Broadcaster Yinka Bokinni brings old friends together to remember their childhood friend Damilola Taylor, killed 20 years ago, and the community that he touched
Nearly 20 years have passed since that day in November 2000, when the 10-year-old Damilola Taylor died on a landing of the North Peckham Estate in south London. Thousands of newspaper stories have been written about the circumstances – there was a Panorama special and a Bafta-winning BBC drama, Damilola, Our Loved Boy – and yet with this Channel 4 documentary, Yinka Bokinni has made an essential contribution to our understanding of his legacy.
Bokinni is now a popular Capital Xtra DJ, but back then she was one of the kids who hung around with Taylor on the estate, playing on the grassy “hills” between blocks and in each other’s flats. Bokinni explains how Taylor’s death, followed a few months later by the demolition of the entire estate, became, for her and her peers, an immovable line separating childhood and adulthood: “Us kids never saw each other again. For 20 years, we never even talked about Damilola.”
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