Yahoo Finance The children scarred by Damilola Taylor's killing: 'It felt like our pain wasn't valid'
Twenty years have passed since 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was stabbed as he was walking home from the library after school. For his childhood friend and neighbour Yinka Bokinni, who had not been able to bring herself to speak about his death, it was this grim anniversary that drove her to finally break her silence and to return to the place she once called home.
For much of the country, all that was known about Damilola, who was attacked with a broken bottle by two teenagers, was the hour leading to his death. Ricky and Danny Preddie were convicted of his manslaughter in 2006.
But Bokinni says there was always so much more to Damilola’s story. He was the adventurous one in her friendship group, who rode his bike down the biggest hills and, despite complaining about the chill during the winter, was excited to have moved to London from Nigeria and to be making new friends. He had lived in London for four months before he died.
Related: 'I wanted to show that he was loved': Yinka Bokinni on her neighbour, Damilola Taylor
It’s the boisterous boy she had known, not the violent killing, who is the driving force behind her moving Channel 4 documentary Damilola: The Boy Next Door, which was released last month. Bokinni returns to TV screens on Friday in a BBC London Damilola Taylor anniversary special at 6.30 on BBC1.
She created the documentary and the anniversary special not only to honour her friend and her community, but to finally explore the scarring impact his killing had on the children that were left behind.
Bokinni admits she was scared to go back to the area she grew up in, the North Peckham estate in south-east London. She hadn’t returned since 2001, when she was 11 years old, and had long struggled to confront her childhood trauma.
“I’m still scared now,” says Bokinni. “It’s one of those things where it’s not the type of fear like heights, spiders, or something happens and it scares you. It’s like an underlying kind of chill.”
Damilola’s killing, which sent shockwaves across the country, had ruptured Bokinni’s community. She describes her childhood as idyllic up to that point, in which children played on the estate, ate together and hung out in each other’s homes. They treated each other like a big family on the estate. She remembers clearly that when Damilola moved in, a woman she called aunty (but wasn’t related to her) had told a group of children hanging together outside to play with her son.
“Channel 4 gave me such freedom to really tell my story in the way that I wanted to tell it, tell the story of Peckham, the people who live there and people who have lived there, and people who existed at a time,” she says. She was also determined to remain honest about the area’s deprivation and the challenges the community faced.
In making the documentary, she not only felt the power in telling her own story, but coming together with a community to reckon with a tragedy that had scarred them. After Damilola died, there was little support provided to the children in the area. The first time she spoke about his death in significant detail was in front of a camera for the BBC Panorama documentary.
“We weren’t seen as children … For example, black boys are babies when they’re eight, nine and 10 and in a blink of an eye they become scary in the eyes of the public,” Bokinni says. “So because we lived in the ghetto, in the hood, in the sticks … they went, ‘Tell us about it,’ as opposed to, you’re children and something horrific has happened around you.”
She criticises the media’s focus on the broken windows in her area and the urine-stained walkways, as opposed to the devastating effect that his death had on the children who knew him. “It kind of felt like my pain, our pain, wasn’t valid. And I think part of my film, I hope, shows that it is valid and that it does matter, and he matters.”
The documentary has been widely lauded, but Bokinni, who presents a daily show on one of the UK’s biggest radio stations, Capital Xtra, refuses to buy into the idea that she and people of her background who make it in their industry are “diamonds in the rough”. She says: “There’s something in this council estate upbringing that I think really does instil resilience and strength in those who want to just do well in whatever field they’ve chosen.”
Despite her fear, she is glad she broke her silence. Since then, people across the country have got in touch with her to say how deeply the documentary has resonated with them. “It’s a story of modern Britain and that’s just the truth; regardless of if we put ‘black’ in front of it, it’s still a British story.”
