Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34984 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
The Critics' choice in `The Hit List' from Radish Books --Independent on Sunday

Denise Mina
A brilliant, fascinating book which revives the memory of David
Oluwale and tells his story as it should be told.

Harmit Athwal, Institute of Race Relations
'Kester Aspden's brilliant book is extremely comprehensive,
involving painstaking research. It deserves to be studied.'

Customer Reviews

Miserable misplaced people.
"leave David to me " or words to that effect struck me in the book.They are spoken by one of the two police officers convicted of assaults on David Oluwale. The use of this mans first name is incongruous given his inhumane treatment by these officers and give a glimpse of what might have been a more indepth relationship between these officers and Oluwale than one of bully and victim.
This book is not an attack on the police or other Criminal Justice agencies and public bodies,nor is it pre occupied with institutional racism.It is an account of an immigrants life in Leeds in the context of a changing police force and a changing city.The police officer Kitchin and Ellerker have become dinosaurs in the force and they know it and one has a sense of their growing sense of inadequacy and powerlessness in a changing job and city.They exert their pathetic power and control over Oluwale.
We are left with some sympathy for the officers as Aspden gives powerful accounts of their personalities and backgrounds and the lonely death of Kitchen.
That Oluwale passes through the hands of other Institutions and Authorities and no help is seemingly given is not surprising given the historical context of the book but it leads the reader to ask if much has changed since.The vulnerable and dangerous still fall through loopholes and safety nets today as revealed by subsequent enquiries into preventable murders and deaths.
Nationality Wog is so thoroughly reserached and touches on so many institutions and individuals in order to put the story into as wide a context as possible that one wonders how Aspden manages to bring all the threads together.He does achieve this and the book culminates thankfully not in a dull account of the trial of the police officers but in a skillful account of the best bits of the court scene and lovely portrayals of the QC's in the case.
The detail in the book will delight anyone familiar with Leeds from descriptions of the shop door ways where Oluwale slept and received his beatings to the position of Leeds United at the time and an account of their black players.
The book has been described as brave and it is right from its almost shocking title to the authors attempt to speak to Ellerker in his driveway.

EK.York
June2007

read this book
I found out about this book quite by chance, when a friend asked me to go to a reading by the author at Waterstones. I thought I should buy it so I would have a clue what it was all about. I am really glad I did. The book is not an easy read, but a fascinating one. It is a cliche I know, but I really couldn't put it down. It is much much more than a tale about one man, David Oluwale. Kester Aspden has provided an incredibly detailed social history of policing in general, and the city of Leeds in particular. I have recommended "nationality wog" to everyone I know. This is a story that really should be heard.

David Oluwale- neglected by society in 1960's Britain
I have just finished reading this book and it is one of those books where you just can't put it down, and there were some very difficult parts in this book about the brutality that David Oluwale received at the hands of the police and authorities that even today asylum seekers are recieving the same kind of brutality and bad treatment from different types of organisations. The years of David Oluwale's life as a homeless vagrant was the most brutal, being bullied and hounded as the title of the book says by a supposed 'law enforcing' organisation. His death was caused through blatant racism whether people chooose to admit that or not, as at the time of his death in 1969 it was a year after Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech so tolerance for immigrants was non existant back then.
This was a story that definately needed to be told. this is definately a story of a person who is a part of our history here in Britain.