongwe to teach children the game. The inspiration behind the academy was personal.
“I wanted to teach my son the game I love,” said Ms. Namangale, referring to her 9-year-old. She also has two adult sons who also play. “And from that desire grew something much bigger than I had ever imagined.”
To date, the academy has enrolled 110 children, including both paying and nonpaying students.
Children as young as 5 can begin chess lessons here, and they can take after-school classes and music lessons as well.
Ms. Namangale has also set up a shelter in Lilongwe where street children — often orphaned or homeless and a common sight in Malawi’s cities — gather to learn chess.
“They often come hungry,” she said. “Food is what they need the most; as a result, some don’t even play.”
Knowing that she couldn’t afford to provide food for these children all the time, she partnered with another institution that provides meals to street children in an initiative they are calling “chess and nsima” — a thick porridge that is a staple dish in Malawi — to encourage more children to participate by offering them meals alongside chess lessons.
“Some of the street children we taught are now helping others learn,” said Stanford Chibambo, a chess instructor at Dadaz. “These are kids who had never seen a chessboard before.”
Ms. Namangale was born in 1976 in Chombo in a family of seven, raised by a single mother. She spent her childhood in the village, fishing, fetching firewood and selling sugarcane to help support the family.
Her humble upbringing did not stop her from getting an education. With financial help from an older sibling, she earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental science in 1999 from a public university. In 2013, she got a master’s degree in business administration.
She credits chess, in part, for her academic success.
“Even though I was already an above-average student, chess helped me even more academically. I believe it can do more for many children.”
One of them is Thandizo Mpyela, 14, who is in her chess club in Chombo. He’s in his final year of primary school and dreams of becoming a doctor. He says chess has improved his performance in school, especially in math.
“I hope that one day I shall also have the capacity of bringing chess to children living in poor conditions, just like Madam Namangale is doing,” Thandizo said. “She grew up in this village, and now she’s conquering the world. That inspires me a lot.”
Ms. Namangale’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. In 2024, she was appointed to a volunteer position as global head of the Gift of Chess, a nonprofit aiming to distribute one million chessboards worldwide by 2030. Over 2,000 chess sets have been distributed across Malawi so far.
As part of a global initiative called “Chess for Freedom,” she’s also introducing the game in Malawi’s prisons, using it as a tool for rehabilitation.
“When you play chess, you can make a mistake. But one mistake doesn’t make you a loser; you can still make a better move and win,” she said. “That’s the same message I bring into prisons so that they know that they can make another move and be changed people in society.”
After serving their time, some prisoners have received chess sets from her as gifts.
Her next goal is working with Malawi’s Ministry of Education to make chess education mandatory in primary and secondary school curriculums.
“This game teaches critical life skills like planning,” she said. “Students need to plan for their future while they are young.”
Every time she visits rural schools to see how the chess clubs she set up are progressing, the children remind her of the girl she once was, full of curiosity but with very limited tools.
She added, “If a girl from a village like myself can become a global chess leader, imagine what a million others can do if they were given a chance to have access to a chessboard?”
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