Improbable success in the game of chess has propelled a 16-year-old Ugandan girl from Kampala’s Katwe slum to celebrity status in the United States and beyond.

Phiona Mutesi’s poignant story is told in a recently published book, The Queen of Katwe, which the Disney company plans to make into a feature film.
Author Tim Crothers, a US sports journalist, describes Phiona as “the ultimate underdog.”

He writes: “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. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe.”

It was due to sheer hunger that Phiona got introduced to chess. "For her entire life," Crothers writes, "Phiona’s main challenge has been to find food."

At the age of nine in 2005, she followed her brother, Brian, to the Kampala site of the Sports Outreach Institute, a Christian charity that serves porridge to slum children such as Phiona.

It was there that she met Robert Katende, a football coach, who had recently begun a chess programme for children who didn’t take part in physical athletics.

Phiona had never heard of the game before Katende informed her of the basic rules. Crothers notes that there is no word for chess in Luganda.

In Uganda, Phiona said in a recent online chat hosted by the US sports network ESPN, “A few people play, but most of those are coming from well-off families who have been exposed to the outside world. Or people in very good schools. It is believed to be a game of the rich.”

Phiona’s mother was warned by some friends, Crothers relates, that because chess is a white man’s game, Phiona might be taken away by mzungu (the white people). But the family’s poverty was so acute that Phiona was allowed to continue taking part in chess matches at the mission, where she was also fed.

Her father had died from Aids when she was three years old. The girl did not attend school because her family could not afford fees – or clothes.

When Phiona first appeared at the mission, Katende recalls in Crothers’ account, "she was so dirty that the other children from the slums would not really welcome her."

Because she showed an unusual degree of promise, Katende introduced Phiona to Ivan Mutesasira and Benjamin Mukumbya, two of the strongest chess players at the mission. They agreed to tutor her.

Crothers quotes Ivan as remembering: “When I first met Phiona, I took it for granted that girls are always weak, that girls can do nothing, but I came to realise that she could play as well as a boy. She plays very aggressively, like a boy. She likes to attack, and when you play against her, it feels like she’s always pushing you backward until you have nowhere to move.”

Crothers offers his own explanation for why Phiona became so adept that she is now invited to compete internationally: "She succeeds because she possesses that precious chess gene that allows her to envision the board many moves ahead, and because she focuses on the game as if her life depended on it, which in her case might be true."

Her talent for chess has now taken Phiona to the US, where she visited the White House as part of a recent tour promoting The Queen of Katwe.

Phiona has also travelled to Russia where she took part in the World Chess Olympiad in 2010. Soon after arriving in the Siberian city where the tournament was held, Phiona took a “long shower, washing away the slum,” Crothers recounts.

Phiona was one of the youngest of the 1,000-plus competitors in the Olympiad, which included women from 149 countries. In one of her first matches against a far more experienced player, Phiona kicked off her shoes because she had always been barefoot when playing.

After losing a match that she realised afterward she should have won, Phiona bolted to her hotel room and sobbed into her pillow — acting much like any teenage girl might, Crothers says.

And after winning for the first time at the Olympiad, Phiona rushes outside the hotel and lets out a whoop of jubilation that can be heard by everyone inside.

She subsequently took part last year in a chess tournament in Istanbul, Turkey, where she qualified for the World Chess Federation title, “Woman Candidate Master.”

“Chess gave me hope, whereby now I’m having a hope of becoming a doctor,” Phiona told CNN in an interview last month.

She now attends school in Kampala and, as a result of her earnings, is helping finance construction of a house in Kampala for her mother and siblings.

“Chess is a lot like my life,” Crothers quotes Phiona as reflecting. “If you make smart moves you can stay away from danger, but you know any bad decision could be your last.”