In an interview after the recording, Mpanga recalled how the podcast’s diverse influences had come together. “I wanted to be both street and book smart,” he said of his teenage years on a housing project in northwestern London. “I took pride in my intellectual abilities, but I also took pride in my surroundings,” he added.

“I was an M.C. in every spare moment that I wasn’t in school, and I was very committed to perfecting the craft,” he said. Grime, a genre of electronic music that was emerging in London at the time, was a big influence, he added, as were rappers from the United States, such as Nas.

But while rap was Mpanga’s teenage passion, it was a career in politics that beckoned. Or at least, that’s what he thought.

At Cambridge University, an elite institution whose student body has a much lower proportion of black and working-class people than the rest of British society, Mpanga studied politics, psychology and sociology, and ran in elections to become the president of his college’s student union. He said that throughout his time at Cambridge, he came to feel increasingly isolated in a very white, patrician space and that he grew disillusioned with the idea of a career in Parliament, which had seemed like a logical step. But he also discovered an affinity for spoken-word poetry.

A friend was putting on a music event, he recalled, and asked Mpanga to perform. But he didn’t want to rap: There were “annoying” and “irresponsible” stereotypes that he, as one of the few black men on campus, didn’t want to uphold, he said. So he decided to try something more poetic.

“The reception I got for this new style of performance that I was coming up with really let me know I was on to something,” he said. “And that was it.”