British Labour MP David Lammy on tribal culture, belonging and loneliness

In 2007, British politician and lawyer David Lammy took a DNA test.

That year, the UK marked the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Lammy, who had been a member of parliament since 2000, was asked by the Science Museum in London to take a DNA test, and found that his ancestry was more complex than he imagined.

The Labour MP for Tottenham, London, who has been serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs since 2021, was not only intrigued by the results, but his journey into his past served as the launch pad for his book Tribes: A Search for Belonging in a Divided Society, published in 2020.

“It wasn't just a delight to me,” Lammy tells The National from the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature this weekend to talk about his book.

“It was a delight to the whole family, because my DNA test would answer lots of questions that we all have as a family.”

Lammy’s parents were from Guyana in South America and moved to UK at the end of the Second World War to help rebuild Britain, like many others from the Caribbean and the West Indies.

Growing up, Lammy’s parents gave him a powerful sense of his Guyanese heritage and traditions, and yet, given the complex history of black people in Britain, he always had questions about his ancestors.

“The truth is, we are the descendants of enslaved people and that means that there's always a bit of you that doesn't know where you are from," he says.

“It's been one of the great privileges of my life to spend time in the continent of Africa because my work as a politician has taken me to many African nations over the years … but you're looking at people and you're thinking, I wonder if we're related.”

According to the DNA test, from his father’s side, he is a descendant of the Bantu people of South Africa. From his mother’s side, he is from the Temne tribe in Sierra Leone and the Tuareg tribe in Fafa in Niger, and he also has traces of Scottish DNA.

“It was comforting, intriguing and exciting,” Lammy says about seeing the results and researching his ancestry.

“Exciting to put that jigsaw puzzle together, exciting to go on an odyssey to an unknown place for me. I found it was 100 per cent positive.”

Lammy describes in the book this “odyssey that I made to Niger” where, after spending time with the people there, he felt a “powerful sense of brotherhood and belonging”.

“That's what the book is about,” he says.

“It's about belonging and what that means in modern society. We're living in a society where there are profound problems with a new tribalism that's driving us apart, not driving us together.”

Tribes begins with his transformative journey into his roots and from there explores and examines themes of modern tribalism, and today's cultural and political landscape in Britain.

He also explores the theme of loneliness within the western world as the reason behind many prevalent issues in contemporary culture. Loneliness, he believes, is a predominant theme in modern life, a driver for how people are reacting to new information and ideas.

“We're working longer hours than we ever worked before; both men and women are working and kids are disappearing into social media,” he says.

“We are more connected than we've ever been in this globalised, social media-driven world, but we're also more isolated than we've ever been. That's a phenomenon I see every day in my constituency, and largely across the UK. And it was into that phenomenon that I was writing.”

In Tribes, interwoven through passages about his upbringing and personal life, Lammy also explores how people are seduced by extremism due to a greater need to belong.

“Human beings need a sense of belonging and a tribe can give you that in a positive way," he says.

“Family can give you that in a positive way, a nation can give you that when it's done well. But equally, sadly, the echo chambers of social media can drive you to look for that belonging in unsavoury, extreme places.”

Lammy believes these extreme places and ideas can be intoxicating for those who are looking for a sense of belonging in a world where identity politics are active and real.

This can translate into a modern tribalism in society, a subject he, naturally, explores in depth in Tribes.

Lammy says how countries think about a sense of belonging at a national level is critical to keeping extreme ideas at bay. Whether through a sense of unity after tragedy or through sports, music, drama, national song or conversation, it’s important for countries and cultures to think about how they can be inclusive for their diverse populations, since there are so many ways contemporary culture can quickly drive them apart.

“The book is very much a take on the times that we're living in,” he says.

“Things like the pandemic, and some of the challenges that we have economically and globally at the moment, amplify this theme of tribalism even more.”