Yesterday’s news that a 64-year-old man, Akinwale Arobieke, was found dead in a Liverpool flat sent Scouse Twitter into meltdown. Thousands paid humorous and ironic tributes to the infamous oddball universally known as “Purple Aki”.

Aki became notorious for approaching well-built young men and asking to squeeze their muscles or watch them perform squats. He would even request they jump on his back while he performed squats. Although he served prison time and had various restraining orders issued against him, he was never convicted of a sexual offense, and in fact won compensation from the police and authorities for harassment and malicious prosecution on at least two occasions. But why has Aki’s death provoked such an outpouring of affection and nostalgia?

In 1986, in his mid-twenties, he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter when 16-year-old Gary Kelly was electrocuted on a train line while running away from Aki. This was later overturned on the basis that his presence at a train station was not itself an act of harm.

The legend of Aki — and a legend he became — speaks to not only the Scouse love of the surreal and the fantastical, but reveals much about the city’s attitudes to race in the late 20th century. He wasn’t known as “Purple Aki” because he dressed up as a Roman Emperor or was a huge Prince fan, but rather because of the particularly dark hue of his skin in a famous mugshot.

Aki’s ethnicity, as well as his size, probably served to protect him: if everything about his behavior were the same, but he was a big white man, it’s not hard to imagine that he would have been the target of mob violence. In another, more racially diverse city, Aki would surely have been perceived differently: as a weird pervert, certainly, but his blackness would not have been as remarkable in London, Birmingham, or Manchester as it was in Liverpool during the Eighties and Nineties.

For many white kids growing up in the city at that time, Aki might have been the only Black Liverpudlian they knew about, save for the fictional characters Mick Johnson on Brookside and Lister from Red Dwarf.

At that time, before the internet, it was easy to believe that Aki was a fictional figure himself, so bizarre and fantastical was his very existence. Indeed, he’s believed to be at least partially the inspiration for the Candyman character, invented by Scouse author Clive Barker in his Books of Blood in 1984.

Of course, there were plenty of black people in Liverpool, and always had been for many years by the Eighties, but unless you lived in L8 or its environs, there was a good chance you could grow up without meeting any black Scousers. This was the case across much of the city until the early 2000s.

While certain professional Scousers are always quick to point out that Liverpool has the oldest black (and Chinese) communities in Europe, the legend of Aki shows the complicated attitude towards race and ethnicity that exists until this day. Last summer’s Southport riots were another chapter in that story.

Ostensibly, Liverpool is a multicultural, anti-racist modern city that is welcome to all. Yet this uniquely Scouse urban legend and the obsession with Purple Aki reveals a place that has some way to go before its projected image is made reality.

---

David Swift is a historian and author. His latest book, Scouse Republic, is out now.

davidswift87

---