Zimbabwe's chess 'queens' are checkmating adversity

By Takunda Mandura

In an epic scene from the 2016 Mira Nair-directed biographical film, Queen of Katwe, the actor playing 10-year-old Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi has a distraught look on her face as her mentor Robert Katende checkmates her. She pauses for a fraction of a second before giving up, at which Katende gently berates her, "No...no, Fiona. Never tip your king so quick."

Far away from Hollywood's recreation of the life of a champion, at Chivhu in Zimbabwe, 12-year-old Grace Zvarebwa has been practising for four years the art of not tipping her king too quick.

Along the way, this unassuming girl born into a family of subsistence farmers from a town 146km south of the capital city of Harare has etched her name as a potential global star by becoming Zimbabwe's national junior chess champion.

Grace aspires to be a FIDE Grandmaster, no less, and mentor others like her back home to become champions.

"In June, I won in the under-16 category in Zimbabwe, and we are supposed to travel to Egypt next for the African Youth Chess Championship. I am hoping for funding so that I can go there and win the tournament," Grace tells TRT Afrika. "I will use the cash prize to help my parents and sponsor my colleagues."

Since taking up the sport four years ago, Grace has won more than 15 medals in tournaments across Zimbabwe. In some of these, she defeated players almost twice her age.

Her dream of succeeding outside her country is now shared by many others like her, thanks to mentorship initiatives like those that pulled Phiona Mutesi out of poverty and made her a household name.

Queens of Chivhu

Godknows Dembure, who teaches at Makumimavi Primary School, is doing in Chivhu what Katende did at Katwe, a slum in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, after meeting school dropout Phiona during a missionary-run outreach.

At Nharira Primary School, his previous workplace, Dembure established a chess club named Queens of Chivhu — inspired by Queen of Katwe — to help girl students improve their critical thinking and mathematics skills through chess. Dembure had himself learned to play chess when he was a trainee teacher.

"When I started this chess project, it was as a kind of antidote to the problems that existed in the area where I was teaching. Child marriages, pregnancy and dropout rates were high, prompting me to look for a way to help these girls gain confidence and wriggle out of the situation they were in," Dembure tells TRT Afrika.

"When I started this chess project, it was as a kind of antidote to the problems that existed in the area where I was teaching. Child marriages, pregnancy and dropout rates were high, prompting me to look for a way to help these girls gain confidence and wriggle out of the situation they were in," Dembure tells TRT Afrika.

Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (Zimstat) data shows that rural girls are twice more likely to be married before 18 than their urban counterparts.

Zimstat also notes that 33.7% of girls aged under 18 are already married, which works out to one in three girls under 18. In comparison, only 2% of boys get married before reaching the age of 18.

Zimbabwe is among the 20 African countries where child marriages are rampant.

Funding challenges

In Zimbabwe, chess is still considered an elite sport, played mostly in the country's top schools. A rural chess hub like Chivhu is the exception. Girls emerging from Dembure's Queens of Chivhu club have already triumphed at various levels of the sport, competing in and winning local, national and international competitions.

Dembure says funding to enable his wards to attend competitions is a challenge in the absence of income-generating avenues. Parents in the area already struggle to pay for their children's education – so, there's little else they can provide for chess.

Sometimes, Dembure ends up funding the club with his own earnings so that the girls can go to tournaments and gain competitive experience.

Bigger arenas beckon

Besides Grace, two other players from Queens of Chivhu — Lynne Chidanhire and Patricia Madziva — are supposed to travel to Egypt this year for the African Youth Chess Championship. One of the girls doesn't have a passport yet.

The club won the Zimbabwe national championships in 2018, but could not attend the Africa tournament in Egypt due to financial constraints. Last year, the team had players qualify for the African Youth Chess Championship in Ghana, but couldn't send them there for want of funding.

In 2019, a GoFundMe initiative on Twitter made a breakthrough by raising US $5,000 in less than 24 hours for a four-member Queens of Chivhu team to compete in the African Schools Individual Chess Championship in the Namibian capital of Windhoek. Grace just missed out on a medal, finishing fourth in her age group.

The African Youth Chess Championship, the highest level in the continent, serves as the qualifying stage for the World Chess Championship to be held next year from April 3 to 25 in Toronto, Canada.

For Grace and the rest of the Queens of Chivhu, all the extraneous challenges of old remain, but their talent in the royal game of 204 squares has ensured that life isn't a stalemate any longer.