I think the thing that really hit me was that when my (white, middle-class) son, aged 9, demonstrates his academic ability we get an email from his teacher praising him. This was a result of his mother’s drive but does not seem to have been uncommon for Black families. At secondary school a teacher once stated to him in an argument that "The Ku Klux Klan stopped crime by killing black people" – this incident gets a whole chapter, you perhaps won’t be surprised that there were no adverse consequences for the teacher.Īs a child Akala was academically gifted, going to various extra classes and a pan-African school at the weekend.
Interestingly there are gradations in the Black community where in the Caribbean the paler skinned are seen as a higher social class (I think the same may be true in India), and in South Africa being successful is "acting the white man".
So although Akala is mixed-race this is pretty much meaningless since he is considered Black by the white world. This is reflected in the South African apartheid era laws. For racists there is no mixed-race, no being a little bit Black – for them it is all or nothing. He clearly remembers the occasion on which he realised that his mother was white, talking about coming home school having been racially abused at the age of five by another child. He visited also visited the family in the Outer Hebrides, finding Scotland less racist than England. Alongside Black America, Jamaica and Shakespeare are his major cultural influences. He went to Jamaica once as a child but subsequently has visited many times. As he points out this is as some of the overt racism in Britain, which his fathers generation had experienced, had started to recede. He grew up in Camden in the late Eighties. Although I had not heard of Akala previously, I am familiar with the work of his older sister Ms Dynamite.Īkala has a white Scottish-German mother and a black Jamaican father.
I don’t know what the etiquette is for using someone’s "birth name" when they publish under a pen name. Akala highlights that his working class origins are as much an issue as his race.Īkala is a rapper, poet, journalist, songwriter, author and activist – see their wikipedia page here. Natives is an autobiography which illustrates many of the points made in Why I am no longer talking to white people by Reni Eddo-Lodge and Black and British by David Olusoga. A return to the Black Lives Matter theme with Natives by Akala.
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