Radical by Maajid Nawaz Page B

Banksy, this was classic counterculture stuff. No one, apart from my friends and I, knew who “Slamer” was, though his name was scrawled all over Southend. It was two fingers to the police and law and order: we were challenging their authority, and there was nothing they could do about it. That gave us the edge, credibility among those in the know, and we felt we had a way to fight back.
    I also got into dancing to the tracks and MC-ing (live rapping) at nightclubs. We’d go to these under-eighteen nights at clubs down by the seafront, or “The Front” as we called it. We would jump around to the sounds of Onyx and House of Pain, then we’d get up onstage for a lyrical excursion over an instrumental. My MC name was “Black Magic.” The white kids didn’t know what to do and couldn’t really move to these strange new beats, so they looked to us for direction.
    Our B-boy sub-community just kept growing; we would meet kids on the streets and just bond because they were into the same scene. It’s like we instantly knew how to relate to each other. That’s how I met people like Marc, and Chill, or Tsiluwa. Marc was a white kid, and a great rapper who was able to freestyle on the spot; his skills made him the right friends. Chill had recently moved from Zimbabwe. He was walking in the wrong direction one night after a particularly violent racist incident, an attack involving a hammer to the head of a friend—a preferred style of attack by Essex-based racists. I saw Chill walking in the direction we were running from, told him what had happened, and asked him to stick with us if he wanted to be safe. This kicked off an instant brotherhood between us, and together we got up to a great deal of mischief.
    On one occasion Chill and I, both fifteen, decided to see if we could get into an over-eighteens nightclub. If anyone looked at us, at our builds and lack of facial hair, it was obvious that we were much younger. To get in we cut off some hair from our heads, and glued it with Pritt Stick to our chins. We laughed at how ridiculous we looked—Chill, who had Afro hair, looked like he had a pad of Velcro stuck to his chin—but we put our blazers on and got in. We went straight to the bathroom and washed it all off. After that, the bouncers would let us in every time.
    All of this—the music, the clothes, the graffiti, the MC-ing—the hip-hop lifestyle—meant that none of us had any problems with girls. They were almost like groupies, white middle-class girls, who were into hip-hop and wanted to be a part of it. This was a time when mixed relationships became extremely fashionable, especially on the female side: there was a whole group of girls, many from nice girls-only schools, who wanted to be in mixed relationships. They’d talk to us about how mixed-race babies looked so cute. Such talk would make us laugh, and we thrived on the attention. We were just out to have a good time, and were buzzing on a sound, an identity, that we could finally claim as our own.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The Stranger Stabbed for Me
    While life in school was improving, the situation outside was escalating into something far more serious. Although my generation was being exposed to—and becoming interested in—music emanating from black culture, older generations remained unmoved by hip-hop and threatened by its associated culture. This was a generation who still had the mind-set of the father of the boy at primary school who had filled his son with all that rubbish about AIDS. It was these older, violently aggressive groups of white youths we had to be wary of.
    The result was that when we went out, we made sure that we never walked anywhere alone. If we were out in the town, we’d be in groups of five, six, or seven to be on the safe side. We were an overwhelmingly non-white group of B-boys, and as we got deeper into the hip-hop culture, a lot of our white friends began peeling