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Wretch 32: ‘It’s a difficult ride for Black people in this country’

The north-east London rapper’s new album mines his family’s past and society’s present to explore what it means to call a place home

“I remember seeing my gran, my dad and my uncle on London Tonight because they had taken the police to court for harassment and had won.” Formative memories like these meant that from a young age “I was knowing that something’s not right in the system”. As a child there were community activists holding meetings in his front room; he recalls the teachings he received on the likes of Marcus Garvey and the African National Convention, or on apartheid in South Africa, the posters of Muhammad Ali on the walls, and a deep-set understanding of Britain and its relationship to his people being seeded in his mind. Stafford would write in the Guardian years later: “There was such anger about Cynthia’s death, given the regular harassment local black people faced from the police, that the following day a riot broke out.”

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