The Mobo founder, who has died aged 57, had an unprecedented vision: to give Black British music a glitzy and joyful awards ceremony. But her impact went well beyond it
• News: Kanya King, founder of Mobo awards for Black British music, dies aged 57
I first met Kanya King in the mid-1990s, when I was still reeling from the failure of my own attempt to target the Black audience via my newspaper, Black Briton. Kanya came along a couple of years later and showed how it should be done. In framing her awards as “music of Black origin”, she not only connected with the relatively small Black British population, but brought in a whole new audience, too, who acknowledged its oversized influence.
Back then, the word diversity was hardly known. We were in the era of “equal opportunities”, which was taken seriously only by Labour-run local councils, and labelled “loony left” by most of the media. Britain had been dominated by more than 15 years of Thatcher-inspired government. Stephen Lawrence had been murdered, but the inquiry that identified “institutional racism” was still years away.