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Wednesday, February 21, 2018

The Queen of Katwe

Everyone is talking about how great a film Black Panther is, and it's a fine superhero film for all the reasons others have stated. But there's another recent Disney film with an all-black cast, about a real person from a real African country who accomplished a truly superheroic feat: The Queen of Katwe.

The heroine, Phiona Mutesi, lives in a slum in Uganda. Despite her father dying of AIDS when she was three, despite her single mother being too poor to pay for school, despite not knowing how to read, despite being a girl who had to sell corn in the street and carry her family's water home in big plastic gas cans, she learns to play chess. And she's good at it.

She played at the 39th Chess Olympiad in Moscow in 2010, and in 2012, at the age of 16, she became a Woman Candidate Master at the 40th Olympiad in Istanbul. She currently has a rating of 1628, 300 points better than I ever was when I played chess.

She is now 21 and is attending college in Washington state.

As all movies that are based on real life do, the film exaggerates Phiona's skill level, which is described by chess journalist John Saunders as "a competent club player."

But considering that she started from absolutely nothing, supported only by a chess coach whose attention was divided between tutoring hundreds of other kids and playing soccer, her accomplishments are truly astounding.

Her story puts the lie to people like Donald Trump who call African countries shitholes (or shithouses, as Trump's defenders insist). Given the opportunity, people in every country can accomplish great things. And they work that much harder because they have nothing to fall back on.

The Queen of Katwe is available for streaming on Netflix.

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