At first, Tunde thought his biggest problem was the car. It coughed. It spluttered. It bucked. It died. No matter how hard he hit the steering wheel or the pedals, Tunde was going nowhere, out of fuel, out of luck.
He looked around and realised he had a bigger problem. Oshodi Bridge in one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of Lagos was not the place to break down at any time of day. As everyone in Nigeria – never mind Lagos – knows, beneath the rumble of city traffic, the rail tracks of the Oshodi Underbridge are home to the homeless, the runaways, the desperate, the honestly fearful and the fearfully dishonest.
Only now did Tunde’s biggest problem come into focus. A group of teenage boys was walking straight towards his stricken car. The oldest looking boy wasted no time. ‘Oga’, he said, pointing. ‘Sir, what’s happened to your car?’ he asked. Out of fuel, Tunde told him. To his astonishment, the boys offered to take his empty petrol can and buy fuel for him at the nearest filling station. He gave cash to the volunteers whilst some of the boys waited behind, telling him about their daily struggle to get by, helping out in the market. Tunde rewarded the boys for their kindness when the others returned and, as he set off, realised they had given much more than the fuel he needed.
He knew what it was like to live in a slum. He had grown up in one, after all, in Ikorudu. His parents hadn’t been able to afford the fees for sending him to secondary school so, as a 10-year-old with nowhere to go, he spent time hanging around the local barber shop. In between shaves and haircuts, the barber played chess with customers. Tunde watched. During shaves and haircuts, Tunde was allowed to pick up the plastic pieces himself, repeating the moves he had seen. ‘Chess literally save me,’ he would later say. Tunde became fascinated by what he called the greatest miracle of chess, namely the innate ability of a pawn, the smallest and least valuable of all the pieces, to become a queen.
A change in Tunde’s own fortunes, thanks to sacrifices made by his parents, eventually led to a secondary education, representing his school in chess tournaments, a degree in Computer Science from the Yaba College of Technology and, not least, the talent and determination to become a Nigerian National Chess Master, achieving the status of a professional player ranked thirteenth in his country of over 200 million people.
It still wasn’t enough for Tunde. He thought he could do more. At first, he and his friends would take food and chess sets to slums on Saturdays. Tunde believed that when they knew how, the poorest Nigerian children would prefer to pick up plastic chess pieces rather than pick pockets or pick up weapons. Encouraged by the initial response, Tunde and his team created a non-profit organisation called Chess In Slums Africa in September 2018.
By the summer of 2021 Chess In Slums Africa had trained over 200 children and obtained scholarships for 20, using chess as a framework to mentor and educate the children. Tunde’s commitment to help young people in the world’s largest floating slum of Makoko, and also Majidun, was already significant when he gave a newspaper interview that summer. ‘The vision for Chess In Slums Africa’, he said, ‘is to have an academy in every slum community across the continent, to raise a new generation of intellectuals with the right skills needed to transform Africa.’
Then his car broke down on the Oshodi Bridge. Driving home after his encounter with the teenagers, Tunde resolved to set up the Oshodi Underbridge Chess Tournament. He did. Tunde and his volunteers provided two weeks of chess lessons. They persuaded 51 young people to enter the first one-day tournament. Among them was the eventual winner, a 19-year-old called Fawaz Adeoye, who used the prizemoney to go to school and to start a fashion business.
As Tunde sees it, ‘We’re creating a pipeline to technology, education and vocational training. We’ve created a platform to showcase the potential of these children.’ The first Oshodi Underbridge Chess Tournament consolidated and confirmed the reputation of Chess In Slums Africa. One of Africa’s largest tech incubators, the Venture Garden Group is also now picking up the pieces in a $1 million partnership, and the US charity ChessKid is supporting the vision too.
In Tunde Onakoya they see a man with passion and commitment, a chess-driven philanthropist who is not going to run out of fuel any time soon.