It is not uncommon in Uganda to see a group of men of all ages gathered around a board game, all of them concentrating on the moves made by the two current players in a strategy to conquer an opponent. The game is called omweso or choro in the Bantu and Luo dialects respectively; it is the most popular game and has been played for hundreds of years not only in Uganda but in most parts of Africa. At the first sight it seems a very boring game with just a board, on it curved 32 pits and black seeds picked from one pit and dropped in another. But it is not that simple, it requires a lot of calculative strategic moves, in many instances it was referred to as African chess. The idea is to capture your opponent’s “seeds” as many as possible in which case he will have no alternative but to lose the game.
