I was very saddened to hear of Kwesi Owusu’s passing, a Black Arts champion who passed to our ancestors too soon.
I first met Kwesi in Ghana in the early 1970s at the Arts Centre in Accra at one of the themed Saturday shows, Ananasekrom, which provided an opportunity for young performers to showcase their talents. In his case, he had come to recite a poem that he had written whilst still a student at Adisadel College.
He was introduced to me by my very good friend, the late John Hammond, who was then married to his sister Priscilla. I later found out that Auntie Edwina, his mother, who was then looking after her granddaughter, Pamela, was a very good friend of my father when he worked at Sakunde.

We met several times in the late 1970s when I came to London to visit John and Priscilla, and he was studying at one of the London colleges, but it was not till the mid to late 1980s that I had the opportunity to be acquainted with the work he was doing with the London arts. It was at the Africa Centre in Covent Gardens, a popular spot for Africans visiting and living in the UK, where his group, the African Dawn, were performing one of their many shows in the genre of the Last Poets spoken word with a musical background.
Kwesi was also the foremost expert on the Black Arts scene, having written a book that documented the trials and tribulations of various arts groups. This book became a required reading for anyone working with Black community organisations. He was also an activist on debt relief, and I remember him as part of a group that organised for the great Ghanaian master drummer Kofi Ghanaba to come to London for a tribute concert that signified the demise of the Greater London Council in 1986.
Kwesi then turned into a filmmaker with a documentary on the Ouagadougou film festival, and this was followed by a fiction film, Ama. In pursuit of this new vocation, he was one of the sponsors in the acquisition of a cinema on Portobello Road with another cosponsor that would show independent and black films.
I followed Kwesi’s work in Ghana, where he had relocated to with projects on environmental and other social conscience films more awareness exposition on our social issues which he felt was going to create a storm that would be unleashed to make Ghanaians more aware of environmental and social issues that government cannot quite deal with.

He invited me to a meet and greet somewhere in Hampstead, which he had organised to assist a friend in introducing a journal to us, quite enjoyable because I met some old friends, and then we started discussing a documentary on my good friend Mr James Barnor, whom I arranged for him to meet.
I had not known that he was ill; I thought he was creating quite a storm in Ghana, where it all started. He treasured our culture to the extent that his contribution to the black arts scene was priceless. We have lost a consummate thespian, a champion of the arts and an accomplished cultural curator. For Kwesi wrote, he acted, he made films, and his influence on the arts scene in the UK and Ghana can never be underestimated.
To the family, my sincerest condolences.
Kwesi -Rest in perfect peace in the lord and rise in Glory
Ade Sawyerr
Croydon May 2025