It’s as West Indian as rice and peas and the barber shop: the slamming down of dominoes – hard – on a table as a group of elderly black men go head to head in a heated game.
“If you are West Indian you just can’t play dominoes without making a bit of noise,” says Ernest Theophile, 73, who has been playing dominoes, cards and backgammon with his friends in Maida Hill market square in north London for 12 years.
He is unhappy about an injunction relating to behaviour in the square after Westminster council received 200 noise complaints. He argues it prohibited their board game revelry.
That order was tweaked last year but still those who breach it are threatened with jail if they are caught “playing loud amplified music, drinking alcohol and shouting and swearing”. The council says they were never the target.
Still, Theophile is fighting the order, saying it amounts to “racial discrimination” against the board game players.
Inevitably, the case is being portrayed as another “woke row”, but any child of Caribbean origin who grew up in Britain will understand his insistence that dominoes, played the West Indian way, cannot be played quietly.
Growing up, I remember huddles of men – including my dad, uncles, family friends –hunched over tables, talking, laughing and remonstrating loudly in smoke-filled rooms, usually with a Red Stripe or Jamaican white rum in hand with reggae music blaring out of the speakers – and the dramatic thud of the dominoes as they crashed on to the table.
The banging down of the tiles would get louder and louder, especially if a player was on a roll and looked like they were going to win. Sometimes there would be fallouts, even near-punch-ups – dominoes is a serious thing in the Caribbean community. The game is still so popular in Jamaica that in 2010 the country expressed hopes of it becoming an Olympic sport.
My cousins and I would play and look on, often wondering how long these games, which could last for many hours, would go on for. For me, it meant seeing a more relaxed and fun side to my usually quite strict and serious father. It is one of the most enduring memories of my youth – as it probably is for a lot of Caribbean children who grew up in the UK.
The fact is, this case is not about wokery or being deliberately antisocial – it is about cultural nuances. Dominoes is not played in Caribbean communities like chess or draughts – it is more like a very rambunctious game of Monopoly. It’s loud, it has energy – it’s a social gathering, as Theophile alluded to when he said he and his friends started playing in the square because “we were kind of lonely”.
If they make a bit of noise, they are not the only ones. Football fans have their chants; pubs are noisy places; children playing outside, wrenched away from their screens, make a glorious racket.
No one has the right to be deliberately antisocial, but isn’t reasonable accommodation of our different foibles how a diverse society works? Lighten up. Let the old men gather. Let the games begin.
