by AMY FALLON
Phiona Mutesi began playing chess because she wanted the free meal the programme offered. She is now a world prodigy and was named a Woman Candidate Master, the bottom-ranking title given by the World Chess Federation. PHOTO/Amy Fallon/IPS
Phiona Mutesi was a muddy, desperate nine-year-old foraging for food in Uganda’s biggest slum, Katwe, when she discovered, through her older brother Brian, a chess programme.
It was not pawns, rooks, bishops, knights or a king that drew her to a church verandah in Katwe, Kampala – it was what came with the lessons: a free bowl of porridge.
“We didn’t have food. We were sleeping on the streets because we didn’t have the money to rent a house. It was a hard time,” says Mutesi, 17, whose father died of AIDS when she was three.
“The pieces looked attractive to me. I didn’t want to learn the game. That time I just wanted to get a cup of porridge.”
Mutesi was dirty and barefoot. The other children in the programme, run by Robert Katende of Sports Outreach Institute, a Christian mission, told her to leave.
“I didn’t feel bad because that’s the life in Katwe,” she tells IPS, speaking from the lounge in Katende’s house where she is currently staying. In the cabinet behind her, her trophies are piled high.
“If you don’t fight you can’t get it.”
Mutesi returned again and again to the chess programme, but only for the free meal.
“That’s when I got to practice and I got better. Then I got an interest in chess,” she says.
“I like chess because it involves planning.
“The life I’ve been living, it also involved planning. When you’re living in a slum you also have to plan ahead: how am I going to get food tomorrow?”
Chess had been introduced in this East African nation in the early 1970s by a group of doctors working at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, according to Christopher Turyahabwe, General Secretary of the Uganda Chess Federation.
“They thought it would bring back reasoning,” Turyahabwe tells IPS. “Later on it spread through the army to help them plan strategy.”
Inter Press Service for more
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