The Keskidee Centre, or Keskidee Arts Centre, was Britain's first arts centre for the black community. Located at Gifford Street in Islington, near King's Cross in London, it was a project initiated in the early 1970s by Guyanese architect and cultural activist Oscar Abrams (who died on 15 February 1996 aged 58) to provide under one roof self-help and cultural activities for the local West Indian community. Its purpose-built facilities included a library, gallery, studios, theatre and restaurant. The centre became a hub for African and Afro-Caribbean politics and arts, and developed its own vibrant drama company that attracted both a black and white audience.
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History
In 1971 Abrams bought a run-down Victorian mission hall from the Shaftesbury Society for £9000 and transformed it into the Keskidee Centre, which came to provide "a unique and hugely influential cultural and political environment for the black community throughout the 1970s and early-1980s." The community centre's name and logo derived from a bird native to Guyana.
In 1971 the Keskidee Theatre workshop was founded with a full-time drama company dedicated to black theatre, under the artistic direction of Rufus Collins. Among other professional actors, directors, and playwrights it attracted were Yvonne Brewster, Anton Phillips, Howard Johnson, Jimi Rand (Say Hallelujah), Edgar White (Lament for Rastafari, 1977; Les Femmes Noires/The Black Women), T-Bone Wilson (Jumbie Street March; Body and Soul, 1974), Pat Maddy (Gbana Bendu, 1973), Yemi Ajibade, and Lindsay Barrett. Productions of Derek Walcott's Pantomime, Wole Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers (1975) and Lennox Brown's Throne in an Autumn Room (1973) were also staged.
Nigerian artist and sculptor Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede was also an artist-in-residence; his son Tunde Jegede, born in 1972 and now a composer and virtuoso kora player, has credited the Keskidee Centre with initiating and nurturing his earliest appreciation of African diaspora culture. Errol Lloyd was also brought in by Abrams as an artist-in-residence (1974–75). Linton Kwesi Johnson was the Keskidee's first paid library resources and education officer. It was at the Keskidee that he developed dub poetry, a staged version of his poem "Voices of the Living and the Dead" being produced by Lindsay Barrett there in 1973, with music by the reggae group Rasta Love. The venue was also used for community meetings and events by the Caribbean Artists Movement. On 10 December 1974, Angela Davis spoke at the Keskidee Centre, while she was in London to attend a rally in support of South African political prisoners.
Up-and-coming bands such as Misty in Roots and Steel Pulse also played at Keskidee, and in 1978 Bob Marley used the centre to make a video for his song "Is This Love?"
The Keskidee ran into financial difficulties in the 1980s, and closed in 1991. The building was subsequently taken over by the Christ Apostolic Church.
Legacy
In 2009, The Keskidee was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 programme based on oral history interviews conducted by Alan Dein as part of the King’s Cross Voices project.
On 7 April 2011, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Keskidee Centre, an Islington Council heritage green plaque was unveiled by David Lammy on the building, at the time a church.
However, on the night of 8 March 2012, the building was ravaged by fire. Although the police treated the blaze as suspicious, they were unable to solve the mystery of who had started it, and a Scotland Yard spokesman said: “We have now exhausted all lines of inquiry. Realistically, the investigation is closed.”