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

by Tim Crothers

Overview

Now a major motion picture starring Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo, directed by Mira Nair.

The “astonishing” (The New York Times Book Review) and “inspirational” (Shelf Awareness) true story of Phiona Mutesi—a teenage chess prodigy from the slums of Uganda.

One day in 2005 while searching for food, nine-year-old Ugandan Phiona Mutesi followed her brother to a dusty veranda where she met Robert Katende.

Katende, a war refugee turned missionary, had an improbable dream: to empower kids in the Katwe slum through chess—a game so foreign there is no word for it in their native language. Laying a chess­board in the dirt, Robert began to teach. At first children came for a free bowl of porridge, but many grew to love the game that—like their daily lives—requires persevering against great obstacles. Of these kids, one girl stood out as an immense talent: Phiona.

By the age of eleven Phiona was her country’s junior champion, and at fifteen, the national champion. Now a Woman Candidate Master—the first female titled player in her country’s history—Phiona dreams of becoming a Grandmaster, the most elite level in chess. But to reach that goal, she must grapple with everyday life in one of the world’s most unstable countries. The Queen of Katwe is a “remarkable” (NPR) and “riveting” (New York Post) book that shows how “Phiona’s story transcends the limitations of the chessboard” (Robert Hess, US Grandmaster).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501127182
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Edition description:	Media Tie-In
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	264,276
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.37(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tim Crothers is a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He is the author of The Queen of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion and The Man Watching, the biography of University of North Carolina women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance, and coauthor of Hard Work, the autobiography of UNC basketball coach Roy Williams. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and two children.

Read an Excerpt

The largest of eight slums in Kampala, Katwe (kot-WAY) is one of the worst places on earth. The slum is often so severely flooded that many residents sleep in hammocks suspended just beneath their roofs to avoid drowning. Raw sewage runs through trenches beside the alleyways of the slum and floods carry it inside people’s shacks. The human waste from neighboring downtown Kampala is also dumped directly into Katwe. There is no sanitation service. Flies are everywhere. The stench is appalling.

When it isn’t flooded, Katwe’s land is packed dirt, fouled by the sewage. Nothing grows there. Stray dogs and rats and long-horned cattle all compete with humans to survive in a confined space that becomes more overcrowded every day. Homes exist wherever someone can find space to construct a makeshift shack, at least until a developer decides that land might have some value and the area is set afire. People are evicted from their dwellings by way of a controlled burn.

In Katwe they say that “running water” is the water you have to run through the slum to get, either from a dirty community well or a fetid puddle. Electricity is far too expensive for most Katwe residents where it is accessible at all. Landlords show up periodically with a sack full of padlocks and anyone who can’t pay the rent is locked out of their home.

Katwe has no street signs. No addresses. It is a maze of rutted alleys and dilapidated shacks. It is a place where time is measured by where your shadow hits the ground. There are no clocks. No calendars. Because it lies just a few degrees from the equator, Katwe has no seasons, which adds to the repetitive, almost listless, nature of daily life. Every day is just like the next. Survival in Katwe depends on courage and determination as well as guile and luck. During Amin’s regime when Uganda suffered through a foreign trade embargo, Katwe became known as a mecca for spare parts. Anything that could be sold on the black market could be found in Katwe, where the people developed a vital resourcefulness amid the squalor.

If you live in Katwe, the rest of the Ugandan population would prefer that you stay there. In the more stable neighborhoods that surround Katwe, homes and petrol stations and supermarkets are patrolled by uniformed security guards with AK-47s. The skyscrapers of downtown Kampala are in view from any dwelling in Katwe, just steps away. Children of the slum venture to the city center daily to beg or pickpocket and then commute back to Katwe to sleep at night.

In Katwe, life is so transient that it is often hard to identify which children belong to which adults. It is a population of single mothers and their kids tossed randomly from one shack to another. Everybody is on the move, but nobody ever leaves. It is said that if you are born in Katwe, you die in Katwe. Death from disease or violence or famine or neglect touches everyone in the slum, yet individual tragedies are not dwelled upon because they occur so frequently. Most of the children of Katwe are fatherless and the men in their lives often beat or abuse them. The women of Katwe are valued by men for little more than sex and childcare. Many women in the slum are sex workers who eventually become pregnant, but can’t afford to stop working in the trade. They must leave their children locked in the shack at night and it is not uncommon for them to return home in the early morning to find their kids have drowned in a flood or died in a fire after knocking over the kerosene lamp they were using as a night-light.

Bishop Mugerwa estimates that nearly half of all teenage women in Katwe are mothers. Due largely to the lack of access to birth control in Katwe and its neighboring slums, Uganda is now the youngest country in the world with an average age of 14 years. The prodigious birthrate produces legions of young children without an infrastructure strong enough to raise them or educate them. Many become homeless and hopeless, with no sense that if they disappeared they would even be missed. Katwe’s youth endure an overwhelming stigma, a sense of defeat, and a resignation that they’ll never do any better than anybody else in the slum. Achievement is secondary to survival. “What we have is children raising children,” Mugerwa says. “It is known as a poverty chain. The single mother cannot sustain the home. Her children go to the street and have more kids and they don’t have the capacity to care for those kids. It is a cycle of misery that is almost impossible to break.”

By the time Harriet Nakku came to Katwe in 1980, the muddle of decrepit shacks overstuffed with people stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.

All of the frogs were gone.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Opening 7

Chapter 1 Land of the Frogs 9

Chapter 2 Katende 25

Chapter 3 Pioneers 55

Chapter 4 Resurrection 69

Chapter 5 Teach Her What You Know 83

Chapter 6 Mzungu 97

Middlegame 117

Chapter 7 Like a Boy, But Not a Boy 119

Chapter 8 Heaven 141

Chapter 9 The Other Side 155

Endgame 177

Chapter 10 Hurdles 179

Chapter 11 Dreams 213

Acknowledgments 230

New Postscript for the Paperback Edition 233

Tips from Phiona for Chess (and Life) 239

Guide for Book Clubs, Classrooms, and Chess Groups 243

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for The Queen of Katwe includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Phiona Mutesi had never seen a chessboard. Her home was a decrepit shack in the slums of Kampala, Uganda. At nine years old, she was barely literate, a school dropout who spent her days wandering through the Katwe slum selling boiled maize and hoping she could find a single meal to eat each day. Then she met Robert Katende, a local missionary working for Sports Outreach, an American relief organization. Under Katende’s tutelage, Phiona slowly learned to play chess. She gradually mastered how to strategize, how to defend her pieces, and finally she learned how to win. She won game after game, against boys, against adults, against renowned players, until it became clear that she possessed a true gift for chess. Through a series of unlikely sponsorships and miraculous coincidences, Phiona was able to begin competing and winning in tournaments around the globe. Despite all odds and countless life-threatening obstacles in Katwe, Phiona is now one of the world’s best chess players. Her journey is one that will leave you inspired by the strength and dedication of this courageous young woman.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. The Queen of Katwe is not only the story of Phiona Mutesi. It is also the story of Robert Katende, Rodney Suddith, Russ Carr, Phiona’s sister, mother, and grandmother as well as the story of the Katwe slum. How did all of these different stories help to shape Phiona’s journey?

2. In what ways was Phiona’s mother supportive and/or unsupportive of her daughter’s interest in chess? In what ways was the Katwe community supportive and/or unsupportive?

3. Should chess be considered a sport by the International Olympic Committee? Should it be included in the Olympics?

4. Why do you think Sports Outreach is a successful way of transforming poverty-stricken lives?

5. The scholarship that paid for Phiona’s education was donated by the Popps, an American family who lost a son. The boy’s father is quoted as saying, “People say that there must have been a reason that Andrew died. There’s no way in my mind that I will ever think that the good things that have come out of this were worth his death.” (Chapter 6). Is there ever a way to quantify the good that can come from tragedy?

6. What factors do you think set Phiona apart from the other chess players in Katwe?

7. How does Phiona’s success affect the other children who play chess in Katwe?

8. How has Phiona’s gender impacted her experience as a budding chess champion? Are her wins more impressive or meaningful because she’s a girl?

9. Do you think Phiona will be able to get out of Katwe without succumbing to the obstacles that have overwhelmed so many other slum children? What specific obstacles does Phiona face?

10. What do survival strategies in Katwe and game strategy in chess have in common? What role does remaining stoic in the face of both victory and loss play?

11. How did the stories of the two Ugandan world champions, John Akii-Bua and Dorcus Inzikuru, help contextualize Phiona’s victories and what they mean for Uganda and Katwe?

12. How was the “Children’s Team” able to eclipse more traditionally educated Ugandan chess players?

13. What new obstacles will Phiona and the other young chess players of Katwe face as they become adults?

14. Discuss the proverb of the Ugandan who argues that relaxing while eating a fish today is preferable to working to create a fishing business so that he can retire and relax while eating a fish in the future. Does the clash between western values and Africa’s mindset prevent true understanding between the cultures?

15. According to the author’s description of Phiona as the “ultimate underdog”: “To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. To be a girl is to be an underdog in Katwe.” What does this passage reveal to you?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Bring a chessboard to your book club meeting and play a game of chess. If one member of the group is familiar with the game, that member can give a lesson to the others.

2. Try new things. Go outside your comfort zone with the refreshments you serve and discuss what Phiona must have felt like trying all the new tastes during her trips to chess tournaments in other countries.

3. Pool your funds and sponsor a child from Uganda’s Katwe or a similar slum through an international aid group, or create a scholarship for a child to attend school. Discuss what it meant to Phiona to be sponsored by the Popp family.

Editorial Reviews

Phiona Mutesi is [a] young star…. An incredible story."

Gary Kasparov

This extraordinary story will stop you and make you want to count your blessings! It confirms how the strength of the human spirit and determination can prevail. Tim’s portrait of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi offers hope and inspiration to all humankind.

Laura Schroff

"Astonishing."

New York Times Book Review

So compelling… Crothers writes the story matter-of-factly ... reserving judgment and bias…. It beckons the reader to wonder at the possibilities that lay before Mutesi, and it reminds us of the harsh reality in which she continues to live.

Charleston Post Courier

"Wonderful.... A story of resilience and creativity in the midst of immense need."

ForeignPolicy.com

"[A] remarkable story."

"Tell Me More" NPR

"Riveting."

New York Post

"Phiona’s story transcends the limitations of the chessboard—her life not confined to the miniature pieces that her hand glides from her side of the board to attack her opponent’s king. No, Phiona succeeding at chess, like the fight to become great athletes for so many impoverished people around the world, has been a game for her life."

The Sports Quotient - Robert Hess

"Tim Crothers powerfully captures the crushing poverty in which Mutesi and herfamily still live."

The Age (Australia)

"Part of Crothers's achievement is his presentation of the terrible circumstances millions of people battle every day to sustain themselves and feed their families, nearly all of them lacking the bright, improbable possibility provided by Mutesi."

The Boston Globe

"An inspirational profile of an amazing chess player from one of the world's worst slums."

Shelf Awareness

"The Queen of Katwe Tim Crothers gives us an inspiring and heart-wrenching story."

Chessville.com

It’s a story almost too uplifting to believe… Crothers tells Phiona Mutesi’s story in a crisp, reportorial style, but it’s nearly impossible to read the book without a strong emotional response… Inspiring.

Booklist

"The Queen of Katwe is an extraordinary account of one young woman’s exceptional achievement. It is also a lament for this world in which only a tiny number of incredibly fortunate and exceptionally determined children have any chance of escaping the dehumanizing poverty that prevails in Katwe and places like it."

Bill Littlefield

"A moving and universal story of the power of potential and the wonder of perseverance. This story will inspire you—and will make you wonder how many more Phionas there are among us."—Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, New York Times-bestselling author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

"This story of a young woman's triumph over the unimaginably cruel fortune she was born into would pierce a heart of stone."—Hillary Jordan, New York Times-bestselling author of Mudbound and When She Woke

“The Queen of Katwe is one of the most inspiring, thought-provoking, humbling books I’ve ever read. It’s a must-read for any chess player, woman, athlete, or frankly anyone who knows any of the previous three, aka everyone!”—Siva Sankrithi, Math Teacher & Chess Coach, Lakeside Upper School, Seattle, WA

“The Queen of Katwe is gripping. We witness Phiona’s incredible evolution as a player, as she competes against older and far more experienced competitors. It also offers readers a fascinating look at a war-torn and struggling nation, as well as the unlikely story of how her mentor Robert Katende, a refugee of Uganda’s civil war, has created a flourishing chess program for kids in one of Africa’s most treacherous slums. This story has the power to inspire girls everywhere."—Alexandra Kosteniuk, Grandmaster, 12th Women's World Chess Champion (www.chessqueen.com)

From the Publisher

If you were scouting for chess prodigies, it is unlikely that you would search through the slums of Kampala, Uganda looking for youthful players of promise. Yet, somehow, against every expectation, impoverished teenager Phiona Mutesi somehow not only mastered the Game of Kings when she wasn't searching for food, but also managed to win her country's national chess championship when she was just fifteen. As a brief article, Tim Crothers' portrait of Phiona earned a place in Dave Eggers' annual anthology; now presented in fuller, humanizing detail, the story of this brave young woman gains new drama and depth.

Sports journalist Crothers' (The Man Watching: A Biography of Anson Dorrance, the Unlikely Architect of the Greatest College Sports Dynasty Ever, 2006, etc.) moving account of an impoverished Ugandan girl's unlikely rise to prominence in the world of competitive chess. Phiona Mutesi discovered chess by accident. Eager to find out where her brother Brian went when he "[snuck] away from his chores," 9-year-old Phiona followed him to a "dusty veranda" in Katwe, the slum where they lived. There, she encountered a group of children learning about chess through an outreach program designed to bring food, sports and religion to poor children. The program leader, Robert Katende, encouraged the shy Phiona to join and paired her with a 4-year-old girl to pick up the basics of the game. Soon, she was playing, and defeating, the most advanced boys in the group. Deciding that his players, whom he christened the Pioneers, needed a goal beyond simply mastering the game, Katende began entering them in local tournaments against other children from more privileged backgrounds. Though shunned for being dirty "street kids," they still made a respectable showing. But it wasn't until 2007, when Phiona unexpectedly became Uganda's female under-20 chess champion, that Katende realized the extent of her gift. Under his tutelage, she went on to win the 2008 and 2009 junior championships and help a group of other talented Pioneers win an international tournament in 2010. Later that year, she was invited to play in another team event, the Chess Olympiad in Siberia. Although she lost, she gained the respect of older players, who declared that she was a grandmaster in the making. As Crothers points out, however, whether Phiona can live up to her potential will depend on whether she can outmaneuver an even more formidable opponent: the environment of Katwe, which "conspires against her on so many levels." A poignant reminder of the power of hope.

Kirkus Reviews