Phiona Mutesi would never have become a Ugandan chess prodigy and grandmaster had her coach Robert Katende taken his own life when he was young. He had a difficult childhood right from the start: His mother had him when she was a teenager, and his father was married to another woman.
“I was denied the joy of growing up with a loving father to help me along and tell me how much he loved and cared about me. In fact, I was given a death sentence by this man’s legal wife when I was only a few days old: She vowed to kill me if I ever set foot in their home,” Katende writes in his book A Knight without a Castle: A Story of Resilience and Hope.
