Kwame Kwei-Armah - Early Life

Early Life

Kwei-Armah was born in Hillingdon Hospital and named Ian Roberts. He changed his name aged 19 after tracing his family history (in which he first became interested as a child after watching the TV series Roots), through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana, descendent of Coromantins. His parents were born in Grenada, then a British colony. His maternal grandmother moved to Trinidad where she later died, leaving her five children including Kwei-Armah's mother to become orphans in Grenada. Kwei-Armah's mother moved to Britain in 1962. His father, Eric, moved to Britain in 1960 at a time when there was high unemployment in Grenada, and found work in London at the local Quaker Oats factory.

When he was one year old, Kwei-Armah's family moved to a two-story terraced house in Southall, London, where they rented out two rooms to help to pay for the mortgage. Kwei-Armah started at his first primary school as a five-year-old, and after a teacher disciplined him by kicking him in the back, his mother took on three jobs to pay for him and his two siblings to go to a private stage school – working as a child minder, as a night nurse at Hillingdon Hospital, and doing some hairdressing work. At the age of about 35 years his mother had a stroke leading to left-sided weakness, from which she slowly recovered.

Kwei-Armah grew-up in Southall in the 1970s at a time when Asian families were moving in and white families were moving out, and he perceived animosity from the Asian community towards the Afro-Caribbean community. One day, at the time of the April 1979 Southall riots, his father came home after the evening work-shift and took him out to see the Hambrough Tavern on fire. Kwei-Armah saw a police van arrive, and when the police started to charge at the crowd using batons and shields he ran home frightened. From the upstairs front room he saw the police chasing black and Asian boys along the street followed by skinheads, who also had batons and shields, chasing behind the police. The event shocked him making him feel that he was living in an alien environment, and reinforced his resolve to do well in his education. He later wrote about the event is his first play, A Bitter Herb.