Who is the author of Natives?

Akala is the author of Natives.

Biography & Memoir

Natives Book Summary - Natives Book explained in key points

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Natives summary

Name: Natives
Rating: 4.6 (36 reviews)
Author: Akala

Akala

Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

4.6 (36 ratings)

22 mins

Brief summary

Natives by Akala is a powerful memoir that explores race, class and identity in contemporary Britain. It invites readers to challenge their understanding of race relations and the impact of structural racism on society.

Topics

Race Black Lives Matter

Table of Contents

Natives
Summary of 7 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 7

What’s in it for me? A study of British identity and Blackness.

Future generations and historians will remember the summer of 2020 for two things: the global Covid-19 pandemic and the similarly global Black Lives Matter movement.

The death of George Floyd lit the fuse of the latter, but the powder keg that exploded that summer had been long in the making. As demonstrators saw it, the killing of Floyd wasn’t an isolated incident of police violence. To understand his death, America had to reckon with its history of anti-Black racism.

But British demonstrators across the Atlantic made it clear that this wasn’t just an American phenomenon. Britain, too, has its own history of slavery, imperialism, and racism. This history is all too often poorly understood, or distorted by convenient myths. These distortions continue to justify the treatment of Black Britons as second-class citizens.

But how should we understand this history? That’s the challenge musician, commentator, and activist Akala decided to tackle. He did this by documenting his experience of growing up in a Britain that racialized him as Black.

In these blinks, we’ll follow Akala’s story from his grandparents’ generation, who came to Britain from its Caribbean colonies in the 1950s. Then we’ll move on to Akala’s own youth in a multi-ethnic working-class neighborhood in London. Along the way, we’ll explore the entangled histories of racism and empire in Britain.

A short note before we begin: these blinks contain frank descriptions of racist language and attitudes that some may find upsetting.

You’ll also learn:

why racialized stop and search policies don’t solve crime in London;
how official narratives about British history often distort the truth; and
why anti-Black racism takes so many different forms across the world.

Caribbeans arriving in Britain were met with a racist backlash.

At the end of the Second World War, Britain was exhausted, indebted, and in physical ruins. It also faced a labor shortage. To get back on its feet, it needed workers.

Despite its wartime losses, Britain still possessed a vast empire. In 1948, it passed the British Nationality Act. This gave anyone born in a British colony the right to settle in Britain. With the encouragement of the government, Caribbean subjects bearing British passports began landing at Tilbury, a port near London.

This was the “Windrush generation,” a reference to the name of the ship that brought many Caribbeans to Britain. They saw themselves as equal citizens who had come to help rebuild the war-shattered “mother country.” But that wasn’t how white Britain saw them.

The key message here is: Caribbeans arriving in Britain were met with a racist backlash.

Between the late 1940s and 1960s, around half a million Caribbeans arrived in Britain, among them Akala’s grandparents. They quickly realized that stories they’d been told about the mother country weren’t true.

Britain, for one thing, was full of poor white people. Out in the colonies, whiteness had been a sign of power and wealth. The only white people many Caribbean subjects had seen before coming to England were members of the imperial elite. Imagine their surprise, then, when they first saw a white man sweeping the street. It was absurd. What was this Britain?

But this wasn’t the only surprise. Caribbean arrivals had been told that they’d be welcomed as heroes. They were shocked when they were met with hostility instead. Akala’s grandfather, for example, remembers that he was regularly called racial slurs in public within a week of setting foot in the country. As his new neighbors saw it, he wasn’t helping rebuild the country – he was a freeloader who’d come to steal “their” jobs or even “their” women.

How had white Britons come to this conclusion? Well, no one had tried to explain to white Britain that the popular welfare state then being built was in large part supported by revenues raised in colonies like Jamaica. Nor were they told that the people who’d produced coffee, tobacco, and gold in those colonies, and who were now coming to Britain, weren’t “immigrants.” They were British subjects like anyone else in the country.

In the absence of such explanations, hostility to Britain’s Black citizens only continued to grow.

Akala learned what it means to be Black in Britain at an early age.

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.

Policing in London treats crime as a racial issue.

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.

Black sporting successes are often treated as a strange anomaly.

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.

Britain’s involvement in ending slavery isn’t as clear-cut as many believe.

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.”

Official narratives don’t align with how many Black Britons remember the past.

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?

Anti-Black racism takes different forms in different places.

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.

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What is Natives about?

Natives (2018) melds memoir and polemic to explore race and class in contemporary Britain. Drawing on his own experiences while growing up poor and Black in London in the 1980s and 1990s, musician and writer Akala crafts a vivid portrait of a society that systematically robs Black citizens of opportunities. Why, he asks, is Britain like this? As we’ll see in these blinks, answering that question takes us deep into the history of slavery, empire, and racism.

Natives Review

Natives (2018) by Akala is an eye-opening exploration of race, class, and British identity. Here's why you should give it a read:

Packed with personal experiences and historical analysis, the book offers a thought-provoking insight into the realities of growing up as a black person in Britain.
Akala's keen observations and sharp wit make the book engaging and accessible, allowing readers to easily connect with the author's perspective.
By questioning prevailing narratives and exploring the impact of colonialism, Natives challenges readers to reconsider their own biases and deepen their understanding of social issues.

Best quote from Natives

I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me.

—Akala

Who should read Natives?

History buffs
Radicals and reformers
Brits and Anglophiles

About the Author

Akala is a hip-hop artist, writer, activist, and entrepreneur. As a musician, he is best known for his award-winning breakthrough album It’s Not a Rumour and his 2010 follow-up DoubleThink. Akala is the founder of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, a theatre production company that explores the parallels between contemporary rap and Shakespeare’s writing. Natives is his first book.

Categories with Natives

Biography & Memoir Society & Culture

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