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Europe kind of co-opted a lot of scholarship coming from the Arab world. The Islamic bathing practices, decimal number system, and they went, "We may not like these people, but this is blatantly good." When you have shared struggle and
Akala discusses hip hop, multicultural London, and South-South solidarity in a live Quarter Tones podcast episode.
Key Takeaways
- Multicultural environments foster genuine empathy through shared struggles and cultural exchange.
- British imperial history deeply influences modern diasporic identities and cultural connections.
- Hip hop serves as a unifying cultural force among diverse youth in London.
- South-South solidarity is rooted in shared experiences of colonialism and resistance.
- Cultural ownership and representation, such as Akala's engagement with Shakespeare, are important for reclaiming narratives.
What the video covers
- Akala explores the impact of British imperialism on London's multiculturalism and shared struggles.
- He reflects on growing up in a diverse London borough with 130 languages spoken.
- Akala emphasizes the role of shared poverty and struggle in creating empathy across cultures.
- He discusses his Pan-African and left-wing internationalist upbringing and politics.
- The conversation touches on the exclusion of Indian troops from WWII victory parades despite their contributions.
- Akala highlights the influence of Caribbean immigrant families on his mother and his own cultural education.
- He explains the significance of hip hop and shared popular culture in connecting diverse youth in London.
- The dialogue includes reflections on South-South solidarity and anti-colonial struggles.
- Akala addresses his relationship with Shakespeare and cultural ownership.
- The episode is part of the Quarter Tones podcast, which explores the sound and culture of the Arab world.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Historical Context
- 02:08Multicultural London and Shared Struggles
- 04:16Cultural Exchange and Empathy through Food and Music
- 06:04Family Background and Political Upbringing
- 07:56Pan-Africanism and South-South Solidarity
- 09:46Early Career and Audience Connection
- 13:18Relationship with Shakespeare and Cultural Ownership
- 18:20Closing Remarks and Audience Q&A
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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shared poverty with other groups of people, it does create a genuine like, "Those are my people." I never grew up believing that middle-class white people had ownership over everything that was good. You think about the absurdity of
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excluding Indian troops from the victory parade after World War II. India contributed more men and resources than New Zealand, Canada, and Australia combined to the British war effort. And the British government goes, "Yeah, but do we really want to show the world that
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brown people helped us win this war?" Yeah. No. Welcome, everybody. I'm very, very excited to do this. My name is Mikey Mhenna. Uh, this is a live episode of Quarter Tones.
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If you don't know about Quarter Tones, it is a podcast that is trying to explore the sound of the Arab world. Um, what it did sound like, what it does sound like, what it might sound like in the future. And we do that by speaking
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to people who influence this region. Um, regardless of where they come from and where they might be going. Akala is a giant in this world. He's a thought leader. He is a writer and, but more than anything, he is a music head and a
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rapper and a musician. It is an honor. Please give it up for Akala, everybody.
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Thank you. Thank you. So, one of the things I think you do, it's sort of at the core of your music and your work, is connecting with a diverse set of audiences, both as listeners but also as people who
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are informing your work and like influencing the way you think about the world. Um, so I want to go back to sort of 2005, 2006, 2007, early career, early Akala, right?
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Yes, for sure. How were you doing that? You were living in the UK. How are you actually getting diverse voices and connecting with diverse audiences?
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Well, I think London, partly as a consequence of the British Empire, one of the ironic effects is that London has the world in it. I mean, the bar I grew up in, a bar called Camden, there's 130 languages spoken in
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my borough. In my school, there were people, and what's interesting is no one, none of the teachers in my school ever explained why we had children from Sudan and Somalia and Iraq and Kurdistan and St. Lucia and all of these places where
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British imperialism had been involved. Not that that's the sole reason for migration, but it was often a huge part of the reason. Big Irish population in my neighborhood. And so it's only actually as I got older and
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traveled more of the world to more culturally and even different parts of England, actually culturally and ethnically homogeneous, for one of a better word, places that I realized my experience was the unusual one and having genuine friends whose mom and
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dad come from Pakistan, another friend who comes from India, and another friend who comes from Turkey. And ironically, because it's London, we still all communicated through this mix of American hip hop, UK garage, like there was a shared popular culture among young
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Londoners that was its own thing, separate from all of our own, you know, whether you grew up listening to Nuzra Fat Alhan or Dennis Brown, right?
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It was, it was, um, and so that was just my normality, but it also meant I was learning, whether I realized it or not till I got a little bit older, about other cultures, other struggles. My neighbors were from Cyprus. They came to
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Britain after the war in Cyprus in the 70s, and I learned about that by osmosis.
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I grew up eating vine leaves and halloumi and andlagi just as a normal, right? Just as a normal, that part of the course if you're a Londoner, whatever your ethnicity, you, you're going to know some Indian food for sure, and you don't realize you're
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learning culture through all of those things till you go to places where those things are not available and you go, "Oh, you guys," like even though I'm Jamaican, you, you guys don't have Indian food. Like if I go somewhere where there's no
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Indian food, for example, I'm like, "There's Indian food everywhere in London," and I didn't realize how much I valued that experience. But I do think that when done well, it creates a genuine empathy for other cultures. We're naturally all biased
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towards our own family, our own group, our own tribe. But if you actually grow up, especially, you know, fairly working-class background to put it mildly, when you have shared struggle and shared, to be honest, poverty with other groups of people, it
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does create a genuine like, "Those are my people." Even though they're not my people, they're my people. Do you know what I mean?
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Yeah. So, in those days, did you feel like you were speaking to these different groups or you were speaking on behalf of these different groups?
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I think two, more than on behalf. I think everybody speaks on behalf of themselves.
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But I felt that even though I, you know, I went to a special Pan-African Saturday school, I grew up with a sort of Pan-African nationalist but nonetheless left-wing internationalist politics, and that that was also part of it. My
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parents, despite having, you know, both of them had really, really awful upbringings to be quite frank. And yet they were both just very like brainy, very bright, very, they didn't let their childhoods crush them, even though they both had the kinds of childhoods
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that should crush most normal human beings. Um, and they were very politically conscious people.
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Yeah. The family that basically adopted my mother. So my mother was kicked out of the house when she got my dad, you know, this is 1980s. It was a very common experience for white women in the UK who
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fell in love with black guys. That dad wasn't too happy about it, and in my mom's case, that was very much the case. Um, but the family that basically adopted her was a family of Guyanese
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Jamaican university graduates. So my godfather, my uncle Hoffman, his dad, even though they were working class in England, back in Guyana he'd been a school teacher, but he'd gone to university. He was very active in the trade unions back
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in Guyana. He'd been close to governmental power back in Guyana. And so he brought, ironically, my mother, who is white, was educated by this Caribbean immigrant family who in many respects were more cultured and more wealthy. I mean, she did a degree in Caribbean
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history partly as a consequence of this and only in her 20s. And so I felt that I was speaking to this multicultural, multi-ethnic working-class London experience, but also to many people that came from former British colonies and by extension
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other formerly colonized parts of the world. Um, because there is a shared experience in that way. And I think, I think I'm a little bit younger, but growing up on the tail end of the non-aligned movement and south-south
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solidarity and all of that sort of stuff, there was very much a sense in black nationalist politics. I don't know why I'm saying that in inverted commas, but that it was, it wasn't black nationalism as an inverse
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of white nationalism. It wasn't about black people are better than everyone else. It was about getting free from slavery and colonialism and apartheid in solidarity with other people who'd suffered similar things rather than, you know, "My group is better than yours," my
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tribe is better than yours kind of vibe. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. I want to come back to the south-south stuff, but I want to stay back in 2006 for a second.
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Yeah. So, a lot of people's entry point into your work, um, has somewhat to do with Shakespeare.
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Yeah, that's true. Um, was your interest in Shakespeare at all ironic? Were you sort of trying to like reclaim this thing or say I have some sort of ownership over this playwright and this work and there's a place for me
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here? Or I guess maybe an easier version of this question is, what was your relationship like to that work?
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So
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Yeah. The baby and bathwater type. And and I it's just silly. Every culture has their Shakespeare, their their roomie, their uh their Gabriel Garcia Marquez, their Czechov. Um every culture has created beauty. If some people have become bigots based on the beauty that
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their culture has created, that's quite sad and it's unfortunate. That doesn't mean the achievements themselves are not real enough. So first of all, just the recognition that blatantly in the English language Shakespeare is one of the best people to write in the
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English language. As a storyteller, as a creator of character, um there's a reason why his work survived and none of the other playwrits of his era, many of whom were very good. Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlo, these were all very
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brilliant people. They weren't Shakespeare and they knew that in his in the time. So yes, fine, his work did spread because of British imperialism. There is a certain linguistic colonialism to be unpacked. There's all of that to go
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through. But even in his own time, in his own city, the rest of the mandom are like, "Yo, that's the guy. That's Nars.
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That's Michael Jordan. That's Michael Jordan in his own time, right? They knew what it was.
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Um, so for me, because my stepdad was the stage manager of a theater, fine. It was a workingass Caribbeanled theater called Hackne Empire, like opposite the projects, the estate, right in the ends. Um, but I never grew up thinking theater was
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theater with an F for the Londoners in the house. All right. Theater. Should we do a Google translate? Are you guys good? You guys, right? So, so theater. If I said theater, this would be a class marker, you know, you're supposed to speak like
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this. Theater um theater, you're showing really really who who and what you are, right?
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But um I never grew up believing that middle class white people had ownership over everything that was good.
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Yeah. Like my parents were dogged like and my mom and dad I didn't grow up with both of them. Like I my dad to be fair to me wasn't an absent father, but my mom broke up. I would stay at his house
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weekends, uh holidays, etc. So he was present in my life. He just I just didn't live with him. And even ironically, and for those who read my book will know this, like my uncles who were there way of putting it, gangsters
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and criminals, even they were like, "You're going to do well in school. You're a bright you and if you don't do well in school, we're going to punch you up." Like there was so and and I went back to Jamaica as a kid for one summer.
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That's all it took. It was so blatantly obvious that none of my cousins had any idea that blackness was supposed to be related to not doing well in school.
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The National Spelling Competition is televised in Jamaica. The National Debate Competition is televised. One of the most bizarre things about Jamaica is that for all its other problems, and there's a lot about Jamaica that's wrong, so I'm not romanticizing the
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country, but the top schools in the country are all state schools. The private schools are kind of looked at as the schools, no disrespect, the schools for not very bright, rich kids. You got kicked out of the state school.
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No. Well, well, rich kids who couldn't even qualify to get into the state school. So, top school's a school called Campaign College. There's a school called Calabar Vibes Cartel. I don't know whether he did or didn't go to
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Calabar. But the point is he says that he did as a boast. And other people say, "No, man. I just I'm just a lie." And I'm he's trying to get street cred off of pretending he went to a better school than he did.
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I did well in the spelling bee. Not I'm not even sure. The first non-American to win the international spelling be was a young Jamaican girl called Salian Matthews. When she came back to Jamaica, there were people at the airport to greet her.
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Amazing. She got she got like a deal with the Jamaican equivalent to McVitties. Like she got a sponsorship. They won a TV show for winning this. So all it took was one summer and I came back to England. I
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thought not just black kids. It's really sad that a lot of working-class white kids in England think that being clever belongs to middle class people. Almost seeding all of this ground and performing and anyone who works with working-class boys in England will know
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this. It's almost like this um performing intellectual difference to people who are supposed to be your betters, right? And I never felt any of that. So I never felt like I was that someone who spoke who said theater like
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this had more innate ownership over Shakespeare. And then when I started looking into the history, I well in his own time 92% of his audience were illiterate.
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It was it was the the form of popular entertainment. It was very much one of the few places in London at that time where the hood was out and then the elites were at the top with lemons over
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their nose cuz people smelt quite bad. Washing wasn't too much of a thing in London in those days. Um, and so then obviously once it became a public thing, there was the irony. But to be honest, the push back that I thought would come
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from the custodians of Shakespeare in England, if I'm honest, it never really came. There was almost this thing of this guy actually knows his stuff. Like it's not a gimmick. He really has because there there's a few programs I
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was on. You may there's one that actually someone's cut up and put on YouTube um where I was on a program talking about Shakespeare and I could see some of the Shakespearean scholars, you know, when they give you that look.
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Oh, like oh he actually knows what this rapper actually knows what he's talking about. they actually read the plays and the Scottish writing and not just not just the hits like the B sides the B sides and the classics and the
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Titus and Johnonicuses and you know all all the all the stuff and and so actually what I found was people didn't want to challenge me in that space too badly cuz it would have got embarrassing for them and and and then there were some really
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early champions Ben and David Crystal who are two of the most respected people looking at the language of Shakespeare and just cool they just father and son authors and once we kind of had the nod from and a few other people. Sisly Bry,
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rest in peace, who was um she was the voice coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but I mean she was a personal friend of Paul Robson as a as a younger woman. You know what I mean?
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Like so this was the the the the the caricaturures. In fact, I had to investigate my own bias and assumptions because the people that I thought these people would be some of them were that but lots of them were like I grew up
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here. I didn't grow up with money either. I'm not from what you think I'm from. I just am now in this place and you're as you know what I mean? So I I it was it was something that I felt like
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um more of us need to do. I went to New York recently and I don't know why this relates, but it does relate for me, right? And for all America's problems and and there's much about America to to
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be disgusted with. But what I notice sometimes in America, it's so normal to see black people in certain positions of power that I don't even think Americans, black Americans even notice it till they go elsewhere. I was in a museum in New
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York. I can't remember which one. And there was like a exhibition on Renaissance Florence, but the brother in charge of it was was manning them. Like he was a black brother, but he was he was from round away. You could you know
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when you just know Yeah. Sure. I'm sure he went to the right university and all that, but he's from Brooklyn or somewhere right?
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Yeah. But you know, the fact that he felt that sense of intellectual entitlement to just go, "Yeah, I like free rafflite art." And who cares what everybody else thinks? What I find is when you go to the country of origin, people don't have
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the same hang-ups. Heavy metal is like the second most popular music in India. If if Metallica go to India, it's shut down. Like cuz Indians in India don't think they need someone's permission to like what they like. Does anyone in here
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who's not Jamaican? So none of the Jamaicans in here can answer this. For any of the non anyone who's not of Jamaican origin in the house, who is the most popular non-Jamaican musician in Jamaica? Does anyone know?
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Absolutely. Right. You're not of Jamaican origin, are you? Okay, cool. I'll let you is number three John Denver.
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No. No. No. Is Selen Dion like Kenny Rogers? Oh, Kenny Rogers. Michael Bolton. Yeah, Kenny Rogers.
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They don't care. They're like, "We love all that corny shit." And not that Selen's corny cuz Sel's not ky. Let's be Let me be clear. But like, so the the point is I think that we need to be
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careful coming just to round it off your original point, the sort of baby and bath water thing.
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We can reject colonial imposition and still say, "Yeah, but there's there's beauty in this." And actually there's something far more radical in going I feel some ownership over discarts or Bacon or Plato and I have my own relationship with
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those scholars and those thinkers that there doesn't need to be a bunch of middle-ass white professors who are the intermediaries and custodians and owners of all of that stuff in the very much the same way that Europe to its credit
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at the time really kind of co-opted a lot of scholarship coming from the Arab world. They co-opted Islamic bathing practices. They took the Indian decimal number system and they went this is blatantly good. We may not like these
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people but the stuff they're doing is blatantly good and could improve our life and so we're going to take all of that stuff and run with it. There was a whole process called the Toledo translations in and Spain where
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classical Grecoman scholarship was tra translated in into Latin but from Arabic. Yeah. I mean they were they were Arabic speaking scholars who were doing it.
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Exactly. The thing that I think was so special about Fire in the Booth wasn't only the lyricism and the like the lyrical prowess and sort of almost like the athletic the athletic achievement of it but the subject matter was decidedly from
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a UK perspective, decidedly from somebody who grew up at the metropol of an empire that was trying to understand the impact of colonialism by the people in their neighborhood. And you weren't hearing that from like from New York or from Chicago or
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from LA or stuff like that. You were hearing a a different story that rhymed but not that story. Did you feel like I need to tell this story? This is a story that needs to be told.
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Yeah, definitely. Ve very consciously I feel like when you buy a Nars record or a Rakim record or a or a Kendrick Lamar record, you're buying a slice of black American history. When you buy a Kendrick Lamar record, you know it's
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harking back to George Clinton and to this and even if you don't know it's in there with with with Nars, his dad was a jazz musician, right? So it's that direct. Rakim is a grade eight saxophone player. This is not like and when he you
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hear him talking about how he tried to rap, he's like I was trying to rap the way John Cold Train plays.
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I've heard him say that. So there there's this uh even though the mainstream media tries to denigrate hip-hop as an art form, there is this cannon and this history and so on.
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Continuity. Yeah, it is continuity. With us in the UK, it's a little bit different because our influences are twin where we've got the American bigger cousin in one ear and then we got the Jamaican bigger cousin in the other ear. Because as much
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as I grew up on Nars and and and all and and and New York hip hop, especially West Coast, too, but really New York hip-hop, I had Bounty Killer and Bey Man and and and and Shaba and Ninja Man and
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Supercat in my other ear with the Jamaican vibe. And those sort of two avenues gave us UK hip hop and grime.
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Gave us jungle and and then the UK variant of of Garage because Jamaica was always in the back here going, "Yeah, but I'm here too." and and so I feel like for me I always say to people Bounty Killer especially
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was as much of an influence on me in the early '90s as Nars was. He was the other MC that I looked at and had political commentary and had great songs and so on and had cultural impact. Um, and so like
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any group of people, you want to tell your story and your people's story and their experiences. And I think hip-hop, as as Chuck D always put it, you know, being the CNN of the hood, I feel like we always wanted to say to our cousins
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in New York, look, we we can relate, not just like as a gimmick because of the music, but we have some some very different experiences, but some similar experiences, too. And I feel like um, you know, Fire in the Booth was
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partly trying to achieve that. And I think part partly did where people went, "Oh, you have the same problems with mass incarceration and institutionalized racism and police brutality and and but then there's some differences and and that's what it was trying to trying to
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get at." After the success of the earlier part of your career, you establish yourself as like a real voice um that's trying to tap into this this story.
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Um and with that success comes access to different places. You're traveling around the world. You're meeting all these different types of people. Um, and I would imagine that your your vantage point changes and and evolves.
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So, I want to talk a little bit about that south south um uh solidarity, especially at a moment moment like this right now. I I really feel like we're hitting a some sort of pivot point where the nature of empire is like the the uh
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the Wizard of Oz um curtain has fallen a little bit. Yeah. And we're seeing this moment of asking ourselves like do we have to keep on going through the center of the empire? Can we can we do south south
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collaborations? Can we support each other? I'm curious from somebody who's traveled as much as you have and have thought about this as much thought about empire as much as you have. What is the nature of how you think about that
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South? Yeah, I think we can, we will, and we are. I also think all of the same contradictions that come out with human politics will come out. There will be south self south self south self south self south self south self south self
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south self south self south self south conflict and south south self south self south self south self south self south self south self south self south self south self south collaboration right humans will never I don't believe we're
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going to build a bed of roses where we all get on but I do hope for a world where there's less war and more peace where everyone has access to the basics of life clean running water healthare education a
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decent home to live in more time with their family like I think one of the things that happens is not just more access which does happen class privilege which does happen if you achieve certain things but there's also just age and I
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think at a certain point you realize you have a bit more of a tragic view at least I have and and the reason for that is no no but the reason for that isn't anything grand or political when you realize just maintaining
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cordial relations with your 10 closest family members is a task worthy of the Buddha and even the Buddha might fail right but you don't know that when you're 22 cuz you still get on with everybody then between 22 and 32 too. Siblings
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fall out, cousins fall out, aunties and uncles don't get on, granny dies, and one person in the family tries to teeth the money and blah blah blah and so on.
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Right? I don't want to tell too much of my family story, but you know, I'm sure all hypothetical all hypothetical absolutely not naming any allegedly.
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Allegedly, but listen, everybody laughed and that let me know everyone's family has some everyone has that auntie, everyone has that uncle.
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Everyone's got problems. And what I realized, see, when I was young, I was poor. I don't know why I'm doing poor inverted commas. I was poor, right? I went to school without breakfast.
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Times was hard. Sleeping in a tracksuit, all of that stuff, right? I thought middle class families had all the answers and their life was so wonderful, right? Because compared to me on paper, that seemed then I became an
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adult and I realized that one's mom takes her in front of the kids and that one does this and that one's absent. And that's why that girl was the one having drug and other parties at her house at
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13, right? So I realized class doesn't, don't get me wrong, you'd rather cry in a on a Benz than in a bicycle.
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But that material concerns only solve one part. You need community. You need family. You need people that love you and care about you. And often sometimes poorer communities and poorer countries have more of that than places that have
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more economic privilege. I mean America and Britain would be two great examples of that. Very rich countries. A palpable lack of community compared to many other places because the way capitalism is organized in those two countries specifically.
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Communities are constantly eviscerated moving around the country. Housing's completely unaffordable. uh institutions uh religious and community institutions are find it harder to maintain themselves and so on and so forth. And um so I think that the the change in vantage point from
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traveling little things I was in North Africa right and um I noticed that Korean this is long before K-pop this is like 12 13 years ago. When I say long before K-pop I mean long before K-pop was on my radar, right? K-pop was
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clearly happening in Korea, right? But I noticed that the Korean government had an active program of translating their soaps and their TV shows into dia the Moroccan and Algerian variants of Arabic. Not even just Arabic general, the local version, right? As part of
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their soft power play to sell car. And I was like, that's phenomenal. Like, and you think of even today, even in the West, you've had Korean TV shows be successful. You've had it, you've had Italian TV shows be successful, which
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sounds even cuz ital Italy is part of the West, but Italy is treated as like, we were talking about this this morning.
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It's like the baby cousin. It's the Naples of the West. It's the hood. Like, it's like you're just about in the G8, but we all know if you weren't a white country, you wouldn't be in the G8 no
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more. You you'd be in some other thing. You you're about as south as you can get, right? But but but even economically, like Italy is a rich country, but it's a small small rich country and the south of Italy is not rich, right? Sicily is a
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different thing, right? And and and and so I feel like if if Italy was in North Africa, they'd go, "Yeah, G8 is not for how I mean, how is Italy in the G8 and India's not like it's absurd when you really think about
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it. A country of that represents a fifth of humanity. It's a nuclear power. It's a 5,000y old civilization. And Italyy's also got a very impressive history of civilization. It's just it's at what point does India go um excuse me we're
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also a democracy you know or or screw the G8 or screw the G8 and bricks right e either courses fine I'm just I'm just saying it's it's I think they made their decision by the way I think they clearly have made their
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decision and I think I think if post World War II if western governments hadn't been so shortsighted in my view you you think about the absurdity of excluding Indian troops from the victory parade after World War II. India contributed
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more men and resources than New Zealand, Canada, and Australia combined to the British war effort. And the British government goes, "Yeah, but do we really want to show the world that brown people helped us win this war?" Yeah. No. And I
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think they thought that relationship was going to continue of just being able to tell these massive countries what to do forever and ever into the future. If they had have said, which they did with Poland, so for example, the after World
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War II, the British government had loads of immigrants coming from Poland that the British government was subsidizing and they actively had a propaganda campaign called what the Polish did for you where they started putting leaflets through people's letter box saying,
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"Look, we know these people from Poland are coming here and you Brits, white Brits don't love them, but this is why they have a right to be here." Can you imagine? They did that with people from India and the Caribbean and Africa. the
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whole history of postwar Britain could have been different but also their relationship to the state of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Nigeria and all these other large economies even if they're per capita terms poor countries these are going to be massive economies in the
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future there's no way around that I feel like that arrogance in that period made a lot of the leaders of the countries go what really okay and now you know I listen to the Indian foreign minister talk quite a lot and I look at
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the way he kind He speaks with a certain confidence like, "Listen, we're not your local cousin, you know, brother. It's not 1942. Like, we're not some new kid on the block you can just tell what to do.
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We've been around for a minute." And you need to respect us. Yeah. And that sort of world that's emerging, that multipolar world, which by the way, prior to 1500 was the world.
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Europe didn't. That is the nature. That is the natural order. The natural order is a multi-polar uh multiplayer chess game.
Speaker A
Absolutely. And when Europe went out into the world, this is what's interesting for for European colonialism and white supremacist to justify themselves. Europeans have had to lie to themselves about their own history. When they first went out around the world,
Speaker A
whether it was Marco Polo or the the early Portuguese in West Africa, they went, "Wow, these non-Europeans are doing some pretty impressive stuff." It was only after they got the machine gun and quinine, which helped Europeans to survive malaria and conquered everybody,
Speaker A
they went, "Ah, these people are rubbish." Before that, they were like, "No, man. These these people are on stuff. They got this, they got that. we could learn this, we could learn. It was the arrogance of finally having
Speaker A
conquered everybody that made them go, we've always been the best. But prior to that, they were like, they had to of necessity negotiate those relationships.
Speaker A
We're now returning to a world in which the West is going to have to negotiate those relationships. Some people don't want that world to emerge. And how vicious the kickback will be is is going to determine whether or not we
Speaker A
have World War II, I think. Yeah. What is it like in Europe right now from your perspective? I mean, like we're sitting here in Dubai right now.
Speaker A
Yeah. Um we're in this moment of uh transition. Do you feel like people on the ground there are from your perspective, you travel a lot, from your perspective, are people reconciling that um that contradiction and saying, "Okay, wait a
Speaker A
second. We need to renegotiate our relationship to the rest of the world." I think I think some people are but I I'm also conscious that I have a bubble an ideological bubble and I try not to of people who think similarly are
Speaker A
reasonably well educated are quite worldly. I think there's also a portion I mean if you look at the Brexit Farage Tommy Robinson of it all there's definitely a push back against that and there are a portion of Brits who
Speaker A
genuinely don't realize that the whole north of England is not a rich country anymore like it's a middle- inome country at best like London one of the biggest problems in England is regional inequality. You got one major city
Speaker A
that's responsible for like a quarter of the country's GDP. Outside of that you're talking about a living standard similar to Slovenia. No disrespect to Slovenia cuz Slovenia is not a poor poor. No, I'm being literal. Like literally the per capita income in
Speaker A
England outside of London is about the same as Slovenia. Yet Brits have this arrogance like as if we're Singapore or Switzerland or somewhere. And like I have people message me all the time about hole countries and stuff like
Speaker A
on Twitter. I think bro like if anything the average working Brit today with the cost of living crisis with the unaffordability of housing should be relating to people in the global south and saying ra like I'm my parents work
Speaker A
hard and they're never going to own a home. Yeah, I get how economics beyond my control can shape my experience. If anything, you'd think the decline in living standards in the West would make Westerners go ra. So, if other people
Speaker A
are suffering, it isn't just cuz they're stupid and backwards and their culture is awful because if you're a firefighter or a school teacher or a nurse in England today, you're doing the same work you were doing 20 years ago. the
Speaker A
same necessary and important work and you're receiving half the reward for it because your wages are frozen below the rate of inflation because houses are like eight times the price of what they were because basic necessities are expensive. You haven't changed your
Speaker A
behavior. And so I think some people are having that self-reflection. But I do think it's hard for a lot of people to let go of those once you've been told you're superior.
Speaker A
There is something rotten in the human spirit. And I'm not even saying I'm above it. I had a particular type of upbringing. had I grown up a light-skinned person in Jamaica where being light-skinned is a source of privilege and and and you're treated
Speaker A
differently as if your white daddy must be somebody powerful even if he wasn't. Right? There's there's a whole history of colorism in the Caribbean that is very different to being a mixed race road in London.
Speaker A
I might have had some of that arrogance cuz I deal with light-skinned Jamaicans and many of them do have it, right?
Speaker A
Because they've grown up being treated a certain way simply because their skin is lighter and it means something different socially and they're a separate social class.
Speaker A
There there does seem to be something rotten in us that when we get somebody to look down on, it's very hard to go, but that's Yeah, that person isn't worse than me. And I think we find a lot of us find it very
Speaker A
very hard to admit that our success in life, even if we weren't very hard, me included, by the way, is hugely related to luck. I grew up in a social housing in zone 2 in the middle of one of the wealthiest cities in the
Speaker A
world. A kid who lived in Middlesborough didn't do anything differently to my family. He just lived in middle and I lived in London. A child born born in the same day in the fllas in Brazil I even though I was unfortunate in a rich
Speaker A
country I was also extremely lucky globally and I think lots of people seem to find it really hard to go yeah I'm successful but luck played a big and privileged in a way.
Speaker A
Yeah everybody give it up for Akala. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker A
Thank you. A pleasure. [Music]
Topics:AkalaHip HopSouth-South SolidarityBritish EmpireMulticultural LondonPan-AfricanismQuarter TonesCultural EmpathyShakespearePostcolonialism
