2010 was a year of highs for Kingsley 'Akala' Daley. From his early days as a footballer for West Ham and Wimbledon to his current polymath position as Mobo Award winning hip-hop artist, record label CEO and purveyor of social “edutainment”, he's a figure known for his constant activism. “It's been an inspiring year of multifaceted, independent hard work.” He's been busy with the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, a music theatre project that works to educate young people, and Illastate Records, the independent label he runs.

“A lot of the projects I do involve working with young people, and meeting like-minded folk who support the things I do, so the people-led energy this year has been beautiful.” He's particularly proud of the Voices Of Hip-Hop History event which took place in November at The British Library, which saw guest panellists including legendary spoken word poet Saul Williams and US author and film maker MK Asante. “Connecting with Saul and MK was a pleasure. I also found the fact that 700 people paid to go to a library and hear about hip-hop quite funny, and gratifying”.

He spent a lot of last year promoting his third LP, Doublethink, a electro-heavy album inspired by dystopian fiction novels such as George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Whilst MK Asante's informed text, It's Bigger Then Hip-Hop encourages students to use “two sets of notes” as a way of challenging the traditional, dominant syllabus they are fed by state education, Akala emblems his LP with the 'double think' term in an Orwellian tradition. “Orwell used the phrase to mean to tell deliberate lies whilst believing them to be true, and to forget facts the minute they become inconvenient”. It's been 60-years since Orwell's published his novel, yet this type of insidious behavour was felt by many in the UK when Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's u-turned on pledges to cap university top up fees, which resulted in mass student protests and some very bias press reporting.

“I respect the right to protest, but I think permanent change is multifaceted and more complicated than that. It's essentially a class issue - lower and middle classes are being priced out of education. It's a shame for a country like Britain, with so much wealth, to behave this way. I've been to Scandinavia and their attitude is very different. They're dealing with racial upheaval due to an influx of immigrants from the Afghanistan/Iraq war, yet they have children there - and I found this across a number of schools I taught at in Denmark - who have been in the country just 3- or 4-years and can write poetry in English, their third language. I think its societal issue - it's our worship of vacuous celebrity culture, materialism, our worship of ignorance. I think there is a whole generation that feels insulted by the way that ignorance is marketed at us. We're not passively accepting it, and I think the protests are one manifestation of that”.

Akala is an outspoken champion of hip-hop as an agent for positive change and social empowerment.He believes that the hip-hop has a responsibility to be conscious. “Art is never passive because, like MK has said, it either trains us to accept the values we've received - the unequal social, racial, gender boundaries we're boxed in by - or it encourages us to challenge them. When rappers embrace misogyny and materialism, that's not passive art - that's capitalist, imperialist propaganda. It's not speaking for people in the inner-city, because those are the people who really suffer. The main consumers of that music are middle class kids who don't have first-hand experience of that kind of violence. It's a perverse type of entertainment”.

Trying to maintain principles that defy some of society's most harmful and dominant cultural imperatives can be an exhausting effort, especially for an artist who uses his visibility to challenge the public sphere. How does he ground himself when he needs to recharge? “I go away. I travel as frequently as possible. I went to Brazil for three months in 2008.” This trip, he says, changed him irrevocably. He visited the favelas in the north, far away from the insulting, tourist-geared 'favella safaris' of the south, and found a deep connection with the inhabitants there. “The idea is that they are horrific, machine gun-toting people, but their hospitality, in very desperate circumstances, was humbling. It can be immensely difficult when you're up against the mass elevation of certain images, but knowing there is a collective out there rejecting those ideologies keeps me strong”.

Traditions of sexism in hip-hop have been a prevalent topic of contention for both the community itself, and its external critics, but Akala, along with friend and fellow MC Lowkey who also appeared at the British Library event, are prime examples of male rappers who exhibit an allegiance to feminist ideals in their lyrics. This is one of the reasons the corporate-owned mainstream hip-hop world has little interest in projecting their messages. “I've been told directly, “You won't get on MTV because there are no women (or 'video hoes' as they've been dubbed) in your videos.”

Collective responsibility plays a part in the gender politics of hip hop, but Akala insists that the accusation is complicated. “We've got to be careful about what we allow the hip-hop community to take responsibility for. When hip-hop began it was owned by small, independent labels that for the most part, understood the culture. I didn't see the women of that period - Queen Latifah, Roxanne Shante, Salt & Pepa - dehumanise themselves; they were progressive. We can't divorce misogyny in hip-hop from the institution of misogyny in the larger world. To offload misogyny on to young men of colour, as if British society as a whole is not misogynist, is wrong. Women in this country still get paid less than men for doing the same jobs and being equally qualified, they're still dehumanised in advertising and marketing campaigns - these things don't take their roots from hip-hop”.

If the past year was a busy one for Akala, the itinerary for 2011 looks set to be just as full-throttle. “I've written a short book to go with Doublethink, so we'll release that in March or April. There'll be another single, more Hip-Hop Shakespeare projects, shows in the Far East and Australia, and another album,” one that will replace the electro stylings of Doublethink with a more organic, live band instrumentation.

He's also interested to see how the episode of Konnie Huq's ITV2 show On The Edge turns out, since he worked with the Blue Peter presenter on it as a creative consultant. “It's about Konnie learning how to be an MC. I wasn't keen on it at the beginning because I didn't want to be involved in making something patronizing to hip-hop culture, but I think it's been handled respectfully. I'm looking forward to seeing it”.