Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I caught up with the film-maker and award-winning poet Caleb Femi about his latest collection, The Wickedest, which takes you on a time-stamped journey through a fictional south London house party. But first, the weekly roundup.

Weekly roundup

DRC conflict escalates | The armed group M23 and Rwandan soldiers entered the centre of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Sunday night, advancing the risk of a broader war between Rwanda and DRC. Violence in eastern DRC has “compounded the problems of a country that already has one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises”, reports Carlos Mureithi.

Families of apartheid victims sue South African government | The Cradock Four were a group of anti-apartheid activists who were killed by state security forces after being stopped at a roadblock in 1985. Now their families are suing the South African government for failing to bring their killers to justice.

Black airmen removed from US air force curriculum | As a result of Donald Trump’s executive order to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the US air force has suspended a training course documentary about the first Black airmen in the country’s military, known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

Sierra Leone on precipice of change | A parliamentary bill could lead to the abolition of a centuries-old British colonial law, with new legislation decriminalising abortion and ensuring that all women and girls have access to comprehensive reproductive care. However, progress is under the threat of influence from US religious extremists.

Cinematic acclaim for Afro-Brazilian narratives | The production company Filmes de Plástico has focused on making films on working-class, urban-dwelling, Black characters, who are typically underrepresented in Brazilian cinema.

In depth: The Wickedest shoobs you’ve ever attended

The Wickedest is a legendary, monthly south London house party that is three generations deep – an Uber driver recounts the lore of this night, beginning with a man called Mig Jarrett, who danced after falling in love with “someone’s aunty”. “The wickedest / people who / geese-flocked / to Mig’s / house claiming / bomb shelter.” For Femi, 34, writing this epic was drawn from his experience of growing up on a now-demolished estate, where house parties and “shoobs” would provide respite from the challenges that afflicted inner-city, working-class Black people.

Infamous for being the site of the murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in 2000, the North Peckham estate, like many of those postwar concrete constructions that sought to provide stability to Britain’s underclasses, had long been synonymous with criminality and decline. But these ideas had been explored in Femi’s debut collection, Poor. The Wickedest is “not alien from the world of Poor, but this is just a party that’s happening on the side. Here’s these people who are experiencing the issues in Poor. Here’s what they do when they want to have a good time.”

The Wickedest is certainly a good time. Time and the body are one as the collection moves through a circadian rhythm. At 11:03pm, the partygoers arrive in “Amina Muaddi heels and B22s”; at 01:42am, a DJ is shouting at a couple “lipsing” (British slang for kissing) by a window and then chastises them “you lot been there all night though / you’re blocking the breeze”. And at 03:26am a partygoer is in tears grieving a friend: “My gut tells me that you are here … / you’ve never been the type / to miss a lit shoobs.” For Femi, this is the most fascinating aspect of a house party – “How time dictates how we feel and how certain experiences come to us. There’s certain sensibilities that only occur because the time of night permits it.” In this way, as you move through the timestamps of The Wickedest, you not only get lessons in “hood peacocking” (impressing beautiful women) and a tutorial of the “destruction dance” but real human emotion, as romances blossom or are frustrated, the party becomes a space for escapism, and characters share wisdom with one another. Femi “felt that the timestamps would help implicate the reader” and that the cast of characters meant readers would “have the space to participate with what you can and can’t relate to”.

***

A long history of partying through adversity

Inspiration for The Wickedest comes not only from Femi’s experiences as an adult partygoer, but also from the social housing estate of his childhood. “Living in the North Peckham estate when I was around 10 was one of my first times experiencing house parties in a way that felt very communal.” These house parties had an open-door policy – if you lived in the area, then you lived in the block, and the door would be open. “I remember hearing music on other floors or hearing or seeing a ruckus going on and knowing that I could go there, because you’d see kids from the estate running in and out.”

When Femi would sneak past his parents to attend these parties, he found grooves reflecting the migrant communities that had come together on these estates – Femi himself had arrived from Nigeria in 1997, aged seven. “You’d have very west African parties, with fuji music and P-Square being played. Then there were more Caribbean parties, and those fascinated me because it was new, hearing lovers rock. I would never hear that in my house. And reggae. This high-octane music and the way it made people feel. I could see the similarities with Nigerian music, too.” And then there were more distinctly Black British sounds: garage, jungle, rave music, the kind that thrived on pirate radio. And, noting his age, whenever it was another kid from the block having a house party, it would be “S Club 7 and the Cheeky Girls, primary-school disco music”.

Femi was deeply invested in the history of such parties for Black communities in Britain. He was interested in the idea of communities being “ostracised and experiencing harder times” and then finding refuge in these spaces. “The idea of shebeens fascinated me,” Femi says, describing the unlicensed bars and house parties that flourished in postwar Britain. “I spoke to these three Caribbean women from south London in their late 60s and they told me shebeens would happen in garages or abandoned spaces or someone’s house.” Such underground gatherings were also known as blues parties, which were created by West Indian migrants who found that the “colour bar” prevented them from entering mainstream, West End clubs.

Still, Femi continues, these makeshift spaces were troubled by outside discrimination. “There was always the perception that illicit stuff happens there, which is a reflection of how most of us were taught to see working-class Black community spaces as no-go spaces.” Such dehumanising perceptions of Black parties have been presented at key junctures of British history. The tragedy that became known as the New Cross fire in 1981, which killed 13 young Black people, tore through a house party celebrating an 18th birthday. While it was never proven to have been a racist attack, we know that the fire was started deliberately, and there had been complaints about the party to the police.

***

The decline of Black nightlife

In the middle of The Wickedest is a copy of form 696 – a risk-assessment form used by the Metropolitan police to evaluate the risk of violent crime at music events. On the form, responding to the maximum capacity of the premises, Lala, who hosts the Wickedest, writes: “Unknown (it was built by the same architect as the Tardis)”. Form 696 had been in operation in 21 London councils from 2008 to 2017, and had been viewed as an unsubtle attempt to curtail Black nightlife by removing the licence of Black grime and garage clubs – an extended version of the form asked if a particular ethnic group was attending the event. Femi included this in recognition of how licensed clubs had grown out of those house parties, showing how Black people have been vexed by police interference and “noise disturbance” complaints at every stage of the evolution of nightlife. In Sonnet 696 he writes: “What could go wrong if we so happen / to end up under the same roof; a party, / summer barbecue, will we all combust?”

The precariousness of Black nightlife is a core concern of The Wickedest. For Femi, house parties aren’t the same any more, largely due to the decline of social housing and spaces in which you can reliably throw one. He mourns the lack of character of more modern housing, too. New builds with glossy white kitchen countertops lack the family photos, tacky wallpaper and heirlooms that made early house parties a space of cultural heritage. These now feel relegated to nostalgia. Stormzy’s house party space in Soho, London, attempts a close visual recreation, but isn’t really the same thing. In The Wickedest, though, Femi has captured the real spirit of the house party, in all its noise and complication, and he commemorates the beauty and history that emerges when Black people come together under one space in pursuit of a good time.

The Wickedest by Caleb Femi is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.