Natives summary

Akala was born in 1983 to a Black British-Caribbean father and a white English-Scottish mother. His father had come to England from Jamaica, and his mother had lived in the colony of Hong Kong. Both were children of the globe-spanning British Empire. 

They met in England. It was a time of ubiquitous, unashamed racism. When Akala’s mother met his father, her family all but disowned her for being with a Black man. Neighbors, meanwhile, spat at her in the street.

In many cultures around the world, pubescent boys participate in a coming of age ritual. Whether it’s a bar mitzvah or a camping trip, these ceremonies mark their entrance into adulthood. 

In London’s poorest boroughs, Black teenage boys undergo a different kind of rite of passage: being stopped and searched by the police. 

In 1995, Akala watched Dreaming of Ajax, a BBC documentary about the Dutch soccer club Ajax Amsterdam. Ajax, a poorer club, had dominated European soccer for years. It regularly outperformed its richer English counterparts.

What accounted for this disproportionate success? The documentary pointed to the club’s organization: Ajax was better run and had a better coaching system than English clubs. 

In 2007, Britain celebrated the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act. This parliamentary act from 1807 prohibited slavery in the British Empire. On the anniversary, prime minister Tony Blair expressed his sorrow that Britain had participated in the slave trade. But he stopped short of an official apology. 

Most commentators agreed with Blair’s decision not to apologize. Britain, after all, was the first country to abolish slavery, they said. This was a unique achievement. A BBC documentary spoke of a “remarkable” decision: Britain had ended the slave trade and thereby forgone “enormous profits.”

History has two facets: facts – things that happened, and interpretation – the meaning we attribute to those facts. Interpretation isn’t just something historians do, though. It’s a public process. 

In the Britain of Akala’s youth, there were few Black voices in politics. That situation is changing. Black Britons play a growing role in public life. The nation is also changing demographically. By 2050, around 30 percent of the British population will have African, Asian, or Caribbean roots. How will this affect debate about the country’s past? 

White people often deny the existence of “white privilege.” These are the systemic advantages that white people possess due to their skin color. From the perspective of a “mixed race” person like Akala, though, the existence of this privilege is undeniable: different societies treat him differently based on how they see his Blackness.

As we’ve seen, in Britain a person of his color is seen as simply Black. In South Africa, by comparison, he is seen as “colored.” This again contrasts with North African countries like Algeria. There, Black people are still regularly referred to as abeed, meaning “slave” in Arabic. Akala, though, isn’t an abeed. He passes for a brown-skinned Amazigh local.