Once he graduates from university, he takes up work at an American NGO Sports Outreach, which offers a blend of religious and social support and educational pathways to children living in the slums of Uganda. He converts to born-again Christianity after a sporting event in which he nearly dies in a freak accident. Katende also comes from severe poverty, managing to make his way through the taxing educational ranks by earning scholarships for his soccer skills. Crothers introduces Robert Katende, the man who would become Mutesi’s chess teacher. Without any formal education or skills, she resorts to low-paying odd jobs to support her children. Mutesi’s mother, Harriet Nakku, is a single parent unable to lift the family out of poverty in a country that affords little opportunity. Not long after it was established, worsening civil war and poverty in the region shaped it into a slum community lacking adequate public sanitation. Katwe first became a site for residential life at the beginning of the 1970s. The book describes Katwe, the slum where Mutesi grew up. The book received much visibility for its focus on a chess master who is not white and male, combining this professional achievement with the unique, competitive challenges of being, or becoming, an African woman in a rapidly globalizing world. The book contextualizes Mutesi’s formative development in the slums of a country fraught with war and economic strife, which she endured thanks to her parents, who fostered in her a love of the intellectual life, and which she eventually was able to leave. The Queen of Katwe (2016), a biography by American author Tim Crothers, chronicles the life of Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan woman who became a chess prodigy and later a world-renowned chess champion.

The queen of katwe book