The TV adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s canonical Noughts & Crosses has been almost a decade in the making. Having read the whole series in my youth, in what I can only describe as a malnourished frenzy, last week I was lucky enough to be invited to the BBC premiere in Brixton, south London. It doesn’t happen often on a panel discussion about a TV series that the writer gets a cheer that brings the house down.
The drama showed me something I’d never thought of before: what an African world might look like had the British empire never happened. English sentences are peppered with Yoruba. The prevailing race wear vibrant patterns, and traditional dress at formal occasions. The Noughts (whites) have permed hair to mimic black beauty standards.
Fans of the book have been waiting patiently to see a world in which racial politics are inverted. And we were not disappointed. Others were, though, and accused Blackman of race-baiting. I was going to counter by asking if it would be race-baiting for the show to present whites as the ruling race with black people the underclass. But that’s just real life, isn’t it?
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