Racism, a stacked system — Nadifa Mohamed’s Booker-shortlisted novel ‘The Fortune Men’ shows not much has changed since 1952

A photograph appears on the Internet/Nadifa Mohamed




Toronto Star
By Steven J. Beattie

On September 3, 1952, a Somali man named Mahmood Mattan was hanged in Cardiff, Wales, for the murder of a Jewish shop owner named Lily Volpert. In 1998, 46 years after Mattan’s execution, following years of campaigning by his widow, Laura, a judicial review found the case against Mattan to be “fatally flawed.” These are the true facts of the case.

In fictionalizing this story of a lethal miscarriage of justice, Somali-born British writer Nadifa Mohamed has crafted a mesmerizing novel that, notwithstanding its historical setting, has disconcerting resonance for the present.




“The Fortune Men,” which was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, manages an intimate presentation of Mattan’s experience by way of a present-tense, close third-person narration. Mohamed provides her reader with a nuanced, closely observed psychological portrait of a man who was guilty of many things, but not the crime for which he was sentenced to die.

In Mohamed’s portrayal, Mattan is a gambler, a thief and a womanizer, though he also shares a deep emotional connection to his white Welsh wife and their three small sons. Mohamed insists on his full humanity while also making clear the extent to which he was scapegoated by a racist and uncaring judicial system.

Mohamed’s approach in this regard is canny. The trial itself is cast in the form of court transcripts in which a succession of prosecution witnesses provide patently contradictory evidence mixed with prevarication and outright lies. One key witness against Mattan identifies him only after being offered a reward and being coerced by the police.

Even Mattan’s own lawyer refers to him in court as a “child of nature” and a “semi-civilized savage.” “I’m not going to insult your intelligence, members of the jury, by suggesting that anything he has said at any time is true,” Mattan’s lawyer tells the court before insisting that his client’s lack of honesty does not make him a murderer.




In an ironic twist, Mohamed puts Mattan in the position of potentially being able to provide an alibi for himself, though he is unwilling to do so, given that at the time of the murder he was with a woman who was not his wife. Even while sitting on death row, he refuses to divulge his true whereabouts for fear of hurting Laura.

Laura Mattan is the most stalwart figure in “The Fortune Men,” standing by her husband and refusing to give up hope until the very end. (An epilogue informs us that she found out about the execution only when she attempted to visit Mattan in prison after he had been killed.)

Laura’s counterpoint in the first half of the novel is Diana, the sister of the murdered woman. Focusing on Diana allows Mohamed to extend her critique of a racist society by inserting undercurrents of anti-Semitism into the way the murder is handled by officials and the interactions Diana has with her fellow citizens.

In what is arguably the only misstep Mohamed makes, the sections involving Diana disappear in the second half of the book; there is a sense that this aspect of the story is not so much concluded as forgotten or abandoned. That said, the increasingly granular focus on Mattan himself is reasonable, especially as the day of his execution draws closer.

Mohamed illustrates the doomed man’s faith in the British judicial system until well after it is merited: even close to the end, he believes his innocence will save him from the hangman’s noose. His naiveté is the central damning indictment of this searing, affecting and distressingly relevant novel.