native race and class in the ruins of empire

Akala’s story is different, but avoids falling into a common trap. The poignant and critical difference between the two books is that Malcolm X’s escape from the life into which American racism had channelled him took place only after he had become a Harlem hustler and ultimately a convict. Some of Akala’s character sketches, in which he describes men from his London neighbourhood who might have been academics or generals had their life-chances not been so prescribed by race, are redolent of Malcolm’s descriptions of the Harlem gangsters he knew in his years as a hustler. Both books begin with powerful accounts of childhood and the experience of racial awakening. The book it best resembles is The Autobiography of Malcolm X from 1965 the memoir that wasn’t, as it was co-written by Alex Haley (later of Roots fame) and based on a series of intense and revealing interviews. Its more introspective passages create the impression of someone who walks through the world thinking, and for whom self-education and self-awareness have long been survival strategies. It has been described as a polemic, which in certain respects it is, but it is also a form of biography, a work more interestingly and experimentally structured than any out-and-out polemic. Natives is not an easy book to categorise and for some it will not be an easy book to read, full as it is of uncomfortable statistics about the effects of race and equally disturbing truths about British history. That he later made another remarkable transition, becoming an entrepreneur, poet, recording artist and increasingly significant voice in British public life, explains why there is a buzz about the book and its author, an artist in the process of expanding his horizons and extending his range. For a while, as he himself acknowledges, he became the stereotype. The bookish youth is the author, who, when exposed to the full force of British racism, went from being a “wannabe Max Planck to a wannabe gangster”.

Native race and class in the ruins of empire