Akala’s unique experience as a sportsman – he played football seriously throughout his childhood – a scholar and a performing artist, give him the content and confidence to address “Linford’s lunchbox”, in a withering critique of British narratives around black sporting achievement, and the global histories of oppression. Travel, like education and the dynamics of his own family, is a constant theme throughout Natives. “How will our children and their children after that navigate being born black in Britain and of Caribbean heritage without the wisdom and laughter, the cooking and cussing, of Caribbean-born grandparents?” he asks. And as the grandchild of Jamaicans who came to Britain as adults during the Windrush era, Akala’s generation is the last with a direct connection to the countries of their heritage. He writes – in a powerful chapter about the failures of the education system to nurture the talent of black children – of how his father and his uncles emerged from their own experiences of the British school system to regard it as a “cultural and intellectual war zone”.

The relationship between different generations of Akala’s family is a recurring and fascinating thread. “Though my mum was far from rich and had a great many sufferings of her own to speak of, she still shared a degree of racial discomfort when faced by the questioning eyes of her five-year-old son,” he writes. In one of the most touching of many personal passages in the book, Akala retraces the steps by which he was racialised – as a mixed-race child – into blackness, and by which he realised that his mother, who fiercely protected her children’s pride in their heritage, enrolling them among other things in a Pan-African Saturday school, was racialised as white. Natives delivers the answers, and some of them are hard to hear. 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.

I n 2010, UK rap artist Akala dropped the album DoubleThink, and with it, some unforgettable words.

Akala natives