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And the inflection point between African and Caribbean cultures that Cane Warriors documents is wholly deliberate. Even with a necessarily limited descriptive palette, Wheatle paints with trademark vividness. Moa and his fellow slaves talk, in pungent patois, of falling “eye-water” and “bruk-outs” of the will of West African Akan gods, where the tragedy of a fellow slave’s death is compounded by the hard work of having to dig their “pit”. I knew that killed the overseers and the masters at the plantations, they marched to Fort Haldane, sacked that and got 40 guns and the gunpowder.”Īs well as the unflinching, crisply relayed nature of its violence, one of the most striking things about Cane Warriors is the specificity of its language. “But there was definitely a slave uprising that happened on Easter Sunday in 1760, started by this guy Tacky, who was rumoured to be an African prince. Hard facts were difficult to establish, he says. And soon he was sifting through historical records that gave him the spine of a story. But Wheatle, who first learned about the bloody revolt on a trip to Jamaica with his father, would not be denied.

Which is not to say that the book’s route to publication was straightforward – he tells me his “previous publishers weren’t too excited about Cane Warriors”.

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So I do feel, with Cane Warriors, that I’ve come full circle.” Reading CLR James in prison changed Wheatle’s life: ‘Up to then, I’d only seen black people as victims or subservient’ It led me to search for other black heroic texts, because I’d been denied them all those years. To actually read a text where there was an incredible black hero really opened up my eyes to the world. “Because, up to that point, I’d only seen black people as victims or subservient. “That changed everything for me,” he says, pouring more tea from his pot.

The first stirrings of his interest in writing came while he was serving a four-month prison sentence for his role in the 1981 Brixton riots, when his cellmate handed him a dog-eared copy of The Black Jacobins, CLR James’s seminal account of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s 18th-century slave revolt and the resultant Haitian revolution.

But as Wheatle, now 57, sees it, Moa’s story tallies with his personal history. “Back-ripper”-wielding overseers and rural cane fields are a world away from the modern, multicultural cityscapes and wry socio-realism that have long been his hallmark. And now – in a landmark period of his career that happens to coincide with a Steve McQueen film about his life – he has done it again with Cane Warriors: a taut, urgent new young adult novel set within the real-life slave uprising that took place on a Jamaican plantation in 1760.Īt first glance, the story – told through the eyes of Moa, a 14-year-old enlisted in a brutal rebellion led by a fellow slave known as Tacky – feels like a departure for Wheatle. He did it with Crongton Knights, the 2016 Guardian children’s fiction prize winner that rendered council estate turf wars with wit, care and profundity. He did it with Brixton Rock, the 1999 debut that introduced readers to troubled care-system kid Brenton Brown and the signature crackle of Wheatle’s streetwise prose.

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