“I want to be a grandmaster by the age of 11 or 12,” said 9-year-old Tanitoluwa Adewumi, the youngest child of a family of refugees who fled Nigeria three years ago after they were targeted by the jihadist group Boko Haram. Landing in New York City just over two years ago, Tanitoluwa began learning to play chess. Last year he won the New York State chess championship in his age division, lugging the trophy to the homeless shelter in Manhattan where the family were living at the time.
The child refugee had triumphed over children from New York’s most elite private schools, players with lengthy records and private tutors. Since then the family have found a home, a memoir telling their story was published last month and the studio Paramount and the comedian Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show, have announced plans to shoot a film.
Tanitoluwa’s chess ranking continues to improve at a remarkable rate. He is now ranked third among players his age and is on track for first place. “I want to be the youngest grandmaster in the world,” he said. Neither of his parents know how to play chess, his father Kayode said. “He was introduced to it at his school,” said Adewumi, 43. “He dedicated his time to it.”
In Nigeria, Adewumi had a printing company. In December of 2016 four men arrived at his shop in Abuja and handed him a thumb drive, asking him to print 25,000 copies of the poster it contained. When he opened the drive, the poster was a message from Boko Haram, declaring “No to western education” and “Kill all Christians”.
Adewumi, a Christian, told the men his printers had broken. They did not appear to believe him: in the weeks that followed, while he was away on business, men with guns showed up at his house and threatened his wife, Oluwatoyin. As the threats escalated, the family fled to the United States in 2017.
In New York they stayed at a shelter in Lower Manhattan and Tanitoluwa enrolled in a local primary school, which had a chess club. Shawn Martinez, who taught there and became Tanitoluwa’s coach, said he was struck by how fast the boy picked it up. “He has an incredible memory and he’s very interested in what he’s learning,” he said.
Craig Borlase, a British writer who worked on the memoir, My Name Is Tani . . . and I Believe in Miracles, said the family had “come from a background of some privilege in Nigeria”. In America, Adewumi worked nights as a cleaner in the Bronx for $6 an hour. He worked “washing dishes, cleaning houses, he was an Uber driver, approaching it with a real dignity and determination,” he said. Adewumi is now an estate agent, while his wife is a home healthcare aide.
Their son is fast turning into a famous chess champion. “He plays competitive chess which is highly pressured,” Borlase said. “He once said to me: ‘You never really lose. If you lose then you learn and if you learn then you win.’ About two minutes later he says ‘pull my finger’ and makes a fart joke. So he’s a really normal but wise kid.”
