“After the funeral we stayed in the village for a few weeks and one morning when I woke up my older sister Julia told me she was feeling a headache. “I remember I went to my dad’s village when I was about three years old to see him when he was very sick, and a week later he died of Aids,” she said. (Harriet guesses her daughter was born in 1996.) I asked her about her earliest memory. She began by telling me she had no idea when she was born because birthdays aren’t something people keep track of in Katwe. Photograph: Stephanie Sinclairĭuring our initial meeting, Phiona didn’t speak comfortably because she had never been encouraged to share her thoughts. Local hero: Phiona Mutesi’s neighbourhood in Kampala, Uganda.

The house contained little more than a wash pot, a tiny charcoal stove, a teapot, a worn toothbrush, a cracked mirror, a Bible and two musty mattresses for the entire family to sleep on. Phiona’s latest home consisted of one 10ft x 10ft room with no windows and a tin roof so dilapidated that every rainstorm flooded the shack. She had been forced to relocate Phiona and her two brothers five times in the previous four years, once because they’d been robbed of all their meagre possessions and another time because Harriet feared their house was about to collapse. On that autumn day, Phiona’s mother Harriet looked as defeated as any person I’ve known. I had been told about Phiona how at the age of nine she could neither read nor write and had dropped out of school, when she met a Ugandan missionary, Robert Katende, who offered to teach her the game of chess – a sport so foreign in Uganda that there is no word for it in Phiona’s native language – and how in just four years she had become an international chess champion. I first met Phiona Mutesi in September 2010 sitting on the mud stoop of her family’s shack in one of the most challenging places on earth: Uganda’s Katwe slum.

The Queen of Katwe by Tim Crothers