By Megan Thomas
I bought my copy and Nadifa Mohamed signed it around this time last year when it launched during Somali Week Festival at the British Library. Testimony to the fact that book-buying and book-reading are two different hobbies? Partly. However, it also took me about three months to read, which is unusual for me. I don’t not-finish books (it’s a curse), but once again my stubbornness was validated by the fact that it was worth the push.
I think part of why this took me so long was because The Fortune Men was, to my knowledge, the first non-fiction novel I’ve read and I didn’t fully understand until around halfway that this was not historical fiction. For the most part, it’s similar to historical fiction in its novelisation of an historical event – except that there is a lot less fiction and it is very closely depicting the actual historical events it is re-imagining. In this case, we learn of the story of the Somali seaman who was wrongfully executed for murder in Cardiff in 1952.
Of course, there is also the element of the necessary slow-build – the man accused, Mattan, is no saint, but without this time to develop his character, I wouldn’t have been able to say with the certainty I had by three-quarters of the way through that he also is no murderer. Stick it out, get invested. It’s worth it, in the sense that the miscarriage of justice that follows is all the more horrifying.
Was it lazy police work? Lying witnesses looking for reward money? Institutional racism? Loathing – or perhaps indignation – of the fact that Mattan had married a Welsh woman and had three mixed race children with her? A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? The wrong colour in the wrong time? The fact that a person who can travel alone from the Horn of Africa to Tiger Bay in the 1950’s has to be a bit of a gambler, never sure whether to show his full hand? Yes, yes, yes, yes, possibly yes, probably yes, definitely yes.
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