GG Mensah

Kwame Mensah wove kente by hand for half a century, cloth for chiefs and funerals and one presidential inauguration, in a trade where a single misplaced thread shows for ever. He talks constantly and he watches closely, and when a match turns his way he says what the other person did well: the double that arrived, the sequence he could not answer, the point at which he was behind. He means all of it, which is the part people struggle with. Losing to him is a strange experience, widely described afterwards as pleasant. Nothing follows it. Once the last checker is off he says goodnight, on the grounds that everything worth saying about the match was said while it was still running.