With warmth, kindness and unlimited energy, Kanya King revolutionised Black British culture

The Mobo founder, who has died aged 57, had an unprecedented vision: to give Black British music a glitzy and joyful awards ceremony. But her impact went well beyond it

I first met Kanya King in the mid-1990s, when I was still reeling from the failure of my own attempt to target the Black audience via my newspaper, Black Briton. Kanya came along a couple of years later and showed how it should be done. In framing her awards as “music of Black origin”, she not only connected with the relatively small Black British population, but brought in a whole new audience, too, who acknowledged its oversized influence.

Back then, the word diversity was hardly known. We were in the era of “equal opportunities”, which was taken seriously only by Labour-run local councils, and labelled “loony left” by most of the media. Britain had been dominated by more than 15 years of Thatcher-inspired government. Stephen Lawrence had been murdered, but the inquiry that identified “institutional racism” was still years away.

So there was little interest in the mid-1990s corporate sphere for any action to tackle racial inequality. This was the world into which Kanya stepped, backed by nothing but her own vision, mission and unlimited energy. How she persuaded executives at London broadcaster Carlton TV to screen her first awards show, I’ll never know. There was no precedent. Back then, I’d covered many Black awards ceremonies as a journalist in the Black press, but most tended to take place in local community centres or town halls. The idea of a glitzy ceremony, screened by a mainstream broadcaster, was just about unthinkable. But not to Kanya.

When I saw that first show, I thought the woman behind it must be some kind of driven, big-shoulder-pads powerhouse straight out of Dynasty central casting. Nothing wrong with that, but to meet her though was to see the exact opposite: engaging, self-effacing, funny, modest. Someone with so much to brag about but who was so humble. Her superpower, it turns out, was kindness and warmth.

Her mission had always been to raise the profile of Black British music and culture, and to boost the careers of its artists. It was never about herself. And when she gained success, she set about trying to create more change: setting up the Mobo Trust, a charitable arm, to support the recording artists of the future.

She took the Mobos beyond London. I remember having an argument with her in the late 2000s, about why the awards should remain in cities with a large Black population, and why taking them to Glasgow would be a mistake. She went ahead anyway, and totally proved me wrong. The awards, and Black British music more broadly, gained a whole new audience, and over the following years they travelled to several other cities.

Kanya’s biggest challenge, though, came two years ago. She was diagnosed with cancer and told she had just months to live. It was devastating news. Somehow, though, she defied the odds and kept going. She was even able to see through the Mobos’ 30th anniversary ceremony in March this year. I saw her a couple of days before this, making a speech at the Speaker’s House about the huge impact of Black music on Britain’s cultural identity, and why this needs to be nationally recognised. It was so strong that I was able to persuade her to write an article for the Guardian’s opinion section. She still had all her force, her passion and her energy. Despite everything she’d been through, the only outward sign of frailty I noticed was when she asked to sit down for an interview she was giving.

She seemed to be defying the odds again – a natural powerhouse that could not be stopped. It allowed many of us to dare to believe she might still be with us for a long time, until the devastating news today that her light had finally been dimmed. Her legacy lives on, though: the change she brought about, in bringing Black British culture into the mainstream, makes her a true revolutionary. A revolution without blood, or suffering: just pure joy and celebration.