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Adisa Banjoko is the co-founder of the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF), an organization that fuses music, chess and martial arts to help at-risk children develop life strategy skills. It brings rappers and martial artists together to play chess with young people and against each other, to teach and demonstrate life strategies.
Adisa stresses that his organization isn’t Muslim, although he is. “Of course on some levels the idea fits in directly with my faith, because Islam is big on charity and youth, but the chess board doesn’t care whether you’re Muslim or whether you’re rich or poor,” he says. It only has one question. ‘Can you show me what you know?’ ”
“I wanted to teach young kids how to use the arts of chess and music to further themselves,” says Adisa about the origin of this idea. “Hip-hop has the stereotype of being inherently ignorant and violent, while chess has the stereotype of being for the nerdy kids. Martial arts has the stereotype of being violent when, in fact, it was created to stop violence. There is so much intelligence and creativity inside all these forms that I saw a connection and wanted to break these stereotypes.”
He points out that kids often feel as if they don’t have options. “Chess teaches you to analyze things and figure out the best options.”
There was a $10,000 scholarship in place at the last tournament Adisa organized. “We find at-risk youth wherever they are and help them develop ways to help themselves,” he says.
February 2008 will see Adisa at the ‘Honor the Queens’ invitational, an event his organization is holding to focus on getting more young girls to play chess.
“Where the women are, culturally and educationally, is where the whole of society is,” Adisa says. He sees this event potentially working towards goals of teaching young girls self-worth, to stop problems like anorexia.
“This is our way of using what these kids already know, to teach them to treat themselves as sacred. A lot of our problems today – school shootings or gang violence, stem from self-hate. We’re trying to take away the causes.”
Adisa Banjoko in based in San Jose, California. Learn more about his projects at www.hiphopchessfederation.com and www.lyricalswords.com
Posted December 2007
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