Books vs. Movies
In this podcast we set out to answer the age old question: is the book really always better than the movie?
Books vs. Movies
Ep. 34 The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster by Tim Crothers vs. Queen of Katwe (2016)
Can a young girl from the slums of Katwe, Uganda, rise to become a national chess champion against all odds? Join me, Lluvia, as I unravel the inspiring life story of Phiona Mutesi, captured in both the book "The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster" by Tim Crothers and its 2016 film adaptation. You'll gain insights into Phiona's incredible chess journey, the role her mentor Robert Katende played, and the creative liberties taken in the film to spotlight the harsh realities of poverty. Together, we’ll explore the dramatized moments like her brother’s accident and how these elements serve to deepen the narrative impact.
In this episode, I also dissect the portrayal of Phiona's family dynamics, contrasting the film’s version with real-life events, particularly her mother Harriet's supportive role. From Phiona's educational challenges to her team's experience in Sudan, we dive into the nuances that shaped her story. We tackle sensitive themes such as portrayal adjustments for characters like Night and the white savior trope, while also celebrating standout performances by Lupita Nyong'o and Medina Nalwanga. Wrap your mind around thought-provoking comparisons between the film's sports movie elements and other works, such as "The Boys in the Boat," and join the discussion on how cultural narratives are crafted and perceived.
All episodes of the podcast can be found on our website: https://booksvsmovies.buzzsprout.com/share
Connect with me: Instagram | Threads | Bookshop | Goodreads | Blog
Welcome to Books vs Movies, the podcast where I set out to answer the age-old question is the book really always better than the movie? I'm Yuvia, an actress and book lover based out of New York City, and today I will be discussing the Queen of Katwe a story of life chess and one extraordinary girl's dream of becoming a grandmaster, by Tim Crothers, and its 2016 adaptation, queen of Katwe, starring Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo. Hi everyone, welcome back. I am so excited, as usual, to be talking about this, or to have another episode headed your way, and I have nothing, really nothing, else to say, so let's just go ahead and get started. So the Queen of Katwe a story of life chess and one extraordinary girl's dream of becoming a grandmaster, by Tim Crothers, was first published in 2012. And it follows the story of Fiona Mutesi.
Speaker 1:Fiona was born and raised in the slum of Katwe. She is poverty stricken, katwe is a slum in Uganda, and so she doesn't have a lot, and so she lives in the slum. She's poverty stricken, she lives in a shack, and it seems like she's destined for the life everyone who's born into the slum is led to leave, which is a life of poverty and barely making ends meet. That is until one day in 2005, when she ends up in Robert Katenda's chess camp. It is there that she learns how to play chess and by the age of 11, fiona was Uganda's junior champion and, at 15, the national champion. In September 2010, she was able to travel out of Katwe all the way to Siberia where she competed in the chess Olympiad, and it was at that moment that she decided that she wanted to be a grandmaster, which is the most elite title in chess. But to reach that goal, she has to overcome everything that comes with living in her part of Uganda, which is poverty, aids. As a girl, she has to. She faces the very real threat of kidnapping and starvation, and this is her biography.
Speaker 1:Queen of Katwe is the 2016 adaptation directed by Mirren Nair and starring Medina Nalwanga's Fiona Mutesi, david Oyelowo as Robert Katende and Lupita Nyong'o as Naku Harriet, fiona's mother. This film follows 10-year-old Fiona and her family as they live in the slum of Kotwe, but one day, everything changes when she meets Robert Katende, a missionary who teaches children how to play chess. So it is a pretty faithful adaptation. This is obviously a biopic based on a biography. So, yeah, this is another one of those based on a true story. But you know, this is one of the few instances in which the biopic didn't bother me, and let's go ahead and get into why.
Speaker 1:So obviously there were some things, some events in the film that were made up, that were rearranged timeline-wise, that were dramatized even more to make it fit the medium of film. We've talked about this several times, but one of the first things we learn early on in the book is that Fiona's brother, brian, got hit by a bike one day. And this happens before the main events of Fiona's life or the main events of the part of Fiona's life that this book focuses on. So obviously the film focuses. The book and the film focus mainly on Fiona's journey to becoming a Grandmaster and her chess journey overall. So yeah, so this him getting hit by a bike happens before she discovers chess and starts trying to pursue it. But in the film this does happen in like the last third of the film, maybe late into two thirds of the film, and this I believe this was included later to showcase how poverty stricken Fiona and her family are. So she, brian, gets hit by a bicycle and he gets pretty severely injured. He requires stitches and this is all in the film. We don't get too many details. In the book we just know that this happened. But in the film he requires stitches.
Speaker 1:Fiona has to pay a random guy to take her and her brother to the hospital using and she has to pay him using all the money, so her and her brother help their mother sell fruits and vegetables in the market and all the money that Fiona earned that day she has to give to this guy to take them to the hospital. And because of this they now don't have money to pay the hospital, so he has to get the stitches done without anesthesia. They have to sneak him out of the hospital the next day because the doctors are coming in to talk about the bill, the medical bill, and when they show up after they get out of the hospital they sneak out of the hospital and make their way back to their home. So I guess it doesn't happen in the last third of the film. It happens like two thirds, in the middle of the two thirds or just in the middle of the film, and they show up and they have been locked out because they're behind on rent and so obviously Harriet the mother begs the landlord to let them stay as her son is injured and you know she wants to have a roof over her son's head and everything. And you know she wants to have a roof over her son's head and everything and they're denied and so they have to. You know he's injured and they kind of just have to stay out on the street even though he's injured. So, yes, this is very.
Speaker 1:I don't know if that actually happened in reality. I have a feeling that it wasn't to this extreme, since it is for film and it was over-dramatized, but it was really to get the point across of how poverty-stricken Fiona and her family are. Fiona starts playing chess at Robert Katenda's chess program at the age of nine and I did not realize that they definitely aged her up. In the film, medina Nalwanga, who plays Fiona, she was. I would say she was definitely maybe 14 or 15 years old or she looked 14 or 15. She definitely did not look 9 or 10. I know I said she was 10 in the synopsis for the film, but yeah, fiona does in the book. By the time the book ends she is about 16 years old. So yeah, so they definitely cast an actress that was kind of like in the middle of of that age range between 9 and 16 and she was like somewhere in the middle, I guess. So I guess it was just easier to keep the same actress, since the events of the film happen so quickly. We are shown years, but I think it was just because everything happened so quickly and we are on this journey with Fiona. It's just easier for us to have the same actress, as opposed to trying to find like a nine-year-old and then like a 10-year-old and 11 and so on until she's 16. So, but yes, she, she is nine and Medina Nalwango is definitely not nine when they filmed this.
Speaker 1:So in the film, the very, very, very first competition that the pioneers that's the name of the chess program they travel to it's a co-ed endeavor. In actuality, only the boys traveled to the very first competition the pioneers went to, and Katenda tells this story while they're there. Like this is the students or the pioneers first outing out of Kotwe ever in their lives, and so they're kind of overwhelmed by the place that they're staying and they're very nervous. And so Katenda tells them the story of this cat who outruns this dog, and the moral of the story is basically the cat is running for its life while the dog is only running for its meal. So that's why the cat has more motivation to escape the dog than the dog has for its meal, and it's supposed to be a metaphor for the students and this pumps them up before their big competition. As far as I like, the students were told the story, but it's more of it wasn't something that was told to them to keep them motivated before the competition. It was just one of the parables you could say that he told them.
Speaker 1:But anyway, at this competition as I said, since it was only the boys there is a scene in the film in which Gloria, who is the youngest member of the Pioneers she's about five or six she does this move and she's very proud of herself and then her competitor, who's so much older than her, takes her queen and she starts having like this freak out. She starts crying and yelling at the top of her lungs that he took her queen and Katenda has to escort her out of the hall where they're playing and it's like this big, it's one of those things that's like he was not that he was embarrassed by the children, but it was definitely like he was very much aware that they were seen as like uneducated and didn't have any manners and that kind of thing, because they're poor kids from the slum and these are kids that are at least able to get an education. So it was kind of like this embarrassing moment for him to have her have this tantrum in actuality again, since the boys did not, since the boys were the only ones to travel to this first competition, it's Ivan. Ivan is one of the. He's definitely not like five or six, he's a little bit older and he doesn't necessarily start throwing this tantrum that Katenda is embarrassed by, but he does throw a tantrum after he loses because he's one of the better chess players at the pioneers. So to lose at this competition was kind of just like it was his first time losing and or one of his the few times he lost and it was just like really emotional for him. So he's he did have like a freak out about that at this competition, but it was Ivan and not Gloria. In addition, for this first competition that the students have to have to travel to, and this one very clearly, I know why this change was made, because events surrounding it are not as interesting as what they ended up putting on film. So it's one of those things that originally the again because these are poor kids from the slum.
Speaker 1:The chess organization didn't want them competing against students. It was very classist reason, essentially like these kids are poor, these kids are not and we can't have them competing against each other. But Katende found a way to trick them into letting his pioneers compete. And the organization then was like fine, but you have to pay an entrance fee of this much for every single student and I just don't think it's going to happen. Oh, that sucks to be you. And then so Katenda goes to sports outreach, which is the missionary organization that is there to preach to the kids and give them an outlet and everything. And he goes to them and he tells them I need this amount of money to send my kids to compete. Can I have it? And the organization was like, yeah sure, here's the money. And that's how he was able to pay to send his kids to compete in this competition. So, yeah, very straightforward and obviously probably not exciting for the film to just see it happen so easily. So he actually has to play soccer.
Speaker 1:So Katende was a very good soccer player in his youth and he was hoping that he could play soccer professionally and that's how he was going to get out of his poverty, slum life that he was living. But unfortunately, that dream came to an end when he severely injured himself. He was playing a game and when he went for the ball, like it was one of those headshots, he went for the ball Somehow. He ended up falling right on his head and was knocked unconscious and people actually, like doctors and the people that were there watching this game didn't think he was going to survive because it was just like this horrendous head injury. But he ended up coming to and it was like doctors were very surprised because when he came to, he was very aware of his surroundings and it was one of those things. He was more so confused rather than anything, because the last thing he remembers is playing soccer and to just wake up on in hospital bed was like very disorienting. But so that's kind of that. After that it was kind of like you can't, like, you're like, thankfully you survived, but your head, this head injury, is not something that should be taken lightly and you cannot play soccer anymore, and so that's what stopped, like he continued to play soccer for fun, but he really shouldn't have been until he gave up soccer completely. But yeah, so that's, that's what happened in reality and the film. We don't know what happened to him. It's just alluded to like. His wife mentioned something about like were you playing soccer again? You know you're not supposed to screw you for playing soccer, how dare you? And he was like that was the only way to get money. So in the film he plays soccer, much to his wife's anger because he's not supposed to play soccer anymore. But he does it solely because it pays, and that's how he raises the money in the film for his kids to go on this trip. So in the film as well, his wife is a teacher and that's kind of how he convinces Harriet to let Fiona keep playing.
Speaker 1:Harriet in the film is a lot more combative, I want to say, about allowing her kids to do the chess program. Combative, I want to say about allowing her kids to do the chess program. She's a lot more hesitant and mainly the main reason being that she needs her kids' help to sell fruits and vegetables in the market or else they're not going to have any money. In reality, she was a little bit more willing to let her kids play chess, the only reason being they were guaranteed a meal. That was their one guaranteed meal a day was going to this chess program and eating the porridge that they had for breakfast. So that is the only reason Harriet wasn't so against them. In reality, as in the film, it makes it seem like she was a lot more against her kids playing. Again, I understand why that change was made, but yes, so she takes a lot more convincing in the film to allow her kids to play, and one of the ways that Katenda convinces her to let Fiona specifically keep playing chess is by letting her know that he will guarantee that she can get an education.
Speaker 1:And that promise of an education is what makes Harriet say yes to Fiona continuing her training. And in the film she receives her education from his, from Katenda's wife, but in reality, she received or receives this. This was written back in 2012. And because Fiona had missed so much school growing up before she was finally able to to continue her education thanks to a scholarship finally able to continue her education thanks to a scholarship she was really, really behind. But even though she was behind, I imagine she must have graduated by now. There isn't too much information on that, but in reality she did get the opportunity to go to school thanks to a scholarship. But of course, the film also makes her learn really, really fast. So, like a week after taking lessons with Katenda's wife, she's already reading like these chess textbooks and understanding everything in there. That is not what happened in reality. Is not what happened in reality. Again, because she had missed so much school, it did take her a while to learn how to read and learn how to read well, but the film definitely makes it seem like everything like once she got so good that Katenda could no longer like it reached a point where he couldn't teach her anymore because she was actually a better player than him. And that's when he gives her the textbooks and she starts reading these textbooks so she can continue improving her game.
Speaker 1:In reality, the way that fiona learned to play and get better was through experience. So every tournament she went to, every competitor she faced, there were things like she would lose, obviously because there's better players out there than her, but she would see the moves that they would do, and so she taught herself new chess moves by watching her competitors and seeing how they did it and how they managed to beat her. She didn't learn new moves through the chess textbooks, and there's also a competition in Sudan that she, ivan and Benjamin get to go to. In the book, in the film, it's just Fiona that goes on this competition. So there's a lot of competitions in the film that only Fiona gets to go on. Once they see how good of a chess player she is, and she becomes the best player in the junior chess champion and then the national champion. There were specifically like the junior competitions, there were a few in which she was joined by Ivan and Benjamin, who were the two best male players. But yeah, the film definitely made it seem like she was the only one attending a lot of these competitions by herself.
Speaker 1:So when Ivan, benjamin and Fiona went to Sudan, it was their first time on a plane. They were staying in a hotel. It was their first time with a bed and a toilet that they could flush and just a lot of, and they had food. They were not hungry. They were having three meals a day. Sometimes they overate, since they made themselves sick because they weren't used to eating so much and things like that, and that it's just one of those things that like, once you experience something like that, it's so life changing, that like they were so happy in Sudan and it was one of those things that as soon as they landed back in Uganda and they looked around at their surroundings, it was almost like a reverse culture shock, I guess you could say, because they were just, they had experienced these wonderful things that they no longer had in their slums and so it was kind of hard for them to adjust. And it didn't make them brats necessarily. And the in the film it definitely seemed like Fiona got a little bratty, like Harriet has a conversation with Katenda and is like I want these things for my daughter but it's making her like, it's turning her into this, like different person that disobeys me and things like that. And so there's this moment in the film in which Harriet and Fiona have a disagreement about this very thing that Fiona goes to Katenda and stays with him and his wife for a few weeks because she doesn't want to be on her mom's roof anymore and this doesn't happen or this didn't happen. It was more of just like a sad reality check for Ivan Benjamin and Fiona to kind of readjust, and it did take them a while to readjust back to the reality, but they did do it. She at no point went to go stay with Katenda.
Speaker 1:One of the changes that did bug me once I learned otherwise in the book was that of Night. Night is Fiona's older sister and in the film she's being very obviously groomed by this older man and her mother is very much like he's grooming you, you're not allowed to see him anymore. He shows up and Harriet kicks him out and is like no, you are forbidden from seeing my daughter, get out of here, go away. And Knight ends up running away with him and she comes back after he dumps her and then at one point she willingly leaves her little brother, richard, behind. She's supposed to be watching him and it starts raining and Cotway is a slum where if it rains a lot, there's going to be a flood, there's going to be flooding, and so she leaves to go with this guy. After he shows up again and Richard is left behind and it starts raining and the house starts flooding. Thankfully nothing happens to him, but obviously Harriet starts hitting her and saying like how could you do this? You need to get out. Like you're kicked out of here, you need to leave. And then she admits that she's pregnant and that's when Harriet allows her to stay.
Speaker 1:The sad reality is that night initially started off by becoming a prostitute. Now, this is a Disney film, so I can understand why they couldn't say that. But I don't know. If I was Knight and I saw that I was being portrayed in this way, I feel like I would be upset. But Knight did start off at first by selling herself. This is the slum. There is not a lot of opportunities to earn money and, as a woman, this is a profession that a lot of them turn to and it's not something that they want to do, but it's something that they feel that they have to do because they have to earn money somehow. So she starts off that way and then eventually she does go with two men and she has children by them, and again, it wasn't it was more out of necessity that she went with them. These were men that might have promised her money or sense of security that she otherwise didn't have, and so she again went with them out of necessity and not willingly because she was in love with them or thought that she was in love with them. So that is one of the changes that I was kind of sad that they made, because that is not the reality of night and it's just an unfortunate reality that a lot of the women that live in this slum have to kind of resort to.
Speaker 1:One of the final competitions we see in the film is fiona competing in the chess olympiad in siberia and at one point she she loses and she takes it really hard and she ends up running away and Katenda has to go after her and is just like you can't leave, like we're in Siberia, you can't, you can't just do that, you need to stay safe. And she starts crying and is like I, what am I supposed to do? And then he like motivates her and she keeps trying at it. She did not run away in Siberia. After a really particularly difficult loss for her she did go to her hotel room and cried for hours but she did not run away. But yeah, those are the majority of the differences between the book and the film.
Speaker 1:I really enjoyed the film. I thought it was full of heart and I guess one of the other things that I didn't mention is that the film is Katenda believes in Fiona pretty much from the moment he meets her and is like pushing for her success. In the book it does seem like it took him a while to come around to her talent and her abilities, like he definitely focused a lot more on the male players than he did on Fiona and then once it was like undeniable how good she is, or was that's when he was like that's when he started focusing a lot, giving her a lot more attention. But anyway, yeah, I really enjoyed the film. I mean, o yello and lupita nyongo are great actors. Medina nalwanga as fiona, she was also great. She was fantastic. This was I, I, yeah, I. I really thought that the film was had solid acting and, despite being a sports film, it avoided a lot of the annoying cliches that we discovered and, for example, the boys in the boat. That one was just like obviously, yeah, there, there are still some like sports movie tropes included in here, but they were not as cheesy or as formulaic as the boys in the boat. So I really, really, really, really really liked that.
Speaker 1:The book I thought was okay. I really liked the parts that focused on Fiona and Katenda and the pioneers. But there were some extraneous stuff in there that I wasn't really sure why he was mentioning it and he always did end up tying it back into the story. But it was also like I don't think you needed to include this and there was one chapter in particular that really, really bugged me and its inclusion in the book really, really bugged me, and it is a chapter entitled Mzungu. I apologize, I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly, but it's Mzungu and it is a Swahili word that means someone who wanders without purpose. So, for example, this is a word that meant like European missionaries. That meant like European missionaries, explorers, colonists, tourists. Now it's a catch-all word that means all white people. So if you hear the word mzungu, they are referring to a white person, and if you hear that word, it is more than likely going to be tinged with disgust. Not disgust, distrust, understandably. So these are. So the lead up into this chapter is essentially like.
Speaker 1:The organization behind the chess program was a religious organization. It is a missionary organization and so it being religious means that it is tied to the Mzungu. So a lot of parents, once they realized what their children were attending, being distrustful of the Mzungu, started taking their children out of the program and forbidding them from going back because they don't trust the Mzungu. Harriet was also very distrustful of the Mzungu but, as I said, she felt like she had no other choice than to allow her children to continue to attend because they were guaranteed a meal. So she was very nervous about them continuing, but because they were being fed, she allowed it. And so that is the lead up to this chapter, and it starts off with the definition that I just explained to you, and the reason this chapter really bugged me with its inclusion was because it reeked of white saviorism.
Speaker 1:Tim Crothers is a white man reporting who initially reported on Fiona for an article for ESPN before deciding that he wanted to write a whole book on Fiona, and it just seemed like he's like. He says they had to trust the Mzungu and they didn't want to, but without the Mzungu, fiona wouldn't even be in this, wouldn't have even discovered chess. So it's just like there's even if that's true, there's no need. It just seemed like oh, these, yeah, it was like without, without the mzungu, fiona wouldn't be where she is today and she should be grateful, or harriet or whoever the the other black residents of the slum should be grateful to the Mzungu. Because of them, uganda has a champion, and it's just like that's a really disgusting way to talk about this and like so the scholarship that I mentioned.
Speaker 1:This chapter focused on a teenager who it focused on like different missionaries that came to Uganda and were actually doing good. According to Tim Crothers, they were actually doing something for the people of Uganda. And then so it focuses on the different missionaries in Uganda that are doing something to help the people living in the slums. And then it focuses on a teenage boy who went on a missionary trip at the age of 18 and had a bright future ahead of him. Unfortunately, he ended up committing suicide and his parents were really distraught, but they wanted to keep their son's memory alive by helping other children, because their son really, really enjoyed his missionary trip to China, and in that missionary trip he helped a lot of Chinese children. And so they said we're going to start a scholarship under his name to help other children and continue his legacy. And so it is the scholarship that is under his name that funds, or funded, fiona's education.
Speaker 1:That's all well and good, and I ultimately like if it had just been mentioned, like Fiona's on a scholarship this is who the scholarship is in honor of and moved on. Obviously there would have wouldn't have been anything wrong with that, but it was just the way it was written, kind of just like you know it just yeah, it just like like it seemed like he was trying very hard to prove that not all white people or whatever, and it's like you don't need to write a chapter about this, like this is not about them, this is about Fiona. Yes, maybe there is a scholarship started by a white family that has helping Fiona go to school. You can talk about the scholarship and how that scholarship came to be without all this other extraneous like it, just like I'm not. It is like white saviorism, but it just feels so disgusting to me because of the implication of, like these people would be nothing without my people. Essentially that was the undertone of that chapter and it was really icky and disgusting and I didn't like it. And I don't know why he had, I mean, I'm sure he felt talking to the residents of the Cotway Slum and the other people that he talked to and just maybe seeing the distrust they had toward him or just the general distrust they had towards the Mzungu, made him feel really uncomfortable and he felt like he had to prove something white fragility or something. But it was just.
Speaker 1:I really did not like that chapter because it just reeked of that. Like the very first paragraph was that it was the definition of mizungu and well, without, without them, fiona wouldn't even be where she is. And it's just like you don't, like you don't need to say that, bro like that is, just stop with your fragility, just stop. Okay, like, stop, this is not about you. And it's like we can see the good that this particular missionary, this particular missionary, did. We can see the good that this particular scholarship did, without this whole fragility behind it, and it just it makes me very angry.
Speaker 1:Because there was, yeah, it was just like the most atrocious chapter and I really did not appreciate the. Yeah, I just didn't appreciate what the implications behind it. And no one is. You're still not really focusing on why people are distrusting of the mzungu in the first place. Like, yes, this particular organization is doing a good thing, yes, this scholarship is a good thing, but just because those are good doesn't erase the history of why the people that live here are distrustful of the mzungu in the first place. I'm done ranting but yes, that chapter clearly just pissed me off and I did, yeah. So, yeah, no one, no one's, reading this book on Fiona and thinking like, anyway, so, yeah, the book was just okay because of that chapter. But there was also other moments that I just didn't find as engaging. I was really engaged in Fiona's story overall, but there were other things that were introduced that I just didn't find as engaging. I was really engaged in Fiona's story overall, but there were other things that were introduced that I just didn't find as engaging. So let's get into it.
Speaker 1:I rated the film 3.5 stars and I rated the book 3 stars, so that means the film is the winner. Yes, I think you can skip the book and just watch the movie. I think the book isn't bad, except for that chapter. Just skip that chapter. When you get to it, the book itself isn't like bad, but it's just okay. I definitely found myself a lot more engaged in the film than I was in the book. So, yeah, I'm still, I still feel really heated, so I'm just gonna log off now. Please leave a rating and a review and tell your friends all about it, so that we can grow our community. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will see you next time. Bye.