“Phiona Mutesi has flourished,” Vianney Luggya, president of the Uganda Chess Federation after Phiona’s second Juniors title, said in the Guardian. Since then, Mutesi’s experiences have grown, but the fundamentals of her rarity in a game invented, played and dominated by the rich remains the same. The year 2011 notched up many firsts for Mutesi – her first Olympiad visit (to Serbia), glimpse of ice, plane ride and laser show. Even so, the aggressive style she acquired during her days of “quick” chess still define her as a player. “If you don’t plan, you end up with a bad life.”Īt the Sports Outreach Institute, quick games were played on dilapidated boards until Mutesi’s growing popularity brought the attention that resulted in the purchase of new boards. “I like chess because it involves planning” she said in an interview in The Guardian. Regardless of the odds, Mutesi displayed a remarkable talent for chess soon after joining the programme. The stench is appalling.”Įver since she has come into the spotlight, Mutesi’s life’s standards have improved, as has Uganda’s economy and Katwe’s relative misery, but Crothers’s description still rings pretty true of the slum. There are no sewers, and the human waste from downtown Kampala is dumped directly into the slum. Of Mutesi’s everyday life, Crothers wrote in 2013: “She wakes at 5 each morning to begin a two-hour trek through Katwe to fill a jug with drinkable water, walking through lowland that is often so severely flooded by Uganda's torrential rains that many residents sleep in hammocks near their ceilings to avoid drowning. The meal motivated Mutesi to schedule her days around the church visits at a time when her current coach and mentor, Robert Katende, described her as “desperate for survival”.
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The programme, run from a ramshackle church that “could fall anytime” as Crothers described it in 2011, enticed players with a free cup of porridge. Mutesi joined a chess programme run by the Sports Outreach Institute at the age of nine not for love of the game, but, in her words, “just to get a meal”. When Mutesi was three, she lost her father to AIDS, and shortly after that, her elder sister died due to unknown causes. She was said to have been born in 1993 (she is not sure of the exact year). That is not to say Mutesi’s life remained untouched from the harsh realities of her neighbourhood. The result is a society in which 50% of teenage girls of Mutesi’s age are mothers – a far cry from the kind of life Mutesi has led, pursuing a sport so rare in her land that the Ugandan language doesn’t even have a word for it. The people of Katwe mostly live in slums, where young men and women with little education or skills are reduced to crimes such as prostitution, theft, armed robbery, and murder owing to unemployment, rampant drug-abuse and deeply entrenched poverty. Katwe is one of the poorest areas in the capital Kampala. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe”.Īlmost 38% of Uganda lived on less than $1.25/day in 2012. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. “To be African is to be an underdog in the world. “Phiona Mutesi is the ultimate underdog,” he wrote. In a 2011 profile, Crothers described the rarity of Mutesi, a three-time junior girls’ champion of Uganda and a regular Ugandan team member in the Chess Olympiads.
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