![]() ![]() His older sister is the ground-breaking female rap artist Niomi Arleen McLean-Daley MBE, otherwise known as Ms Dynamite. As he joked in his Twitter handle for some time afterwards, he is now “Dr Dr Akala”.Īkala’s artistic career extends back far longer than this most recent book, however. ![]() ![]() In 2018, just months after Natives was published, he was awarded no fewer than two honorary doctorates – one from Oxford Brookes University and the other from the University of Brighton – for his book about anti-racist politics and history. He has spoken proudly of the pan-African Saturday school he attended as a child, and his aptly named 2012 two-part mixtape, Knowledge is Power, places an emphasis on knowing your own history and your place in the world (“when you hear somebody’s rapping, the base of it is African Don’t let them tell you ‘bout yourself”). Akala dropped out of college and did not attend university, valuing other forms of community-based knowledge and autodidacticism instead. ![]() Written in the wake of a resurgent white nationalism, Natives is a tour de force of imperial history and anti-racist critique, and a must-read for anyone hoping to understand Britain today. Since the publication of Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, Akala has become a prominent commentator on empire and race, both in Britain and globally. Akala at the Hull Jazz Festival, 2015 (Photo: Ben Pugh CC BY 2.0) ![]()
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