As the A-list stars gathered at the Venice Film Festival this fall, there were few more celebrities than Angelina Jolie, who generated Oscar buzz for her performance in Pablo Larraín’s biopic of Maria Callas.
But one of the most interesting subplots didn’t happen on the big screen — in the audience at the film’s premiere, as a guest of Jolie, was Akala — a rapper, author and activist.
Since Venice, there has been a stream of speculation in the tabloids about the couple and whether or not they are in a relationship. “Sources close to the duo” have reportedly confirmed and denied the allegations, and the question of who Akala is still lingers among many movie fans.
Akala, born Kingsley James McLean Daly, grew up in Kentish Town, north London, the son of a Scottish mother and a Jamaican father. His stepfather was the theater manager at the Hackney Empire, where Akala met Angela Davis and Hugh Masekela as a child. He attended an African Sabbath school for black children, which he said exposed him to “black cultural input” from music and theater to the writing of Walter Rodney from an early age.
Akala first came to prominence in the British rap scene in the early 2000s as part of a socially conscious hip-hop offshoot that included the likes of Ty and Lowkey.
The rapper and poet was not the only person with musical talent in his family. His older sister is Ms. Dynamite, a singer who blended UK rap and rap with pop music and won the 2002 Mercury Prize.
Akala himself won a MOBO Award in 2006, and in 2009 he created a musical theater production company called Hip-Hop Shakespeare, which merged two of his passions that, as he convincingly argued, have much more in common than many people realize.
In 2018, he released his first non-fiction book, Indigenous – a memoir that combines social history with reflections on class, empire, and their legacies in politics, culture, and beyond.
The book changed perceptions about what it meant to be black and British as well as about Akala himself. This made him a sought-after public speaker, with some describing him as one of Britain’s few public intellectuals.
“When I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine being a black boy now and seeing someone like me wearing a woolly hat, not pronouncing the letter T correctly, going on Good Morning Britain, and being taken seriously as an intellectual,” he said shortly after the residents were released. But that’s exactly what happened.
The book became a bestseller and was part of a wave of literature examining identity and the UK’s relationship with its past, along with Rene Eddo-Lodge’s Why I Don’t Talk to White People About Race Anymore and Afua Hirsch’s Britain.
He has criticized the power of Wu-Tang Clan lyricism and mastery of science, tutored James O’Brien on how racism is woven through immigration legislation, and clashed with far-right leader Tommy Robinson over Islamophobia.
The tabloids called him the “Corbynista rapper.” Having never voted in a general election, he wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian in 2017 about why he should support the Islington North MP.
He said: “For the first time in my adult life, and perhaps for the first time in British history, someone who I regard as a fundamentally decent human being has the opportunity to be elected.”
But his political activity extends beyond party politics, and he usually avoids it. He has campaigned to rethink how and why knife crime is reported, called for a retelling of black Caribbean extremist histories, and has written publicly about his struggles with mixed identity.
Jolie’s humanitarian work resonated with Akala’s espoused causes, and whether there was a romantic relationship or not, the speculation has brought the North Londoner and his particular brand of hip-hop-inspired thought to a new audience.
