Ramsey Karim grew up in West London in a house where, in his words, migration, enterprise, faith, risk, and family loyalty all sat at the same table. His parents both arrived in Britain in 1973, and the family’s roots trace back to Aden. His father couldn’t read or write, but Ramsey remembers a man with a sharp commercial instinct, a gold tooth, a gambler’s belief that luck knew his name, and a memory that made up for the lack of paper. His mother was the quiet strategist who kept the ledgers and held the family together. Ramsey is British by upbringing, he says, but Yemeni in his blood, his culture, and his morals. Ramsey’s father started out as a welder. Then he noticed the one thing the Yemeni community in Britain couldn’t get: fresh khat, a leaf chewed socially in Yemen that must reach the customer within about 48 hours of being cut. He worked out the logistics, wet towels, refrigeration, and banana-leaf wrapping, began bringing it in for friends, and then supplied Yemeni sellers in cities across the UK, including London, Manchester, Cardiff, Birmingham, and Liverpool, on credit and trust, with no paperwork required. Khat remained legal in Britain until June 2014. As Ramsey tells it, the business later crossed the Atlantic to New York, where khat was illegal, and ended in an arrest and his father’s deportation. His father went on to run an apartment building in Dubai, where Ramsey and his mother stepped in to settle his debts before the family sold up and returned to London. In the episode, Ramsey describes delivering khat as a boy, carrying it across London by Tube at twelve and keeping it quiet from friends who wouldn’t understand. He tells the story of his father handing him £250 after a night at the casino, and of the time he asked for a job at Burger King and his father simply handed him money instead. He also shares the day he married his second wife, which was the day his father died, with the call coming just hours after the wedding ended at three in the morning. Ramsey talks about raising his own children with more emotional presence than he got, Moroccan couscous Fridays alongside Yemeni incense, why West London is home, and what he plans to do with the book’s proceeds: build wells and orphanages in Yemen in his father’s name. His message for listeners is simple: your parents are doing this for the first time, so ask them the questions you’ve never asked. About Ramsey Karim: Ramsey Karim is a British-Yemeni author, actor and creator based in London. He is the author of The Khatfather: The True Story and the creator and writer of its serialized television adaptation, based on his family's lived history. Learn more at https://thekhatfather.com. The book is available on Amazon.
