Fifteen years and in Form Three, is, really, not an acceptable age for anyone to die. Yet that is just what Nikita Pearl Waligwa of Gayaza High School, the cradle and crest of Ugandan women’s education, has gone and done. Died. “Pearl” is the endearing name by which I believe she went. The “Pearl of Africa” is also Uganda’s pet name.
Pearl Waligwa rose to international prominence in 2016, following her appearance as Gloria, one of the slum girl chess prodigies in Mira Nair’s film Queen of Katwe. This was Disneyland’s dramatisation of the real-life story of Phiona Mutesi, a mabanda/mtaa, single-parent girl, who stumbles into the complex game of chess as a means of survival. Playing for the simple reason that she can get a daily mug of maize porridge at the shanty church where chess is taught, Phiona becomes a star player who dazzles and puzzles the masters across the chessboards and tables of the world.
I am not quite a chess enthusiast or a movie buff. But Queen of Katwe just had all the ingredients to capture my imagination. To begin with, Katwe, the slum setting of the film, is specially real and significant to me. I spent some of my childhood days there.
In the colonial days, when I lived there, in the neighbourhood of a shop owned by the Maragoli legendary fashion designer Ben Edebe, who made dresses for the colonial governor’s wife, Katwe was called the Black People’s City. It has not changed much today. It is still a chaotic slum, mostly inhabited by people who dare “not expect much from life”, lest they be disappointed.
This, indeed, is what makes the little heroines of the movie, Phiona Mutesi and her friend Gloria (played by the late Pearl), particularly attractive. Such “little women”, rising from the desperate deprivation of informal settlements and making their mark on the world, is a heart-melting story. They are a graceful illustration of Gloria’s assertion in the film that in life, as in chess, “the small ones can become the big ones”.
But Queen of Katwe had other big things going for it. The film’s celebrity stars, for example, were David Oyelowo and our own adorable Lupita Nyong’o, then fresh from her Oscar coronation earlier. Lupita’s participation in Queen of Katwe was initially a labour of love (a sort of homecoming to Uganda, where she had done some of her early theatre apprenticeship). But I think it led to her appearance in the more glamorous Disneyland Black Panther feature, of which the Waganda (“Wakanda”) are inordinately proud.