A Chessboard That Did Not Exist

The first chessboard Lissa Siya Joseph remembers was not made of wood.

There was no polished table, no ticking clock and no opponent watching her from across sixty-four squares. No teacher stood beside her explaining why bishops travel diagonally, why rooks move in straight lines or why the knight behaves unlike every other piece on the board.

There was only a screen, and a curious young woman searching for a better way to use her time.

Lissa had begun questioning how much of her attention was disappearing into social media. She wanted something more meaningful: an activity that would challenge her thinking, sharpen her concentration and replace passive scrolling with deliberate learning.

“I was looking for something that could sharpen my mind,” she recalls. “I wanted something that could replace social media and too much addiction to it. I started asking myself, ‘What can I do?’ That is how I met chess.”

Nobody recruited her. Her school did not direct her towards a chess club, and her family had not introduced the game at home. Curiosity opened the door, and Lissa walked through it alone.

She began learning online from the beginning. Every piece presented a new question. Every rule had to be discovered, remembered and tested through actual games. Without a coach beside her, mistakes became part of the lesson. A lost piece revealed what she had overlooked; a failed attack showed her what she had misunderstood; every defeat invited her to return and try again.

This was learning in its rawest form, private, imperfect and powered by persistence.

When Lissa eventually encountered a physical chessboard, she discovered that knowing the game on a screen did not immediately make the wooden board feel familiar. The pieces looked different. The position had to be understood without digital guidance, highlighted squares or automatic warnings against illegal moves.

The experience was embarrassing.

She had entered the room carrying the confidence of someone who had already played chess, only to realise that she was still a beginner in a much larger world. Yet the discomfort did not drive her away. It made her want to understand more.

That response would later become one of the defining qualities of her journey. Where others might interpret embarrassment as evidence that they do not belong, Lissa treats it as evidence that there is something left to learn.

She returned to the online board and continued playing. Match after match, chess slowly changed from an experiment into a serious interest. It gave her what she had been searching for: concentration, challenge and the satisfaction of recognising progress earned through effort.

Then one online game changed the direction of her journey.

Lissa found herself playing against another Tanzanian. During their interaction, the player was surprised to learn that the person across the digital board was a Tanzanian woman.

“Are there even girls playing chess in Tanzania?” he asked.

The question carried more weight than perhaps he intended. It revealed how unusual it still appeared to encounter Tanzanian women in competitive chess spaces. Girls were not absent from the game, but they were not yet visible enough for their presence to feel ordinary.

For Lissa, however, the encounter became a bridge. The player introduced her to Tanzania’s wider chess community, where she began meeting other players and learning about organised competitions. Until then, chess had largely existed inside her screen. Now it had names, faces, clubs, tournaments and a community she could enter.

The discovery created a new possibility. She was no longer playing only to occupy her mind or escape the endless pull of social media. She could test herself against experienced players. She could measure her development under tournament pressure. She could discover how far her curiosity might take her.

Her family watched this unexpected passion grow. They had not selected chess for her, but they recognised that she had found something important.

“We did not introduce you to this,” they told her, “but since you discovered it on your own and you are passionate about it, we believe you can do it.”

That belief mattered. Lissa was entering a sport in which she had few obvious examples around her and no conventional background to reassure her that she belonged. Her family could not make the moves for her, but they could give her the confidence to continue making them herself.

Before the national team, international arenas and the Tanzanian flag beside her name, there was simply a question: What can I do to sharpen my mind?

Chess became her answer.

Soon, it would ask her a much bigger question: could a self-taught beginner walk into her first serious tournament and compete for a place among Tanzania’s finest women players?

Next: Chapter Two — The Beginner Who Finished Fifth