Thread by @akalamusic

Here is the thing about being one of the ‘man dem’ in your 30’s that nobody tells you when you are 19....

As you grow and mature and become less insecure and start to make better decisions so do MOST of the man of your age and consequently...

All the screw face ‘what you looking at, what ends u from’ evaporates and other grown man are actually happy to see you. They know what you’ve been through cos they went through the same shit...

It’s not that we all get a collective melanin reduction operation around the age of 26, it is *shockingly* that man actually have the capacity for growth and change...

So many of us (MC’s in our 30’s and just man in general) are friends with people/groups who were at each other’s throats (literally) aged 17 - 24.

Anyway I hope u lot are having a good day?

The data of course reflects this growth. This particular type of ‘hooligan’ style violence has been age specific (along with the other indicators) for as long as its existed, whether in Manny, Glasgow, Limerick, Belfast or London.

And as you get older you *really* become conscious of how much you risked your life over what was essentially, nonsense - but felt so real at the time.

There is another rapper/poet/now active community man on here that i’m good friends with now and the way me and him met was his mates pulling a strap on a friend of a friend. Naturally we all jumped in because....

At that age getting shot somehow made more sense than getting taken for a *pussyhole*. Luckily it didn’t pop off beyond punches and kicks and it got squashed...

At age 21 (literally on my 21st birthday actually) me and the man dem went out and got into it with some bouncers and even though it was far from the worst thing that had happened, music was just starting to look good and I realised I could not do this anymore...

I pulled away from one set of friends (that I grew up with) and spent more time with my west london mate who was older and by the time I linked him and turned his life around...

The friends I was moving with then went to jail (some not for the first time) and one was deported back to Nigeria from prison even though he was in the UK from age 2...

I’ve recconnected with some of those mates over the last 3/4 years and unsurprisingly after much harsh lessons they too have turned their lives around...

I don’t really talk much about the madness man for up to in my music because I have always felt pressure to present a different, better, image. But i think when talking on these issues it’s important that people understand why I see things this way..

But it seems some people simply want me to condemn rather than explain why certain boys/young men make certain mistakes at a certain stage of life. Mistakes I made myself... despite *knowing* better deep down.

And don’t get me wrong I do think some people are just fundamentally bad mind, but that fraction is very, very small.

It is a given that none of this excuses murder, however paying attention to the indicators can help prevention massively. Again see Glasgow over last 10 years..

Have teenagers in Glasgow suddenly become inherently better people over the last decade or did better policies and actions help change behaviour?

In a related set of thoughts:

Years before I ever did my African history lecture at Oxford I had been doing it annually at HMP Birmingham. *Fascinatingly* I got asked far better questions afterwards by a room full of lifers than at Oxford...