Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 3, 1993 TAG: 9307030055
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEPHEN FOSTER Staff writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
More than a year ago, the nation watched in shock as South Central Los Angeles exploded in flames, looting and murder after four officers accused of unjustly beating Rodney King were acquitted.
More than 50 people died.
In "Monster," Sanyika Shakur, a gangster who has beaten, robbed and killed many, talks of that neighborhood - from the inside. For him, those streets were never peaceful.
"The war has been raging on for twenty-two years. . . . No one has noticed, except for those recently involved in the fighting and those indirectly drawn in by geographical location, economic status, or family association," he writes in the preface to this work of nonfiction, his first book.
His story will bring notice. Yet the sheer, unapologetic reality of it will force each reader to decide whether it is a worthy, explanatory work, or the exploitive venture of a street-wise hoodlum capitalizing on those he's killed over the course of a career in "banging."
It is both. Only a banger could have it both ways.
"I am a gang expert - period," he writes. "There are no other gang experts except participants."
Shakur's prose is simple, direct and, with some exception, unemotional. His words are serious.
His tale is a repetitive, escalating one, beginning at age 11 when he was recruited into the Eight-Tray Crips. Shakur was tagged "Monster" two years later after he stomped a victim into a coma.
For Shakur, South Central L.A. is a battlefield, the platoons the individual "sets" of gangs, armies of Crips and Bloods and Chicanos and the police, all fighting for turf, respect and glory.
His seek-and-destroy missions, terror tactics and communication via sign, color and code the general public equates with tit-for-tat murders, drive-by shootings, looting, robbery and graffiti.
At times he admits fears or misgivings, and the reader can feel some empathy for this man.
In the book's epilogue, he writes, "I admit that I am responsible for deeds that have caused irreparable damage, such as the taking of a life, but I did so in a setting that seemed to dictate such action." Those who died at his hands made their choice before he killed them, he reasons, and in a war, one is supposed to kill.
Born Kody Scott, Shakur, now 29 and serving time in California's Pelican Bay prison, changed his name in recent years. And he says he's changed his beliefs.
Now, while still drawing support from gangsters, he claims to have foregone that life, with its drug-dealing mentality, black-on-black killing and utter helplessness. He proposes that blacks - "New Afrikans" - seek independence, that "this country's 130-year-old experiment of multiculturalism has failed."
But while his outlook has changed during prison years often spent in solitary confinement, the story is about life as a banger.
The reader may have difficulty admiring an author who is an admittedly brutal enforcer, thief and murderer, but the key to the book is not so much to judge this man, but to take his work as a tool, a way to learn the pervasive and persuasive factors that rule South Central and turned him and others into killers.
As for what set off the riots, Shakur, now a husband and father of three, writes, "The obvious helplessness of Rodney King as he was pummeled continuously by the robot-like gunslingers, despite the fact that he was clearly submitting: This summed up for me the condition of the New Afrikan man in this country.
"Rodney King could have been any New Afrikan male in America. He could have been my son."
by CNB