There is a sentence Tunde Onakoya has repeated so many times it has become his signature: "It is possible to do great things from a small place." The remarkable thing is not that he says it. It is that he lived it first.

A Boy From Ikorodu

Born on October 6, 1994, in Ketu, Lagos, and raised in the slum community of Isale Odo in Ikorodu, Onakoya grew up where survival was the main conversation.

His father drove a danfo. He gave it out, sometimes conducted it himself until the vehicle broke down and income dried up.

The family couldn't afford school fees, and while his mates moved through JSS 2, Tunde sat at home, idle at ten years old, in a neighbourhood where idle young boys rarely end up anywhere good.

The Barber's Shop That Changed Everything

Then he found a chessboard at the local barber's shop. The barber would bring it out after cuts and play with friends.

Young Tunde watched, begged to be taught, got ignored, and taught himself anyway, just from watching.

At a speaking event in Germany years later, he reflected: "Finding chess gave me something. It gave me an identity, an intellectual one, and it made me believe that I could be a thinker. That through just this game, I could find my place in the world again."

For a boy who could barely speak English and had never owned a DVD player, this was everything.

His mother, unwilling to let him stay out of school, struck the kind of deal only a mother could. She walked into an upscale secondary school owned by a Nigerian ambassador and offered to work as a cleaner in exchange for her son's school fees.

She held that arrangement for six years, resigning the day he wrote his final WAEC paper.

The school had a chess club. Tunde was consumed by it. By JSS 2 he had won his first trophy, the day his father cried for the first time.

Tournaments took him to cities he had never seen, gave him exposure his small corner of Ikorodu never could, and eventually earned him a scholarship to Yaba College of Technology, where he graduated as a gold medalist and rose to become ranked among Nigeria's top thirteen chess players.

Going Back for the Others

But something nagged at him. Chess had saved him. What about the kids he had left behind?

In September 2018, he launched Chess in Slums Africa, not with a boardroom or a grant, but with volunteers, secondhand pieces, and cardboard boards dragged through alleys in Ikorodu and Makoko.

They taught under streetlights. Some children hadn't eaten the day before. Some passed him notes on scraps of paper: Uncle Tunde, I don't have a school bag. Uncle Tunde, we've not eaten since yesterday.

He posted those notes on Facebook and strangers responded with help. From that fragile beginning, something enormous grew.

A pivotal moment came at Oshodi Under-Bridge. After seven months of training, Onakoya dressed the children in clean clothes and walked them through one of Lagos's most notorious slum corridors.

Chess in Slums Africa eventually expanded across eleven African countries, partnered with Chess.com, and placed hundreds of children on scholarships.

Onakoya informally adopted several along the way, including six siblings whose mother lost a leg in a market accident.

In January 2022, he enrolled a boy he found picking scrap off the ground in Ikorodu and posted the moment on X with no fanfare, just a photo and a sentence.

60 Hours in Times Square

In April 2024, he raised the stakes entirely.

In Times Square, New York, alongside American chess master Shawn Martinez, Onakoya played chess for 60 consecutive hours, shattering the previous Guinness World Record of 56 hours and 9 minutes, while raising funds to educate children across Africa.

The session was streamed live. Davido and Adekunle Gold turned up in person. Nigeria held its collective breath for two and a half days over a board in Manhattan.

He returned to Times Square in April 2025 and broke his own record with a 64-hour session, this time officially certified by Guinness.

Still Becoming

When author Lola Shoneyin approached him about a children's book, his first response was no. "I didn't think I had finished becoming," he said.

He eventually agreed, and Tunde Onakoya: The Chess Champion launched in Lagos in May 2025.

That hesitation, though, says everything, he doesn't see himself as a finished product. He sees himself as a story still unfolding.

From a barber's shop in Ikorodu to two world records on two continents. The small place was always enough. He just had to prove it.