Harry Potter’s Favorite Sport Is Changing Lives in Rural Uganda

Peek behind the scenes of Atlas Obscura’s new film: “The Ugandan Quidditch Movement.”

In 2013, teacher John Ssentamu sat in a sun-drenched bus on a route he regularly rode between Masaka, a city west of Lake Victoria, to Kampala, the capital of Uganda. He peered over his neighbor’s shoulder, reading a page of the book he was holding: Harry Potter and Sorcerers Stone. Ssentamu was immediately enthralled with the fantasy world. In particular, he noticed a strange word that didn’t look like English: “quidditch.” and asked the stranger if he could take the book home. As he kept reading, he was swept into a realm of wizards, magic, and, most notably, that strange word—quidditch—a made-up sport played on flying broomsticks that’s prominent throughout the series.

What started as a fascination with the Harry Potter books would soon influence Ssentamu’s real life in ways he never imagined. Growing up in a rural part of Uganda, Ssentamu wanted to become a lawyer, but didn’t have the financial means, he says. Instead, he turned to teaching. While it wasn’t his first choice, it soon became his calling. “I just fell in love with the profession,” he says, “and now I’m happy to call myself a proud teacher.”

Together with his wife, Ssentamu had a mission to uplift education in rural villages like his own. In 2013, the couple moved to Katwadde, where his wife is from. Children there didn’t go to school, and they were determined to change that. “We had to find ways of attracting the community into education,” Ssentamu says. “When I read about quidditch, I felt like, ‘Wow, this is the right thing.’”

To inspire the local community to rally around the new school he started, Good Shepard Primary School, Ssentamu knew he’d need to get creative. Quadball—the real-world sport adaptation of quidditch—checked all his boxes. It was unique, included both boys and girls as equal players, and, above all, it was fun and engaging. What started as a community game turned into a passion for Ssentamu, and a life-changing experience for the community. “It started to become clear very quickly that it was about a lot more than just a quirky sport,” says Ben Garfield, a London-based film director. In January of 2023, Garfield and a camera crew spent eight days in Katwadde village, filming Ssentamu’s story of creating the first Ugandan quidditch team.

Four years earlier, at home in North London, Garfield had come across a strange site. In a local park, he saw grown men and women riding sticks around a field, batting at balls and running around wildly. He soon learned this was quidditch come to life, and that these weren’t the only people doing it. As a filmmaker, Garfield started researching for a story on the outskirts of the growing sport. “I found out that there was an international tournament, the World Cup, and I thought, ‘Who would be the underdogs?’” Garfield says. He found the Ugandan team’s Facebook page and connected with Ssentamu. It took them several years—a global pandemic had something to do with that—to finally make their project come to life in a movie of its own.

“It was always on our minds that we wanted to have a crew that was reflective of the spirit of the sport,” Garfield says. The film unit was made up of women and men from around the world—from the United States and the United Kingdom, to Kenya, and right there in Uganda.

One thing that didn’t make it in the film, which focuses primarily on the local impacts of the sport, was Ssentamu’s drive to get his team to the international Quidditch World Cup. Between COVID-19 travel restrictions and cancellations, and the expense and complexity of securing visas, the team hasn’t attended—yet. While going for the gold on the national stage is still very much a part of Ssentamu’s mission, his highest accomplishments go far beyond rankings or titles. “Getting to the World Cup is not the end goal in and of itself,” says Atlas Obscura’s chief content officer, Doug Baldinger, also a producer on the film. “It was to shine a light on the work that quidditch was doing for them at home, combating poverty, illiteracy, and gender discrimination in Uganda and hopefully Africa at large.”

Most of the kids in the village have never heard of Harry Potter, but it doesn’t stop them from loving the game it inspired. Quidditch, or quadball, is relatively new and relatively accessible anywhere in the world. “One of the other driving forces with quidditch was not just the gender diversity [it allowed for], but the ability for a rural community to compete,” Baldinger says. “There isn’t a lot of infrastructure built around quidditch. There are no private quidditch coaches that you can hire, or fancy private school quidditch teams that are in operation, so everybody’s kind of starting from scratch.” Hollowed out tires for hoops and sticks for brooms worked just fine for Ssentamu’s team when they first started out.

The sport is about unifying, not just the players on a team, but quidditch enthusiasts around the world. “Regardless of where one is, we share some things,” Ssentamu says. “[Quidditch] can be practiced anywhere. It can be loved anywhere.”

The sport also brought the small village onto the national stage. While they haven’t gotten to attend a World Cup, they’re not giving up on making their team’s mission known. “We are taking baby steps, but at least we are taking steps,” Ssentamu says. “We wouldn’t have taken those steps if we didn’t have this international community standing on our side.”

Since the sport’s origins in the community over a decade ago, the game has become a staple and point of pride for the village, and around Uganda. Members who started on Ssentamu’s team as school children are now adults playing on regional teams, starting their own groups in other villages, and leading their own initiatives. Richard, one of the stars of the team and a central character of the film, has opened a charity with his brother, focusing on uplifting and educating other orphaned children.

Ssentamu is still dreaming big, with hopes of taking a team to a World Cup. “If I get that done, even if I die, I die a happy man,” he says. While his eyes may be set on an international prize, his feet are still grounded in his local community. Outside the sport, Ssentamu continues to teach and uplift the village with efforts like raising chickens to help provide a sustainable income to cover teachers’ salaries and improve children’ s nutrition.

“This [film] has given our community special pride,” Ssentamu says. “It is putting us on the world map in our own style.”

This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura.