Moh Awudu: Most of My Childhood Friends Are Dead, in Prison, or Lost to Crime

Growing up, Moh Awudu did not always appreciate his father’s strictness. Like many children, he saw the discipline, the rules and the punishments as obstacles to his freedom. It was only years later that he realized those moments may have saved his life.

Looking back, Moh says he now understands the value of the fear his father instilled in him.

“If not because of the fear that my dad put in me, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” he says.

The fear was simple but powerful. If he got into trouble, he knew there would be consequences at home. That knowledge kept him away from many of the temptations that surrounded him as a boy growing up in Nima.

Around him, childhood friends made different choices.

Some drifted into armed robbery. Others became trapped by drugs. Many never escaped the streets they grew up on.

“Some of the close friends I grew up with… most of them are the bad guys in town. Some of them were killed with guns because they were robbers. Some of them, when you see their lives today, they’re junkies.”

The losses are not abstract statistics. They are people whose names, faces and memories remain with him.

One encounter still lingers.

Moh recalls meeting one of his old friends not long ago. The sight of him was enough to leave him shaken.

“I met one of my guys the last time and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I thank God.’”

In that moment, he saw two lives that had begun in the same neighbourhood but ended up on completely different paths.

For Moh, the difference was not luck alone. It was the discipline he once resisted.

As a child, he feared returning home after making a mistake because he knew his father would punish him. Today, he sees that fear differently, not as cruelty, but as protection.

“Sometimes when you have fear, you know that when you go home your dad will beat you. So I had that fear in me. Without that fear, you just turn into somebody.”

His reflection is less about punishment than about guidance. In communities where crime can easily become an alternative path, he believes firm parenting gave him the boundaries he needed until he was old enough to make better choices for himself.

Today, as an artist whose work has taken him around the world, Moh often thinks about how easily his story could have been different. Many of the boys he once played with never got the same ending.

He did. And he credits a father whose toughest lessons became his greatest gift.