Akala is a far cry from the average rapper on MTV talking about making money, and girls and fast cars. Instead, the English rapper and poet’s lyrics dwell on serious issues such as racism, opposition to war, Shakespeare and empowering youth to live a life free from drugs and crime. “People that have power and privilege don’t want that power and privilege threatened and questioned,” he tells Weekend Review, on why commercial music today is so depoliticised. “And the people with power and privilege control the outlets of media.”
My interview with Akala (aka Kingsley Daley) took place backstage at a reading festival in London’s Trafalgar Square. He had just been on stage performing his rap take on Richard III. The younger brother of the famous artiste Ms Dynamite, and the 2006 Mobo award winner for the best hip hop artiste, Akala is also the founder of the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company. The group promotes the bard’s work to a younger generation by showing its similarities with modern hip hop.
“I was frustrated by the way Shakespeare is taught,” he says, “I was frustrated by the way hip hop is perceived, and I wanted to do something to challenge these stereotypes.”
He divides his time “50-50” between the Shakespeare company and his music. His latest album is called “The Thieves Banquet”. “It is inspired by a Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o,” he says. “It is a political satire.” The title of the album comes from Thiong’o’s acclaimed book, “Devil on the Cross”, which deals with corruption and capitalism in postcolonial Kenya. One of the most lyrically impressive tracks on the album, “Malcolm said it”, has a line which reads: “Now spread democracy by dropping a bomb, on a terrorist with no shoes or socks. I reckon history teaches us a lesson, the bigger terrorist is the one with the bigger weapon.”
I ask Akala about the identity of the “bigger terrorist” he is talking about (although I suspect I know the answer already). “If you look at the state of the world today, and you look at which nations have the money and the wealth, and which nations invade and bomb and brutalise other nations under the myth of democracy, I think it is fairly clear,” he says. “I mean this country that I live in is one of the nations, along with its ally, the United States. That is not to say all the other nations in the world are Utopias and their governments are wonderful. It is to say the US and Britain use the convenient mythology of spreading democracy for their own greed and political agendas. I mean if you look at who the allies of this country have been historically, they haven’t been democratic progressive nationalist third world forces, they have been the most reactionary, the most brutal undemocratic elements.”
The black-and-white music video for “Malcolm said it” features images of noted black figures including Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Patrice Lumumba, Mohammad Ali, Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King. In sharp contrast are brief glimpses of British Prime Minister David Cameron and the late premier Margaret Thatcher. “They represent the exact opposite of what Malcolm X, Lumumba, Thomas Sankara represent,” Akala says. “That is they represent lack of freedom, they represent imperialism, they represent white racism, all of the reactionary elitist forces — worst really of what this country has to offer is represented by some of these people.”
Democracy predates the West
History, particularly the kind that gets neglected, is a subject Akala has rapped about in his music and is clearly well versed in. I ask him if African or Middle Eastern history is taught properly in the UK school curriculum. “Of course not, and functionally so,” he replies. “Let’s take Iraq for example. Iraq had a legal code, the code of Hammurabi, you know ancient Mesopotamia 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. A legal code in which women and slaves already had some form of recourse to law. So there was a democratic legal code, or a legal code that was to a degree democratic, 3,500 years ago in Iraq. Yet we are to believe we are imposing democracy on these people who were practising a form of democracy.”
He notes the legal code in Mesopotamia may not have been perfect. “But when you compare it to the US constitution — when the US came into being as a nation, black people, native Americans, women, none of these people had rights,” he says. “Even poor whites did not have rights. So to me if you know that history, it is difficult for you to believe that we need to go and impose democracy on those people.”
But is such history ignored due to deliberate policy or a coincidence? “Of course it is a deliberate policy,” he says. “It is functional ignorance. It serves a purpose. If you believe that this part of the world has always been on the top, it helps maintain the illusion of power. So who is behind this? It is just part of the culture. As European imperialism arose, as Europe came to dominate the rest of the world, it came to dominate the information about the rest of the world.”
He worries that school curriculums in large parts of Africa and the Caribbean are still based on England. “Children in Jamaica know more about Oliver Cromwell than they know about Marcus Garvey,” he says. “In all the places that were colonised, there is a legacy that way. That is what colonialism is for, it is not just physical, you implant a culture on top of someone to make them work in your interest.”
The conversation soon delves into some of the forgotten chapters of African and Middle Eastern history. “There are three quarters of a million books surviving in the libraries of Timbuktu including an astronomical manuscript showing the phases of the lunar cycle,” he says. “Problem is, these phases of the lunar cycle were around 200 years before Galileo and Copernicus were born. There were so many others from all other parts of the world. There was a level of advancement and culture in Baghdad in the 11th century. Africans and Arabs colonised Spain and no one likes to talk about it — that for 800 years Spain was an Arabic-speaking country. Coffee and lemons and guitars and all these things came into Europe via that. So the mythologies are massive. But it can’t exist forever. We were taught South Africans were slaves — that was it. That was Africa’s sole contribution to the world.”
People’s knowledge of history can influence how they perceive the world around them. In the wake of the Woolwich tragedy, Akala was invited to a BBC television discussion on racism and Islamophobia. Also present in the audience was the leader of the far right English Defence League Tommy Robinson, who was allowed time to spout his controversial views on Muslims.
Akala managed to win over many in the audience, speaking eloquently about double standards when it comes to media coverage of Muslims and the disproportionate focus on fringe bigots. I ask him what is behind the rise in anti-Islam sentiment in Britain.
“I don’t think it is about Islam,” he replies. “I think Islam is a convenient excuse for people to be racist to people who look different. Do you think the average bigot in the street knows the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim? Because I promise you they don’t. All they see is ‘brown skin and a funny thing on your hair’.”
Rather, in his view, Islam is a convenient way to veil racism.
“We used to talk about Yardies,” he says. “Yardies were supposedly a form of Jamaican criminals. Jamaica only has two million people. It is a tiny percentage of black people in the world. But all black people used to be branded Yardies and were so sated with that tiny element of one island’s culture within the black world; it is similar, to me, with Islam.”
At one stage, on that BBC show, Akala made the observation that racism was not invented by working-class people, but was by elite academics through “pseudo scientific nonsense” and perpetuated as a party political policy from the top down. “If we talk about what was going on in Germany in the 1800s, at the University of Gottingen, there were forms of prejudice for hundreds of years, of course, but institutionalised white superiority in my understanding begins really in 1619 in Jamestown in America when slavery becomes exclusively racialised,” he says. “It existed to a certain degree in 1596 in this country when Queen Elizabeth issued a proclamation to have Moors and Jews expelled from the country. But it becomes really codified as part of the culture, by people such as Blumenbach, with even [Karl] Marx believing that only through Europe can everyone else arrive at enlightenment, democracy and all of this.”
One of the lesser known aspects of Marx’s life was his espousing of bigoted and racist opinions. Akala believes it taps into a wider problem of a lack of “foreignness” in education. “So a lot of people don’t know more of the racist elements of Marx,” he says, “because they have not studied the history of Africa, Asia, Latin America. They don’t know that people such as Ibn Khaldun in Tunisia, for example, were writing using very similar phraseology and very similar ideas to Marx in the 11th century.”
It is the lack of education relating to other parts of the world that has contributed to the ignorance. “There is a certain arrogance even in the left still believing that Europe ultimately is superior, even when it comes to being socialist,” he says. “Despite the fact the global south has a much longer history of practising, not just speaking but practising, forms of socialism, of communism, than western Europe. And I think Marx’s whole schematic is faulty for me. To call yourself a Marxist just feels a bit religious to me. Like he is the godman and I am the student. I am not really into a kind of individualist doctrine.”
He points out how Blumenbach and others became quite genocidal.
“The theories they propagated, that actually people who weren’t white weren’t even human, that black Africans particularly were closer to apes than they were to humans. And this allowed millions and millions of people to be killed, and to be not even seen as any kind of crime at all. And that still persists today. Millions of people have died in the Congo and no one is outraged about it.”
Akala says Europe cannot ever be taught that people from outside ever influenced it. “So if we talk about ancient Egyptians and ancient Phoenicia influencing Greece, people get upset,” he says. “But the records are there, the ancient Greeks said it themselves. If we talk about the Moorish conquest of Spain influencing the European renaissances, it is a problem for people. And that is not about religion, that is about race.”
Some of the lyrics from Akala’s songs are autobiographical and offer an engaging social commentary on contemporary Britain. In “Fire in the Booth”, he raps about teachers who “treated me stupid” and how “students that couldn’t speak English, they put me in groups with”. He explains the story behind that particular verse.
“A lot of middle-aged white teachers find it very difficult to cope with the idea that young black boys are capable of being clever,” he says. “And so I was put in a group of special-needs children who didn’t speak English. You know English is my first language, I was born here, right? The assumption is, we are stupid. This is what I am talking about. This comes from this history of perpetuating these mythologies, so you go to a school as a 6-year-old and a teacher can’t figure out why you are the top reader in the class because as far as they are concerned, the little black boy shouldn’t be smarter than the other people in the class. And so there was a lot of that.”
The song goes on to rap how “some of the first man to give me schooling, you would call gangsters”. Is he saying he was in a gang? “No, it is a reference to growing up in inner city in working-class areas and around working-class people,” he says. “There is a perception that there is this definite line between the good guys and the bad guys. What I am saying is there isn’t. I am saying some of the bad guys in the area I grew up in were the ones encouraging me to stay in school. And the so-called good people, the teachers, were the ones making school life difficult for me. So some of the criminals, drug dealers and other guys that you would call gangsters, would say to me when I was a child, ‘You are too clever. If you drop out of school I am going to [beat you up]’. So it is that contradiction.”
He raps that “ghetto mentality” has been fed to both sides of his family. “My mum is white, my dad is black,” he explains. “Both sides of my family don’t come from money. And there is a certain oppression of both sides. Working-class whites of my family in many ways are less educated, have less access than even the black side.”
In the same song he also talks about having “prisons for profit” in Britain and America. You could say in regard to imperialism they have a different policy in dealing with foreign countries — but why would you want people to go to jail in your own homeland? “That is how you keep stability,” he says. “If you have a society that is unjust, and capitalism is unjust, if you have a situation where ownership of everything is monopolised by a tiny number of people, the awakening of large groups of people is a problem. So if we look at the United States of America, and we look at its history, it is an absolute continuation of policy that the overwhelming majority of [inmates in] prisons are black in a country that was built on black slavery.”
According to Akala, this is not a coincidence but only a continuation of normal policy. “If I was a guy running America, I know that if black people get too much power in America, the only logical reaction is for them to try and overthrow the government,” he says. “Because in this country, for 90 per cent of the time they have been in the country, they have not even been legally human. It upsets me but I am not confused about it. It is common sense from their perspective and Adam Smith said this 150 years ago: a country built on black slavery is doomed the moment Africa wakes up.”
Has President Obama done anything in regard to the situation for black people? “Of course not,” he says. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten into the White House. It is the White House — it is right there in the title. And he was not given the platform so he can come and be a revolutionary. And people who believe he was, I feel very sorry for them. Just because he is brown doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He points towards the US treatment of the African continent. “If you look at the United States policy, particularly to Africa, with Africom and other things, it is an awful policy,” he says. “Because he is black, people don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to figure it out. There is a black president having a military intervention bombing Libya, bombing an African country. People don’t know how to deal with it, because they are confused by his skin colour.”
Does he think in the UK, Europe or the US there is less political awareness than in Asia? “Yeah from my experience of travelling in Africa, Asia and Latin America, definitely there is less,” he says, “because relative to the rest of the world, even those of us who come from the so-called underclass here, relative to the rest of the world we have privilege right? We have wealth. We have access to the fruits of empire. And that makes you ignorant. Or it makes you comfortable enough to not have to question your personal circumstances. So I would say relative to the so-called global south, there is certainly a lot of ignorance.”
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
