Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent.

Maybe it’s because I love music so much, maybe I am just strange, but every time I have seen someone get stabbed it’s been the sound more than the visual of the violence that’s really struck me. I got used to that sound.

children from poorer backgrounds, there is a change in confidence, an unwillingness to speak, a fear of being embarrassed and, for the boys especially, a turn towards aggression that often begins to manifest around this age.

To this day, South African whites, who are still a small minority, control a hugely disproportionate amount of all forms of capital in South Africa.

In ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, the message is still clear – black life is expendable in pursuit of profit.

This realisation that major parts of recent political events could quickly be forgotten or indeed totally ignored if they did not fit the script helped encourage me to always seek multiple sources for a given story or situation, and compelled me to always distrust or at least question what I was being told and why I was being told it. A trait that frequently brought

We experienced black American culture not as a foreign presence but as an extension of ourselves; our overseas family who were articulating to the world what we felt we were going through too.

drive to preserve the French language commands that 40 per cent of music on national radio be in French, which gave a platform to French hip hop in a way that was just not there in the UK. The

Eggs and lemonade were consumed, commemorative postcards were created and the body parts of black people that had been roasted alive, castrated and carved into pieces were kept as souvenirs.

None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall. This

That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply be...