A chess queen inspires copycats
Seventeen-year-old Richard Buyinza stared at the chessboard in front of him, plotting what he hoped would be his killer move. Around him in the cramped, dimly lit room, more than a dozen youngsters were hunched on benches, equally intent on strategy.
Outside, small rivers of runoff and sewage scarred the dirt alley, turned to mud from a recent rain.
The room was silent except for the tapping of plastic chess pieces being moved. Finally, Buyinza and his opponent reached a stalemate. Without a word, they reset their board and prepared for a new game.
Nearly every day for a decade, Buyinza has come to play chess in this room in a squat concrete housing block in Katwe, a crime-ridden slum on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. His companion for much of that time was his older sister, Phiona Mutesi, a chess prodigy whose story has been adapted for the Disney film Queen of Katwe, which opened in North America this fall.
Chess transformed Mutesi’s life, taking her from destitution to foreign cities and red-carpet appearances with movie stars. Now 20, she has moved out of the slum into a Kampala boarding school, where she is in her final year. The teenagers and younger children who show up here day after day hope the game will change their lives, too.
“She gives courage to each and every young boy or girl you see there,” said Buyinza, who serves as a mentor at the Katwe school, part of the Som Chess Academy.
The academy is a Christian mission project founded by Robert Katende, played in Queen of Katwe by actor David Oyelowo. Katende fled Uganda’s civil war as a child, was later orphaned and, as an adult, found a job with Sports Outreach, a non-profit Virginia-based group that uses sports to spread Christianity. He organized soccer matches in Katwe, and would offer players bowls of porridge afterward. To get kids on the sidelines involved, he started teaching them chess.
None had heard of the game, and many thought at first that he was telling them to play chase. Mutesi stumbled upon the chess games11years ago when she tagged along after an older brother, hoping for a bowl of porridge. As the movie depicts, she discovered an innate talent and went on to become one of the best players in Uganda, capable of competing on an international level.
The academy started in 2004, serving porridge along with chess lessons. Centres have also been set up in four other Kampala slums, as well as in two communities in Uganda’s north and east. Every day from noon to 5 p.m., between a dozen and 50 children gather at the Katwe school to play chess, gossip and listen to preaching. The students come from extremely impoverished conditions. They rarely have enough to eat. Some are orphans or were abandoned.
The chess academy offers them a daily meal, which was enough to attract Mutesi at first. It provides a safe space where parents can send their children without worrying they’ll be exposed to crime or drugs. It also offers the dream of a path out of the slums. There are no international sports or entertainment stars from Uganda. The world’s most famous living Ugandan is probably Joseph Kony, a militant warlord.
Now, thanks to Phiona Mutesi, there is at least one model of a Ugandan rags-to-riches story.