This is a woman who was brought up in the 1930s, at a time when the idea that white people were innately genetically superior and that Britain’s right to colonise the world were self-evident. She obviously knew I didn’t have problems with English – I was reading The Lord of the Rings at home. My teacher at seven put me in a special needs group for kids who didn’t speak English. And I found out very early that this offended some teachers’ very sense of identity. “But I went into school too well prepared for school for a child from my ethnic and class backgrounds. I saw probably four pieces of theatre a week for the first ten years of my life. I think I met Angela Davis there, I met this South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela – you couldn’t ask for culturally a better upbringing. My stepdad was a stage manager of a theatre which was probably the most important black-led cultural institution in 1980s Britain. I was from a materially poor but culturally very rich family. Natives is the searing modern polemic and Sunday Times bestseller from the BAFTA and MOBO award-winning musician and political commentator, Akala.“I went into the British school system a nerdy boy who wanted to be an astronaut. In this unique book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left us where we are today.Ĭovering everything from the police, education and identity to politics, sexual objectification and the far right, Nativesspeaks directly to British denial and squeamishness when it comes to confronting issues of race and class that are at the heart of the legacy of Britain’s racialised empire. ‘I recommend Natives to everyone’ Candice Carty-Williamsįrom the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers – race and class have shaped Akala’s life and outlook. It’s personal, historical, political, and it speaks to where we are now’ Benjamin Zephaniah ‘This is the book I’ve been waiting for – for years.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE | THE JHALAK PRIZE | THE BREAD AND ROSES AWARD & LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING
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