The Fortune Men — a blistering story of racial injustice in Wales

[Deeq A.]

Based on a real-life case from 1952, Nadifa Mohamed’s captivating novel is teeming with character and evocative of its time.

Bute Street in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, pictured in 1950, when the area was home to a diverse population of Somali, west African, Arab, Caribbean and Greek families © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1998, the wrongful conviction of a brutal murder that had occurred in Cardiff’s docklands 46 years earlier was quashed at the Court of Appeal. The clearing of his name — the first posthumous pardon of this kind in British history — came too late, however, for Mahmood Mattan, a 28-year-old British Somali who, on September 3 1952, following a three-day trial, was the last person to be hanged at Cardiff Prison.There was no forensic evidence that Mattan had committed the crime — the violent throat-slashing of a well-known local shopkeeper, Lily Volpert, was in fact part of a botched robbery — the testimony of various alleged witnesses was unreliable, and Mattan continued to insist he was innocent.

But the odds were stacked against him from the start. What is now recognised as institutionalised racism — in addition to the payment of a reward to the prosecution’s main witness, the exclusion of vital evidence, and Mattan’s own defence referring to him as a “semi-civilised savage” — led to the state-sanctioned killing of a young man. He left a widow and three small sons.

It’s a grim, desperate and horribly familiar story, and The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed’s blistering novel about the case, could have been written in a bleak, sober style to match. The fact that it isn’t is something of a triumph on the part of the author.

Mohamed, who was born in Somalia in 1981 and has lived in Britain since she was a child, has written a deeply engaging book about race and injustice. The Fortune Men can be read as a comment on 21st-century Britain and its continued troubled legacy of empire, but also as a beautifully judged fiction in its own right — teeming with life, character and humour, and, particularly, evocative of place.

The setting is Butetown, known locally as Tiger Bay (Bae Teigr in Welsh), the Cardiff docks area that was historically one of the most culturally diverse — and poorest — parts of the Welsh capital. By the 1950s, Tiger Bay was home to an “army of workers” from more than 50 countries, “dredged in to replace the thousands of mariners lost in the war.” The cheek-by-jowl housing reflected this mix — neighbours might attend the mosque, or celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim, all visualised by Mohamed in a noisy, cinematic rush.

Mahmood Mattan is one of these drifting workers, a former ship’s stoker originally from what was then British Somaliland. Mohamed doesn’t portray him as a saint, and this is imperative in making his guileless downfall so wrenching to witness. As the book opens, he is down on his luck, barred from many casual jobs due to openly racist policies. To survive, he operates as a petty thief and small-time gambler on the horses and on poker: cocky and charming but also quiet, with a homburg hat pulled low. Acquaintances refer to him as “the Ghost.” He has only basic English and, as he is to discover, a misplaced faith in British justice.

Mattan’s wife Laura is white and Welsh — they had married within three months of meeting and the family is subject to mistrust and overt racist abuse. As the novel opens, the couple has separated and Mattan is living in a run-down boarding house for “coloureds” run by the Fagin-like elderly Jamaican, Doc Madison, also a former merchant seaman: “his iron-post bed piled high with pillows and floral quilts have the look of an oriental shrine, a still point of majesty and judiciousness, while his purple silk pyjamas just add to his regal air.” Doc is one of the stand-out essentials in a varied cast that includes the murdered woman and her family.

Lily Volpert is renamed here as Violet Volacki; she runs a general shop called Volacki’s, which her father set up 40 years earlier, living on the premises with her widowed sister Diana and Diana’s young daughter Grace. Mohamed has created a vivid back-story for Violet that is no less poignant than that of Mattan. The eldest of three sisters, Violet is unmarried and is haunted by nightmares of relatives in Europe who have recently met a terrible end, fearful for the family’s safety as Jews: “this patch of earth, reclaimed from marshland and still liquid, deep within the foundations, is all the sanctuary they have.” Diana and Grace are eating supper in the back room one cold, rainy evening in March 1952 when Violet leaves them to answer an unexpected late ring of the shop doorbell.

Mohamed — whose first novel Black Mamba Boy (2010) was a stunning semi-biographical account of her father’s life in pre-war colonial Yemen and beyond — moves faultlessly from the cacophony of Butetown to describe the claustrophobia, camaraderies and hostilities of prison, where Mattan is now incarcerated and awaiting trial. Memory provides a rich landscape to counter the mundanity and anxiety of his days, buoyed by visits from Laura and his sons, as he recalls growing up in the so-called British “protectorate” of Somaliland, and his long erratic journey to “the end of a hangman’s noose”.

Source: Financial Times

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