In the same way as scenes of Beth Harmon discovering chess in the basement and rising through the world with her championship in chess in the Queen’s Gambit, young children in the Majidun district of Nigeria’s Lagos crowd around plastic tables and boards and learn about the centuries-old games in hope it gives a better life.
Shantytown on the waterfront is across the lagoon from the mansions and high office blocks of Nigeria’s commercial capital. They hope that the cunning and strategy they learn on the chessboard will help them take the leap from their homes into the slums.
“Living here is difficult,” says Michael Omoyele, who has been dealing with food shortages for 14 years and has been working to feed himself. Inspired by “Queen of Katwe”, the 2016 film about a girl fleeing poverty in a Kenyan slum through chess, Omoyele hopes that chess will help him as well.
“On the chessboard, you work hard to win, and from winning chess games, I think I can do better to become a champion and be rich, too.”
Omoyele is training at home, in a room with watermarked concrete walls and peeling blue paint and crying children in the background.
Babatunde Onakoya, 26, founded chess in the slums of Africa 2018. Chess helped his rise from his own deprived childhood in Lagos. Onakoya said he was driven by a belief that Nigerian education is in crisis, with many children either out of school or not learning what he sees as useful survival skills.
Aerial view of the Makoko community in Lagos, Nigeria, May 2, 2021. (Reuters Photo)
He now spends his free time penetrating narrow alleys, stained with the smell of burning garbage and generator fuel, hoping to teach children chess can build a better future for all of Nigeria.
“That’s why we teach them chess, as a way to raise a new generation of intellectuals, people … who will be curious to question everything, who will be curious to innovate,” he said.
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