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The Queen Of Katwe

by Tim Crothers, 2012

Published: 2021.12.08

Home > Book Reviews > Tim Crothers > The Queen Of Katwe

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★ (of 5)

 

The inspiration for a 2016 Disney film (starring David Oyelowo and Lupita Nyong'o), the book The Queen Of Katwe is purportedly about the life of Ugandan chess player Phiona Mutesi. Mutesi was born and raised in Katwe, the largest of Kampala’s slums, and came across chess when she secretly followed her brother who was sneaking off to play soccer and chess at Christian ministry called “Sports Outreach Institute”. Once she learned to play, she won local tournaments and then represented Uganda in international chess Olympiads in Russia, Turkey, Norway, and Azerbaijan, among other competitions.

But quite a bit of this book isn’t about Mutesi, especially the beginning, which is just one of many issues I had with it.

Almost immediately, I was reminded of those late 1990s and early ’00s longform feature stories in Sports Illustrated, for which the title would be something like “How One Dusty Oklahoma School Became A Baseball Dynasty” but then the first line of the story is something like “Buck Wineholder was flat broke when he arrived in San Francisco in 1849.” (Not long after I began this book, I learned that author Tim Crothers did indeed work for Sports Illustrated, listing himself as a “former senior writer”.) Just like those stories, this book is packed full of interesting information that is only tangentially related to the subject of the book, as if the writer was contractually obligated to include any information he collected while researching the story. The entire first chapter mentions Mutesi only once (near the end, when she’s a baby). It’s mostly “poverty porn”, about how horrible it is to live in Katwe, but also it’s about several people who have no bearing on the rest of the story but about whom the author was able to gather facts and quotes that he could use to pad the book. The second chapter didn’t mention Mutesi at all (it’s about how horrible it is to live in Katwe, and also about the man who later becomes the chess coach, Robert Katende), so we get past the 50-page mark without the word “chess” even being mentioned and Mutesi only showing up briefly. This tendency went on. Some side characters got a paragraph or two of biography when they showed up; others (like the founders of Sports Outreach Institute) got entire chapters dedicated to their ancestry, neighborhoods where they grew up in the U.S., scholastic achievements, and so on. For most of these people, the reader doesn’t find out until many pages later how they relate (if at all) to the Mutesi story.

Somewhere in the second chapter, the book began to feel a lot like the evangelical, fundamentalist literature that I read as a teen and young adult (when I was a fanatical Christian and planned to be a missionary). Many paragraphs are dedicated to how certain tangential characters were “called” into the ministry, like the boy who saw “a bright light above him” while on a camping trip and heard an angelic voice that led him to (eventually) accept a job at rabidly evangelical Liberty University. In places, these ideas and phrases are either quoted or at least attributed to interviewees, but in other spots the author forgets himself and employs the lingo on his own (page 138: “Harriet experienced the prophecy for the first time in 2008”, for example).

When chess finally shows up, the author does a fine job describing the game, the children’s initial reactions to it, and how Katende taught it. But when he describes Mutesi’s early games, he begins to blunder (to borrow a chess phrase). For example, he says Mutesi lost some early games to a technique known as “Fool’s Mate” (page 94), but then clearly describes an actual chess mating pattern known the world over as Scholar’s Mate. (FYI, Fool’s Mate is also a thing, but isn’t a tactic one player can employ because it relies on the opponent committing a ridiculous blunder.) After reading descriptions of Mutesi’s early tournament play, I began to doubt the subtitle’s use of the word “grandmaster” — a specific title in chess, the highest in fact, referring only to players who meet very specific requirements (read more), including holding a rating of 2500 FIDE or above. So I looked up Mutesi’s FIDE rating chart and found that her highest ever rating was 1686, back in 2012-13, just enough to get her the “Women’s Candidate Master” title, the lowest-ranking title awarded by FIDE. So I was left to wonder whether the author didn’t know what the title meant and used it anyway (bad), knew and used it anyway as a kind of clickbait (also bad), or just shrugged and used the term casually because some of the Ugandan children were using it casually.

Compounding my irritation over the above missteps, the author claims, without attribution:

“She succeeds because she possesses that precious chess gene that allows her to envision the board many moves ahead...”

—page 136

He does not mention at any point whether genetic testing is available to confirm the presence or absence of this precious genetic material. It would sure save a lot of time and effort in local chess club recruiting strategies.

There are also some contradictions, or at least what seem like them. On the same page as the previous quotation, the author says Mutesi relies “almost entirely on instinct, instead of following the various opening, middlegame, and endgame theory utilized by more refined and experienced players”. Yet on the following page, he quotes someone who knows Mutesi saying “She plays textbook chess” calling her a “strategic player”, which is pretty much the opposite of what Crothers said earlier.

There are obvious factual problems, such as on page 76 when the author claims, without attribution, that Mutesi died when she was seven years old. (He does attribute the story of her “resurrection” to her mother’s telling.) On the next page, he claims she “died again”, though this time it is clear he’s using hyperbole; she was only very sick and everyone thought she was going to die. So why say she died? Just to convince me you don’t know what words mean? These parts also reminded me of my evangelical background, when missionaries would visit our church and tell of miraculous occurrences overseas (including resurrections) — years later I realized how convenient it was that these “miracles” always happened in faraway places and that there was never any evidence nor any way to fact-check the claims.

The last few chapters become disjointed and are mostly quotations from the various people involved in Mutesi’s life. It felt like a few newspaper stories I’ve read (and probably a few I’ve written, to be honest) for which a subject provided a written response and the writer felt obligated to include as much of the material as possible, even if it doesn’t fit into the flow of the book or add to the story in any way. The author also spent several pages detailing how there really isn’t any money for chess in Uganda, though he stops short of providing an address or website where donations can be sent.

I powered through this book despite my disappointments mainly because, at its core, there were interesting bits of information about a people and culture unfamiliar to me. I am always hungry for this information, these windows into other worlds that I will never see or experience. But it is not a well written book. In fact, it convinced me to not even attempt to watch the Disney film that it inspired. (Though I admit I’m curious about how much of the Christian fundamentalism Disney removed from the story.)

For those curious about Mutesi’s life after this book, it doesn’t look like she has played rated chess since early 2019 (according to her FIDE page). There is a Chess.com user profile purporting to be her (here), but that user has lower ratings than I do, so I doubt it. (There is also an offical Chess.com bot named Phiona, to which I lost before stalemating in my second game.) In 2017, she enrolled in Northwest University in Washington — a private evangelical college associated with the same denomination (Assemblies Of God) in which I grew up and which operated the Bible college (now defunct) where I attended in the 1990s. The latest information I could find on her is this story from WBUR (Boston’s NPR station), which says Mutesi works as a motivational speaker to help pay for her college expenses. Wikipedia says she is studying sociology.

 





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