Erick Muteti

In the quiet town of Nyeri, Kenya, nestled among tea fields and jacaranda trees, lives Grandma Wanjiru, an 82-year-old firecracker with a sly smile, sharp wit, and unmatched passion for chess. But Grandma Wanjiru wasn’t always a chess legend. Born in 1943, she grew up when girls were rarely seen holding chess pieces, let alone outwitting grown men over a wooden board. Her first encounter with chess came at age 11, when a British missionary left behind a dusty board and some yellowing rulebooks in the local church library. Curious and clever, she studied it alone by lantern light—learning from scraps of old books, mimicking famous openings, and even creating her own.