John Fashanu: Black leaders must tackle this culture of hatred

I was in Nigeria when I heard that my nephew Jude Akapa had been killed. He was only 15 years old. After what was obviously a long period of bullying at school, he had been hit in the face and died later from a brain haemorrhage. I had known nothing about the bullying. Jude's mother, Shola, had told everyone but me, it seems. She'd written to MPs, she'd told the police, and she'd told the principal of the school.

But what led to the death of my nephew? I believe it was the nauseating hatred and violence that permeates black youth culture in this country. We can see manifestations of this corrupting hatred all the time. We see the number of black youths who are involved in mobile-phone crime. We see that black girls are more likely to be excluded from school than their white peers.

The death of my nephew was not a simple race issue. It would almost be easier to understand if it was a case of white boys picking on a black kid – but it's not. The bullies who killed my nephew were black. My nephew had come over from Nigeria to study, in the same way that Damilola Taylor did. But equally I don't believe his case was an example of Nigerians, as a group, being picked on by black Britons.

There is undoubtedly a lot of tribalism out there with Jamaicans and black Britons and Africans sharing the same cities, but the problem goes deeper than that. It seems that everyone's so full of hate on an individual level. Everyone's got to front up to everyone. Everyone's got an attitude.

The music has a lot to answer for. As far as I can tell there are three themes to modern hip hop music – killing, sex and the police: if you haven't killed a man you're not worthy of respect; everyone's having sex all the time; and the police are always against you.

Some say that it's all down to the poverty and urban degradation in which many young black kids live, but there are a few problems with that theory. Yes, there's urban instability, crime and violence; yes, there's exposure to underage sex, a lack of stable relationships – and, to an extent, it's not surprising that this comes out in the lyrics. But urban white kids live in the same conditions. They can be just as deprived, just as poor, just as criminal, but you just don't hear the same sort of violence and hatred in the lyrics of white music. You'll hear most songs produced by white people talk about "making love" not "fucking".

It's not just the boys it affects. It has a desensitising effect on young black girls, too. I was in the car with my 13-year-old daughter the other day and she put on one of her CDs and it was all about "hos", which is slang for prostitute, "bitches" and pleas to "suck my dick". I would never have let her buy this if I'd known it contained stuff like this, but thinking about it you can see how a girl listening to this sort of thing will be bound to consider it normal if she encounters it in real life. And most of the women in hip hop aren't doing any good, either. Listen to L'il Kim and she's talking about women beating up their black girlfriends and other nasty sexually explicit stuff.

Having said all that, I want to stress that I actually like hip hop music – it's the lyrics that I have a problem with. I'm a black man and it's part of my culture (although hip hop is specifically an Afro-American phenomenon rather than an African one). The music's exciting and it gets your adrenaline up. I remember when I played for Wimbledon that we used to crank up the stereo before a big match and stick the latest rap tune on. It got us totally fired up for the game.

It's the lyrics. What you have to bear in mind about young black kids is that they listen so attentively to what their heros are saying. It's like poetry to them. The rap artists are like prophets but it's a corrupting message that they preach.

Where does that leave us? What can we in the black community do to drive this hatred out of our kids? How can we prevent the death of kids like my nephew Jude? I would not have thought a boycott would work. A lot of this music originally came from the underground and the ghettos and you can't touch that. The bottom line is that people will listen to (and buy) what they want to hear.

No, what we need is leadership. It's a problem for black people, and black leaders must tackle it head on. And there is hope. I've recently talked with Kanya King, who runs the Mobo (music of black origin) awards, and she sees things the same way as me. I've raised it with Lennox Lewis, Linford Christie, John Barnes and others, and I know that we all think on the same lines. It's up to people to whom young kids will listen to speak up on this. They are just not going to listen to MPs.

What's the message? We're not saying you can't dress in Armani and Gucci and be rich and successful. We're not saying you can't make something of your lives. What we are saying is that the message of casual, unthinking, even pathological violence is not empowering now (if it ever really was). It just ingrains a bad stereotype of black culture.

What we really need is for those mega stars like P Diddy, Mary J Blige and Missy Elliot to get the message and start putting it out there. Why should P Diddy cut tracks about violence and aggression? Would he be doing that if his nephew had been killed so needlessly, like mine? We need people like him to make music and write lyrics that are going to make young black kids respect themselves and not go chasing after some futile, macho image of themselves.

We need to take out the hatred.