Kwosi Yeboah

When my parents left Ghana for Sweden, they believed in a better life, or at least better chances for one. We settled in Gothenburg, but it wasn’t the dream they’d imagined. My father was barely home, working long hours on construction sites, and when he was home, all I remember are the arguments. He left when I was still young, leaving my mother, my little brother, and me to scrape by. We moved to Angered, where the streets became more familiar to me than my home.

By the time I was a teenager, those streets had become a second family. I remember the first time I smashed a window, not because I needed anything, but because the thrill made me feel alive. It wasn’t long before vandalism turned into stealing, and then stealing became something more dangerous. At 16, I was running with a gang. Selling drugs felt like the only way out of the hole we were stuck in. But that world is violent. Fear ruled our days and nights—shootouts, turf wars, debts owed. I got a gun, a tattoo. In that life, power and respect were everything.

Then everything shattered. My little brother, the one person who stayed out of it, was killed—shot in the street because of something I did. That kind of pain doesn’t fade. It just sits with you. My mother went numb. She’d already lost so much, and now this. I swore I’d walk away from it all. We scraped together what we had and moved out of the neighborhood.

Now, at 24, I found new friends. One of them had a small studio. Hip-hop was our escape. I started writing, rapping about what I saw, what I lived. It doesn’t fix anything, but it helps. Some nights, I think about my brother, and the senseless violence that eats away at places like this. I’m trying to make something better out of the pieces I’ve got left.