What was that meat cleaver incident? What was his relationship with his family and peers like growing up? How did he make the journey from geeky child, to sullen and armed teenager, to writer, artist and intellectual? He is now known as much for his political analysis as for his music, and, unsurprisingly, his new book, Natives, is therefore long awaited. Whatever that means.”Īny of the million-plus people who have since followed Akala – real name Kingslee Daley – know that the search has taken him into the realm of serious scholarship. “Apparently,” it continues, “I’m second-generation black Caribbean.

Like so much of his work, the song Find No Enemy blends his life in the struggle of poverty, race, class and violence, with the search for answers. “First time I saw knives penetrate flesh, it was meat cleavers to the back of the head,” the north London rapper remembers of his childhood.

And it is also, as the title indicates, all about class and the intersection of class and race.I n 2010, UK rap artist Akala dropped the album DoubleThink, and with it, some unforgettable words.

The book takes in the world – it’s about the ruins of Empire, so the cultural critique isn’t restricted to the UK or America, but it also goes to Beijing, Hanoi, Johannesburg, Kingston, Havana, among others and it talks about anti-apartheid movements across the globe, the alliances between different marginalised groups in different countries. And simultaneously you get taught about the way that race is considered in Brazil during a particularly harrowing (and that’s just to read) section where Akala writes about having been held at gunpoint by a Brazilian policeman because there is just no way that he could be anything other than a drug dealer. Britain ended slavery! We’re the good guys! ~Other people~ started it! It is the exact narrative that schoolchildren got taught for decades – I hope it’s changing now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t). You read about Akala as a young boy, attending extra-curricular physics seminars, and as a promising footballer, and being told by a teacher that William Wilberforce be recognised as a “saviour” because he ended slavery (this, by the way, is an entirely ‘normal’ thing to be taught in history lessons in UK schools. Akala’s wide-ranging Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire is both a cultural critique of entrenched racism, neo-liberal economics, the current world order, and an investigation of the author’s life and circumstance and how they reflect all of these.

Natives race and class