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.īishop Mugerwa estimates that nearly half of all teenage women in Katwe are mothers. Many women in the slum are sex workers who eventually become pregnant, but can’t afford to stop working in the trade. The women of Katwe are valued by men for little more than sex and childcare. Most of the children of Katwe are fatherless and the men in their lives often beat or abuse them. 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. It is said that if you are born in Katwe, you die in Katwe. Everybody is on the move, but nobody ever leaves. It is a population of single mothers and their kids tossed randomly from one shack to another. In Katwe, life is so transient that it is often hard to identify which children belong to which adults. Children of the slum venture to the city center daily to beg or pickpocket and then commute back to Katwe to sleep at night. The skyscrapers of downtown Kampala are in view from any dwelling in Katwe, just steps away. In the more stable neighborhoods that surround Katwe, homes and petrol stations and supermarkets are patrolled by uniformed security guards with AK-47s. If you live in Katwe, the rest of the Ugandan population would prefer that you stay there. Anything that could be sold on the black market could be found in Katwe, where the people developed a vital resourcefulness amid the squalor. During Amin’s regime when Uganda suffered through a foreign trade embargo, Katwe became known as a mecca for spare parts. Survival in Katwe depends on courage and determination as well as guile and luck. 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. It is a place where time is measured by where your shadow hits the ground. It is a maze of rutted alleys and dilapidated shacks.
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Landlords show up periodically with a sack full of padlocks and anyone who can’t pay the rent is locked out of their home. Electricity is far too expensive for most Katwe residents where it is accessible at all. 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. People are evicted from their dwellings by way of a controlled burn. 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. Stray dogs and rats and long-horned cattle all compete with humans to survive in a confined space that becomes more overcrowded every day. When it isn’t flooded, Katwe’s land is packed dirt, fouled by the sewage. The human waste from neighboring downtown Kampala is also dumped directly into Katwe. Raw sewage runs through trenches beside the alleyways of the slum and floods carry it inside people’s shacks. The slum is often so severely flooded that many residents sleep in hammocks suspended just beneath their roofs to avoid drowning. The largest of eight slums in Kampala, Katwe (kot-WAY) is one of the worst places on earth. 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).
But to reach that goal, she must grapple with everyday life in one of the world’s most unstable countries. 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. Of these kids, one girl stood out as an immense talent: Phiona.īy the age of eleven Phiona was her country’s junior champion, and at fifteen, the national champion.
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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. Laying a chessboard in the dirt, Robert began to teach. 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. 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. 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. Now a major motion picture starring Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong ’ o and David Oyelowo, directed by Mira Nair.
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