Unsung 'character' in 'Queen of Katwe' is slum itself

You have probably already watched Queen of Katwe, the Hollywood film starring Lupita Nyong’o, about a 10-year-old Ugandan chess prodigy, Phiona Mutesi.

Her success in local competitions and tournaments opened the door to a bright future and an escape for her family from a life of poverty in the Katwe slum.

Based on Tim Crothers’ book, The Queen of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion, the film takes director Mira Nair back to a theme that brought her world fame – her 1988 film Salaam Bombay! about the day-to-day struggles of children living on the streets of Bombay (Mumbai), India’s biggest city.

There are many ways to read The Queen of Katwe, but the subplots fascinate me. Overtly, it is a feel-good story about triumph in adversity. During the show I watched, there were teary faces.

But at the same time, it is also about the limits of individual heroism. Too many stars had to align to get Phiona out of poverty.

She needed the talent, a particular type of mother, a remarkable man and chess coach with the kind of wife who is made in heaven, living in Katwe, of all slums, in Uganda. Such fortune can only land on the doorsteps of one poor child out of a million, every year.

In the process, the film also illustrates the inadequacies of a model much beloved by middle class philanthropy – suggesting that it is not the way thousands of children in the slums and other desperate places will get out of poverty.

UNSUNG CHARACTER

Though the film does not dwell on this, the unsung character in it is the Katwe slum itself.

Katwe should be celebrating its 100th anniversary. Of all places in Uganda, it is the one that perhaps most shaped the country’s independence.

It was the place, within a few years of the establishment of the British Protectorate, where a small artisan class began to gather, squeezed in a marshland between the expansive estate of the Buganda king and colonial posts.

At the end of the 1920s, the Kenya-Uganda Railway arrived in Kampala, and with it the Indian coolies who had built it. They settled in Kampala and other places along the line, and in a division pushed by colonial policy, became the merchant class.

Commerce remained restricted for the “natives”, as it was in most of colonial East Africa. The small traders who emerged set up shop in Katwe.

Katwe became a hotbed of political and economic grievances, made possible by the artisans and traders there who provided the first local resources and infrastructure for a rising nationalist movement.

Katwe thus became established as the birthplace of insurgent ideas on the margins of the colonial state.

Nearly all the Ugandan independence parties were born there or trace their parentage to it. It was natural, therefore, that the first newspapers in the country – many of them quickly banned – were born there.

STATURE ENDURED

Its stature as the birthplace of Ugandan journalism endured and in the late 1990s the most prestigious publisher in the country, Sapoba, was still based there.

After the fall of the military dictator Idi Amin in 1979, Sapoba published the contrarian and radical Weekly Topic.

On the days it published, queues formed outside the facility as people waited to grab their copies.

So influential was Sapoba that in 1980, after a military junta ousted the first post-Amin government, it declared that “Uganda will not be ruled from Katwe”.

The area also bequeathed to Uganda what came to be known as “Radio Katwe”, the rumour mill that thrives in times of repression.

There was no free media during Amin’s military rule and despite the State’s massive investment in propaganda, it could never overcome Radio Katwe.

In the late 1960s, when Uganda became a one-party state, Radio Katwe again took over, as it did when colonial censorship muzzled indigenous media.

In the early 1980s, when President Yoweri Museveni was waging his bush war, there would be stampedes in Kampala as people fled the city for the safety of their homes, based on reports from Radio Katwe.

To this day, it has remained a symbol of defiance against State control of news.

It is no accident then that a Phiona would arise in Katwe. Her path was divined by history. It is a quintessential East African story.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher, Africapedia.com and Roguechiefs.com.

Twitter: @cobbo3