“Kenny Imafidon. We’re arresting you for the murder of…” After that, sound faded. To the teenage boy these words were directed at, everything that followed was incomprehensible white noise. In what felt like slow motion, Imafidon stood, frozen to the floor of his temporary Islington flat, as a team of plain-clothed police officers pushed their way past him. One read out his rights, while the others threw his belongings into evidence bags: the laptop that barely half an hour earlier he had been writing a college essay on; clothes, seemingly at random; his mobile phone. Few people even knew where he was staying, having recently relocated north of the Thames to get away from the escalating street violence that had been playing out closer to home. Just minutes earlier, he’d been talking on the phone to a friend back in Peckham, making plans for his upcoming 18th birthday celebrations. Now, he was in handcuffs, being led outside and into a waiting unmarked police vehicle, unsure if or when he’d return. He was terrified and he was panicking. Mostly, though, he was baffled. It simply made no sense.
More than 12 years later, Imafidon still struggles to find the right words to describe these emotions. What it felt like, during a police interview, to realise the murder in question was that of Sylvester Akapalara: a 17-year-old boy in the year below Imafidon at college, who was gunned down on Peckham’s Pelican Estate. Imafidon had considered Akapalara a friend. Still, on a quiet midweek lunchtime at the Prince of Peckham – a trendy pub just a few minutes’ walk from the scene of that tragedy – I ask him to try. “It was total shock,” he says, softly spoken but self-assured. “I was thinking about my whole life; questioning if I’d even have a future. What would other people think? I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I had no idea what I was accused of, but I knew that my whole world was suddenly at stake.”
In his soon-to-be-published memoir, That Peckham Boy, Imafidon recounts this story in great detail. How he was later charged with one count of murder, two of both attempted murder and grievous bodily harm, and possession of a firearm and an offensive weapon. He was never accused of directly committing these offences, but was instead prosecuted using joint enterprise laws, which punishes guilt by association. More on that later. He was remanded in custody for the following six months before a judge found he had no case to answer midway through an Old Bailey jury trial.
Imafidon’s incarceration was, without doubt, a great injustice. Half a year stolen from an innocent young man during the most formative of periods. Today, life’s going great for him. He’s the co-founder of a research and insights agency that counts Starbucks, Uber, the Houses of Parliament and Unicef UK among its clients. He has just turned 30 and was recently married. So why, I ask him, bring all this up now?
“I’m in a place where I have the strength and security to,” he says, “however uncomfortable it might be. I don’t want to live in secret. Hopefully, I’ve painted a picture of the reality of growing up where and how I did. Showing what it’s like to navigate those environments. What it takes to survive.” He started work on his memoir back in 2017. “It felt like the right time,” he says. “I was a couple of years into business, seeing breakthroughs. Life was on the up.” With no industry connections, the path to publication took time. However, the result isn’t only a tale of Imafidon’s mistreatment by the justice system, it’s also a book that captures a complicated childhood.
“It would’ve been easy to write myself as a golden kid,” he says. “An angel who had his whole life turned upside down. But I don’t want people to have a rose-tinted view of me.” Through his work, Imafidon has met the great and the good: King Charles, two Queens (Camilla and Elizabeth, twice, at Buckingham Palace); he’s worked with Harry and Meghan through the Commonwealth Trust. He’s sat with David Cameron and Theresa May in Downing Street. From business titans to political powerhouses, Imafidon has quite the little black book. “Lots of people love Kenny today, but in terms of my background? I was probably ‘worse’ than many of the people those same people continue to look down and frown upon. So, you love Kenny today, but would you love the Kenny of 10 or 15 years ago?” He wanted people to know the other parts of his story, even if it required a few awkward conversations with his mum. “It’s easy to be ashamed of the mistakes we made in the past,” he says. “Writing this helped set me free of that. And it’s also so easy to look at someone and only see one part of their story. We’re so quick to judge. To write people off.”
Peckham, Imafidon believes, was a different place entirely when he was raised there, in the late 90s and early 00s. “We knew it was seen as a no-go area,” he tells me. “This was pre-gentrification. If we were going to meet? I’m not sure where we’d have gone: this pub didn’t used to be gastro.” Today, it’s a neighbourhood heaving with rooftop bars, pricey restaurants and increasingly unaffordable rents. He lived here until last month, when he moved to east London. “Peckham wasn’t the place it is now,” he says. “I was exposed to lots of violence, far more than made it on to the news. It was an environment where people were stabbed and shot. There were drugs. You become desensitised by all the trauma. But we also had fun, and a sense of community, however rough it was.”
Imafidon’s immediate family was tight-knit. “There was me, my little brother, George, and Mum,” he says. “She was born in Nigeria and came here in search of a better life for us. She was always there, prioritising us, no matter the stress she was under; how many cleaning jobs she was working.” Dad visited from Nigeria, occasionally. “But it was Mum who raised us and she made sure we always had what we needed. She did her best. But I was a teenager – I wanted more.” It’s this that led him, in adolescence, to live something of a double life.
“My school was notorious for all the wrong reasons,” he says,” but there was a major effort to fix things when I was there. And I was doing good.” By Year 10, he already had 5 GCSEs under his belt. “We had amazing teachers, raising the aspirations of us pupils. There was talk of Oxford, Imperial, University College London.” In the classroom, the young Imafidon excelled. His entrepreneurial extracurriculars, however, were somewhat unconventional. Through early adolescence, two older boys had taken Imafidon under their wing; male mentors who looked out for him. Their business was drug dealing. Through them, he learned the ropes of selling cannabis and started his own small-scale operation. By all accounts, it went well.
“The weed was high quality, which meant demand was also high,” he writes in his book of his first foray into dealing, at 13. “Before long, my phone was ringing nonstop. There was no time to eat, barely time to sleep… My customer service was flawless, I prided myself on it, in fact.” Imafidon was no stranger, therefore, to occasional low-level police interactions. “But I wanted to study PPE at university,” he says, “to make something of my life. I was selling cannabis in my teens as a means to an end, it was not a career aspiration.” He’d packed all that in, however, long before those officers knocked at his door.
Following that police interview, Imafidon was released on bail without charge. Three weeks later, just two days after his 18th birthday, he was back at the police station, expecting to be part of an identity parade. “Despite all the stress and worry,” he says, “I imagined I’d just be on bail until it was all resolved. That it was a case of mistaken identity or something. Instead, when I arrived, an officer started talking to my solicitor… Then I was taken over to the custody desk and this list of charges were read out.” He spent the night in a police cell. “The next day, I was sent to Camberwell magistrates court, where I was refused bail.”
Black men are 26% more likely than white men to be remanded in custody pre-trial. He was sent to Feltham, a prison and young offenders institution on the western edge of London. “I literally just thought I was going to have a photo taken, totally innocent in a case that I had nothing to do with… Next, I was sitting in a prison van.”
During the following weeks, Imafidon was forced to confront a new reality. There were the indignities: being strip-searched; spending 23 hours a day locked in his cell; having his liberty taken. There were practical questions, too: what would happen with his A-level exams? “It was such an eye-opener,” he explains, “being in prison. You realise right away: of course, this doesn’t work. This system just isn’t functional.”
The biggest realisation, however, was that he’d not been confused for another suspect. He was being prosecuted for that series of serious offences under a controversial legal mechanism called “joint enterprise”. Today, he’s something of an expert in its usage, although he knew nothing back then. “Joint enterprise is a legal doctrine created more than 300 years ago,” Imafidon writes in his book. “Initially it was used to combat illegal duelling between aristocrats.” Alongside the shooter, all those involved in aiding, supporting or encroaching the duel could be held jointly liable.
This has resulted in bystanders, or people involved in lesser criminal offences, being convicted of murder or manslaughter. According to Liberty, the human rights charity: “We know that often, people are convicted under joint enterprise based on prejudicial evidence, information that could be inaccurate, or racial stereotypes. Weak ‘evidence’ that people are part of a ‘gang’ – including information about people’s associations, friends, families, use of social media and even music preferences – has been used in joint enterprise prosecutions, particularly in those brought against people of colour.” Until 2016, the law was interpreted by courts to mean anyone who “foresaw” the possibility of a crime being committed by another could be guilty. Following a Supreme Court ruling, you are now only guilty of a joint enterprise offence if you intended to encourage or assist the person who committed the offence to do it. As of February this year, a pilot project has been monitoring joint enterprise prosecutions for racial bias. It’s due to end this August. Campaigners argue it needs wholesale reform, and that thousands of innocent people have been unfairly held liable for crimes they did not commit.
In Imafidon’s case, the “evidence” was almost nonexistent. Mobile phone site data placed him in the general vicinity of the murder, although it offered no exact location; he’d been in touch with some of the other defendants on that day. And that was it. “But I lived in Peckham,” Imafidon writes. “We were friends. And I also hung out near the area where Sylvester’s murder took place, which also wasn’t too far from my own home.”
Despite this, Imafidon felt the odds at trial were stacked against him. “It was hard to believe the right outcome would happen,” he says, “to trust the system, despite my great lawyers. Let’s be honest, there are all sorts of cases with miscarriages of justice; of joint enterprise being used to prosecute and imprison totally innocent young Black men. To them, I was just some kid from Peckham. “The prosecution didn’t say specifically what I’d supposedly done. They didn’t try and attribute a role to me, just that I was part of this group of young Black men. I started to realise that even though I’d done nothing, joint enterprise meant my innocence was anything but guaranteed.”
Sitting in the dock, he listened to the prosecution case, suffocated by his enforced silence. “There were seven of us in the dock. All Black boys, all from Peckham. Two of them I’d never met before. At the start of the trial, we just sat and listened to the prosecution’s case. That’s a tough way to start, when what’s being said about you is totally untrue. I’d seen their case on paper, but hearing it? Orated by a professional? It was crazy. It genuinely felt like…” He thinks for a moment. “Hearing what the prosecutor was saying, you’d think: ‘These guys should be locked up.’”
On Tuesday 8 November 2011, the prosecution’s case ended. Imafidon’s lawyer made a “no case to answer” submission to the judge. In short, given the insufficient evidence against him, there was no need for the defence to even present their side and as such he should be immediately acquitted and released. “The next morning,” Imafidon says, “I prayed with all of the other defendants, then we went into court as we always did. I was acquitted. No case to answer.” To this day, no feeling has felt sweeter than hugging his mother – and wolfing down a McDonald’s – outside that court. “I understood for the first time the meaning of the expression ‘the weight of the world being lifted from your shoulders’. I was free.”
Readjusting wasn’t simple. Life was in limbo and for his co-defendants, the trial continued. Friends were later found guilty. Imafidon still visits them, entirely unconvinced by their convictions. For a time, early elation turned to anger and resentment. Quickly, he opted to channel that energy. Internships and mentors in local authorities and parliament helped him find the world of research, exploring and explaining communities systematically ignored or misunderstood. “The best way for me to make sure what happened to me is not a reality for more people,” he says, “and to make change, is to make sure I am that change. To be able to see the system for its flaws, learn how to move in it and operate it, and make the differences I want to make.”
Does he still feel anger about what happened? “Of course,” he replies. “Not about what happened to me, but towards the system. The fact that what happened to me wasn’t an exception, but a pattern. The rule.” Whether in his business, or through voluntary work with those in prisons today, Imafidon believes firmly in the power of potential. “I want people to challenge themselves around how they see potential in others. If I’d been found guilty, everything I’ve done since would never have happened: our seven-figure business; our contribution to politics; the work I’m doing with Lord Hastings in prisons; my family. I feel I’m actively contributing to society, but that so easily could have been taken away. We waste a lot of potential in our society because we make assumptions about what greatness looks like and where it comes from. But greatness comes from places like Peckham, too.”
That Peckham Boy: Growing Up, Getting Out and Giving Back by Kenny Imafidon is published on 13 July by Torva at £16.99. Order it for £14.95 from guardianbookshop.com
