The Queen of Katwe
A Conversation with Phiona Mutesi at IMF in 2017.
Whenever there was a crisis of confidence, Katende would tell his favorite story about an inept doctor.
“Think of a situation when you are sick and you have gone to the clinic for treatment and a doctor comes up and says, ‘Young man, you’re sick. I am going to inject you, but I don’t know whether I still remember how to inject. Let me first see if I can remember.’ Then he gets a sponge and he tries to inject it and says, ‘I think I can remember. Okay, let’s do the injection.’ Can you allow yourself to be injected? Of course you can’t. Why? Because the doctor does not believe in himself. Then how do you entrust your life to him? You cannot. If you don’t believe in yourself, how do you expect anyone else to believe in you?”
Katende’s lessons were designed to bond a bunch of desperate slum children into a community of chess players helping each other learn how to see into the future.
“Someday you will be able to read your opponent’s mind many moves in advance,” Katende told them. “You will see what is going to happen on the chessboard before it happens. You are all going to be prophets.”
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