Keyo

Keyo

I was born in South East London around big spaces and woods. My dad was from Ghana and mum Sylvita Louise was Caribbean and they had six of us. I had a good family but it was tough because of the climate at the time. I was the first generation born from the influx of those who came from the commonwealth. My dad Ras Fanta was a welder by trade but he also lectured as a black nationalist. He was very political but spiritual at the same time and a part of the black power movement and SIMBA project. My mum was more private and quiet, you wouldn’t mix your p’s and q’s with her though, sharp tongue. I don’t know why I went into care and there are different reasons that children are abandoned, fostered and left but as I said the climate was very different back then. I was in care until I was about six years old, just me and my older brother. It was never spoken about but all I can think of is they could not cope. It was just me and my older brother who went into care. Mum was a midwife and dad was active in many black organisations so they were go-getters. I was always upset in those years and I think it left me with scars. It was all hush hush back then and again in those times there were just things you did not ask. Sadly I only found out about all this once they had both passed. I remembered some of it as some of the foster parents were nice and some were not so nice. However, with the work I do now I feel I am healing those wounds. 

We had to wait for other black people to move in as we were the only black people in the area. The parenting was different back then and beats were normal practice. As a child you were seen and not heard and you got licks if you did not do as your told. I remember the rule was I had to be home before the street lights went on. But we were allowed to roam back then and London was a different place. It was much quieter with of dumps and squats. School was also tough back then and if you were black you had to be either crazy or hard. Teachers were inherently racist again because of the climate at the time. However my siblings and I went to a good school and got involved in poetry and music….I went to Crown Woods secondary school which was the biggest school in Europe at the time. It was huge and had everything, a farm, a lodge and football pitches. I was one of ten black young people in the entire school. Roots was on TV at the time so they would shout Kunta and I used to say thank you as Kunta was a hard man. I got offended if they would shout Toby who was the house nigga so I did not want that name. Luckily I was talented as school and in many ways that saved me. I was chosen for many sports teams including football and was also proficient academically. I was always in assembly collecting awards. So I got admiration and resentment with these achievements. After secondary, I went to Croyden arts school and studied graphic design. Then I went to Goldsmiths to study music and the flute. It was all the arts at this time for me and at an access course in Brixton I met Claudette. We had a boy named Joshua but sadly lost him when he was a few days old. He would be thirty-five now. It was a very traumatic part of my life and I remember listening to Stevie Wonder, ‘we can conquer the whole world’. When we lost the child, we lost the relationship and did not speak for twenty years. We are friends now and the pain is still there but we can talk about it. I always had a great love for her. I repaired slowly after this and decided a new career path in animation was where I wanted to be. I attended Farnham film school to achieve training in this. I met my next partner Jackie and we had two children together. I go back a long way with Gillett Square and run the ‘pop up play’ and Zoom bike project. The philosophy of play is uplifting and my bike project has been successful on the square. We currently have three female bike mechanics and we are now a constituted group all thanks to Ange, Skye and Boom Boom. People come to the bike project from across the borough to talk, fix and just hang with us bike mechanics.