Gang culture? It's all about sex

Street-smart: Bol Joseph is now a successful rapper but says his experience as a gang member is now the subject of his music
Ben Bryant12 April 2012

It was mid-afternoon when Bol Joseph was stabbed. The day had started ordinarily enough - the 18-year-old had enjoyed a lazy morning and just visited a local shop to buy a drink and a top-up voucher for his phone. His silver Rover 25 was parked outside. He got back into the car, took a sip, and locked the doors.

Just as Joseph turned the key in the ignition, the windows in the front and passenger door of his car were smashed. Fists snaked through the glass, pounding on his arms and legs.

He instinctively raised his hands to protect his face. The assault lasted just minutes, and at first he wasn't aware of the pain. It was only when he looked down at his blood-soaked jeans that he realised what had happened. "I thought they was punching me, but they were stabbing me," he says.

Joseph would later learn that he had been set upon by a mob of four from a rival gang in an attack that left his arms and legs torn and in need of stitches.

It was the latest in a spate of revenge attacks and shootings between the Highbury Boys and their closest rivals, a group he is reluctant to name but who are known as one of the most notorious gangs in London.

Seven years later Joseph, 25, is better known as rapper Joe Black. With more than 10,000 followers on Twitter and a newly released mixtape, Realionaire, that includes a track with Tottenham rapper Giggs, he no longer sells drugs to survive.

And as the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, launches a zero tolerance policy towards knife and gun crime, Joseph is ready to speak out for the first time about the gang experiences that led him to spend five out of the past 10 years in prison.

The Highbury Boys formed on Highbury estate with a core of about 10 members, and even though they were involved in criminal activities, Joseph remains reluctant to call them a gang.

"It was a group of friends, really," he explains. "We all knew each other through football. That was our mutual interest.

Everyone used to go to the local league and some of us didn't even play for the same teams, but because we was from the same area we used to start meeting up after school. So when we were walking around, people would just say, 'They're them Highbury boys.' Then we might meet a bunch of Holloway boys, and one of them'll give another person a dis or a wrong look, and it ends up in fighting."

Over time, petty teenage rivalries escalated into full-blown disputes of the kind that saw Joseph get stabbed in his car. Even now, he isn't sure how it happened.

"I don't know when the change came," he says. "One minute we're kicking a ball, next minute we're going to shoot someone."

He was raised by his mother, who works as a civil servant in Brent Town Hall. His father, whom he only saw during school holidays, lived in west London.

"My mum just used to work, so she didn't really know what was going on," he says. "By the time she clocked how serious it was, it was too late. She wasn't helpless but what could she really do?"

Joseph never struggled in school - in fact, he used to like schoolwork. He was in a gang early on, though, and aged 15 received a three-year custodial sentence for robbing a man on his estate with a group of friends.

"My problem used to be my attitude, that's all it was," he says. "I got this attitude where I just didn't like authority. They used to say, 'Academically, there's nothing wrong with him. But his behaviour and his attitude, that's the problem.'"

Joseph's real gang life started when he and his friends started to try to impress more senior gang members - "olders" - on the estate. "Ten years ago I was running round the streets, doing crazy stuff, trying to get my reputation up so we'd be known as the hardest gang in the area."

On the streets, respect was the currency that mattered and the Highbury Boys quickly learned how to earn their share. He and his friends started mugging people from rival estates.

"We'd steal standard stuff. Mobile phones, CD players. The people we used to target were people who we thought were like us. We'd see someone we didn't know and think, 'Oh, he must be from the estate down the road.' Then we'd run through his pockets."

As the years passed he graduated to selling weed, then crack and heroin. By the time he went to prison for drug dealing in 2005, he no longer needed to impress the olders. Money and respect helped net the one thing most teenage boys are chasing: girls.

"I think it's all down to the opposite sex," he says. "Everything. Even when people are selling drugs to make money, it's all to impress the opposite sex. You want to have a rep, you want to be known as the hardest guy on the estate to impress the girls - and that's what it all boils down to."

After 10 years, it's fair to say he has his share of respect, money and women. He has mixed feelings, however, about the influence he had over younger gang members.

"Every generation wants to outdo the last generation," he says. "That's why I think it's getting worse - everyone's saying, 'That guy got stabbed 20 times. Well, I'm not going to let him stab me, so I'm going to get a bigger knife, or I'm going to get a gun.' That's how it happens. It all escalates out of control."

Joseph has seen the rise of violence first hand. Guns, he says, are much more common than they used to be.

"You know, there was always guns, but people weren't using them as much as they are now. Ten years ago guns were for what people thought were serious problems. There used to be 20 people come to an estate and you'd get beat up. But now people are like, 'I won't roll with 20 people, I'll just roll with a gun.'"

He is critical, too, of the riots.

"When it kicked off in Tottenham, that was bound to happen," he says. "But the looting was not justifiable."

The riots have given the public an excuse to turn on the most deprived communities and the young gangs who operate within them. Joseph is sure, however, that it was not just gang members who were rioting and looting.

"I saw people's mums, their uncles, aunties, parents. It weren't just one set of people. I saw them from all walks of life," he says. "I think people thought that if they could get away with it then they would."

He had nothing to do with the riots and says for the past four years he has been focusing on his music, at first still "dabbling in the drug game" for "insurance" but later managing to give up on it altogether.

His life in a street gang is something he'll never escape, though - in fact, it's something his new life as a musician depends upon.

"I think that without the experiences that I went through my music might not have been as powerful as it is now," he says. "Because I'm speaking about the experiences that I've been through. So it works both ways. It's still part of my life. I still embrace it through the music. And I try my best not to glamorise it."

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