His memories of school in the 1980s – he went to Brookfield and Acland Burghley – are mixed: he recalls being bullied by some adults (“my very first teacher was annoyed that I was a ‘know it all’, apparently,” he writes) and outlines the type of heartbreaking treatment he suffered.īut he also recalls those who helped him – the “countless teachers and community activists gave me the tools for navigating life’s roadmap”.Īkala remembers being seven years old and stepping into the junior school. “Some of my white middle-class teachers made my school life extremely difficult and penalised me for the very thing they should have been nurturing – my intelligence,” he says. He speaks of the prejudice he faced as a child.

The purpose of this book, he says, is to examine how race and class have impacted and continue to shape our lives and he takes us on a historical journey that is both shared and personal.īritain, he argues, has two competing traditions: “one rooted in ideas of freedom, equality and democracy and another that considers these words as mere rhetoric to be trotted out at will and violated whenever it serves the Machiavellian purposes of power preservation”.Īkala outlines a Camden childhood in the 1980s – “if there was anywhere in Britain that could serve as a petri dish for examining race, class and culture, Camden would be that place” – and describes the experience of being a young black Londoner in an era of neo-liberal triumphs and of entrenched racism. In Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, part personal memoir merged with a wide-ranging consideration of the “social, historical and political” factors that have shaped Britain today, assumed truths are dissembled with guile and wit.

IT is easy, poet-philosopher Dr Kingslee Daley aka Akala, writes in new his book, to forget that the curriculum we are taught at school is not the “result of some universal abstract truth but rather the designs of actual human beings like me and you”. Akala: ‘If there was anywhere in Britain that could serve as a petri dish for examining race, class and culture, Camden would be that place’.

Akala race