How One Girl Conquered African Chess

Tim Crothers, The Queen of Katwe: One Girl's Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion

Katwe is one of the poorest slums in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, one of the poorest nations in Africa, Earth’s poorest continent. Children born in Katwe have little hope of improving their lives. That includes Phiona Mutesi, whose mother says she was “probably” born in 1996; that’s as specific as she can be. Phiona would’ve spent her life hawking food from roadside stalls, except an accidental encounter helped her discover her hidden talent: chess.

Sportswriter Tim Crothers has crafted an epic of how one teenager, with everything against her, became a national champion and an international competitor, in a game dominated by children of the well-off. Crothers’ book serves as a biography of Mutesi, of the Christian missionary who unlocked her surprising capability, and of the urban squalor pit that brought them together. Crothers’ writing sometimes struggles to incorporate his many themes, but it’s difficult not to feel moved.

In 2002, Robert Katende, a former child soccer phenom, graduated engineering college without direction for his adult life. A Uganda native who grew up poor, he’d found religion during an extended hospital stay, so he accepted a commission from an American missionary program to teach soccer to boys in Katwe. His principal attraction to Katwe’s youth was that he brought actual regulation soccer balls into slums where kids played with balls made from banana leaves.

Despite immediate popularity, some boys couldn’t participate in Katende’s soccer program: they were so poor, even insignificant injuries could bankrupt their families, so soccer, a contact sport, was impossible. So Katende brought an inexpensive chess set into Katwe. The game was so exotic that the local language, Luganda, had no word for “chess,” yet five boyds proved eager students of the primarily intellectual game. One boy’s sister tagged along to practice one day, without warning.

Phiona Mutesi had almost no formal education, because her mother put her to work, aged about three, to protect the family from destitution. It was an intermittently successful effort. She was probably nine years old when she barged into Katende’s all-boys’ chess lessons. Yet Phiona proved so adept at thinking several moves ahead that she quickly outpaced Katende’s ability to coach her. Within two years, she beat every Ugandan chess champion in her age bracket.

Phiona Mutesi

Within six years, Phiona was Uganda’s national champion, and traveled to international tournaments, playing European and American competitors from wealthy backgrounds. Phiona sat opposite children of the white middle and upper classes before, Crothers admits, she knew how to read. Soon her story wasn’t just about chess. She became the only African her competitors’ sponsors ever encountered, possibly their only direct encounter with truly abject poverty. How many Phionas, Crothers wonders, has the world overlooked?

Crothers’ writing requires some effort. He works to maintain focus on his main characters, but real life, as journalists know, is often sloppy, lacking a narrative through-line. Thus, apart from a brief prologue, it takes seventy pages to bring Phiona into her own story. As Crothers’ mixed biography of Phiona, Katende, and Katwe generally moves among several themes, there are visible seams; chapter breaks sometimes feel like fault lines. Crothers clearly isn’t experienced in long-form.

Notwithstanding these form problems, Crothers crafts a complex, multi-pronged narrative that will attract multiple audiences. Readers of nonfiction and biography will enjoy Katende’s and Phiona’s struggles to emerge from poverty and become their own individuals. Fans of history and iinternational policy will find these protagonists’ stories informative to understand a nation that’s still terra incognita to most American and European audiences. And Christian readers will love how the heroes’ faith guided them through trying times.

Originally released in 2012, when Phiona was probably about sixteen, this book has enjoyed a recent push from Sports Outreach, the mission network that sponsored Robert Katende’s original mission. It also received a 2016 Disney film adaptation. Much of this re-release push has come from Christian sponsors, but this book isn’t exclusively Christian; non-religious readers will find plenty to enjoy, too. Crothers’ mix of history, biography, and sports will engage a complex and diverse audience.

This isn’t the kind of book that general readers often seek out. Its two main themes, chess and African poverty, aren’t exactly big audience grabbers. Yet despite Crothers’ occasional difficulty welding his many themes together, he convincingly sells his story. He’s storyteller enough that his journalism feels like a campfire tale. Perhaps this working-class reviewer can offer no better praise than to say, this book made me stay up past my bedtime to keep reading.