As the A-list stars assembled at the Venice film festival this autumn, there were few there more famous than Angelina Jolie, who generated Oscar buzz for her performance in Pablo Larraín’s biopic of Maria Callas.
But one of the most intriguing subplots didn’t take place on the big screen – in the audience at the film’s premiere, as a guest of Jolie, was Akala – the rapper, author and activist.
Since Venice there’s been a stream of tabloid speculation about the pair and whether or not they’re are in a relationship. “Sources close to the pair” have reportedly confirmed and denied the claims, and the question of who Akala is lingers for many film fans.
Akala, born Kingslee James McLean Daley, grew up in Kentish Town, north London, son of a Scottish mother and a Jamaican father. His stepfather was the stage manager of the Hackney Empire, where Akala met Angela Davis and Hugh Masekela as a child. He attended a pan-African Saturday school for black children, which he said exposed him to “black cultural inputs” from music and theatre to the writing of Walter Rodney from an early age.
Akala first rose to prominence in the early 00s British rap scene as part of a socially conscious branch of hip-hop 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, the singer who melded UK garage and rap with pop and won the Mercury prize in 2002.
Akala won a Mobo award himself in 2006, and in 2009 he set up a musical theatre production company called Hip-hop Shakespeare that fused two of his passions which, he has convincingly argued, have far more in common than many people recognise.
In 2018 he released his debut nonfiction book, Natives – a memoir that combined social history with meditations on class, empire and its legacy in politics, culture and beyond.
The book shifted perceptions on what it meant to be black and British as well as about Akala himself; turning him into a sought-after public speaker, with some calling him one of Britain’s few modern public intellectuals.
“When I was a child, I couldn’t imagine being a young black boy now and seeing someone like me with a woolly hat, who doesn’t pronounce his t’s correctly, go on Good Morning Britain and be taken seriously as an intellectual,” he said shortly after Natives was released. But that is exactly what happened.
The book became a bestseller and was part of a wave of literature tackling identity and the UK’s relationship to its past, along with Reni-Eddo Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish).
He riffed on the power of Wu-Tang Clan’s lyricism and mastery of the sciences, educated James O’Brien on how racism has been woven through immigration legislation, and clashed with the far-right leader Tommy Robinson on Islamophobia.
Tabloids have called him a “Corbynista rapper”. Having never voted in a general election, he wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian in 2017 about why he was supporting the Islington North MP.
He said: “For the first time in my adult life, and perhaps for the first time in British history, someone I would consider to be a fundamentally decent human being has a chance of being elected.”
But his political activism stretches well beyond, and typically eschews, party politics. He has campaigned on rethinking how knife crime and its causes are reported on, called for radical black Caribbean history to be retold, and written openly about his struggles with mixed identity.
Jolie’s humanitarian work has chimed with the causes Akala has taken up, and whether there is a romantic relationship or not, the speculation has brought the north Londoner and his particular brand of hip-hop-inspired intellectualism to a new audience.
