Ciaran Duncan

“The tireless stoker, the poker shark, the elegant wanderer, the love-starved husband, the soft-hearted father” – Mahmood Hussein Mattan.

If Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel Black Mamba Boy (based on her father’s own story) explored the web of wanderings that led a Somali boy to become a British subject, such a transition forms only the backstory of her third publication: The Fortune Men. The novel’s main protagonist, Mahmood Hussein Mattan, is a sailor from colonised British Somaliland who has settled down in post-WWII Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, grounded by his love of a Welsh woman, Laura, and their young family. The novel excavates a true story of historical injustice as Mahmood is forced to fight for his life after he is suspected of murdering Jewish shopkeeper Violet Volacki. This is an act that he, despite being involved in several minor thefts, would never commit. In close third-person narration the novel follows both Mahmood, and especially in its first half, Diana Volacki, Violet’s sister. Diana has lived a fascinating life herself, notably becoming a Corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during WWII. This split focus shows Mohamed’s project to be the three-dimensional recreation of lives beset by different kinds of violence.

Mohamed writes the texture of place with virtuosic fluency, and Tiger Bay’s multiracial community forms her novel’s heart. By contrast to what Mahmood perceives as the “war-beaten and monochrome misery” of the Cardiff city centre, the dockside area teems with life. This is glimpsed, for instance, in the excitement of children of all creeds and colours during a lively Eid procession through the streets. Add a fun reference to an unknown Shirley Bassey singing in a local café and it grows clear why, on top of its 2021 Booker Prize shortlisting, the novel made a deserving winner of the 2022 Wales Book of the Year Award. Crucially though, the here-and-now of Tiger Bay is layered with all the remembered places Mohamed’s characters carry with them. Mohamed is drawn to immigrant communities’ “struggles to keep old worlds alive” in customs and in memory, whether Somali, West Indian, or Jewish.

Their shared new world is prominently tarnished by different forms of racism, though. The Jewish Volackis, for instance, are treated as a “model minority” by some in Cardiff but also subjected to a pernicious cluster of stereotypes and phobias all their own. Their shop has been vandalised several times before the ultimate violence of Violet’s murder. The leading questions and racial profiling that Mahmood will increasingly face do not occur in a vacuum.

The novel’s first words are “the King is dead. Long live the Queen”. 1952 saw George VI’s death and Elizabeth II’s accession: a moment of national and imperial transition highly resonant in 2023. Mohamed is more interested in the internal workings of the British State than its figurehead, however. The text’s final act begins with a trial scene in which Mohamed’s detailed evocation of internal and external worlds is replaced by a staccato court transcript. The reader feels Mahmood’s piercing disorientation and sense that events are rapidly spinning out of control. With tragic irony, a man who has seen vast swathes of the world and speaks five languages well is written off as an illiterate, “semi-civilized savage”. But Mohamed’s combination of archival research and creative imagining works against such misrecognition. Like Steve McQueen’s Small Axe television series, The Fortune Men places Britain’s contemporary reckoning with prejudicial policing and a biased legal system in its lengthy historical context. That Mohamed manages to present victims of injustice as complex, vividly human agents in their own right signals that one of Britain’s outstanding novelists has produced her fullest work yet.

Cite this: Duncan, Ciaran. ““Famous British Justice” on trial in Tiger Bay: A review of The Fortune Men.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2023, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-mohamed-the-fortune-men/. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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Nadifa Mohamed reads from and discusses her debut novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), based on her father’s travels across the Horn of Africa before settling in Britain. In discussion with Dr Kate Wallis, she talks about the process of writing the novel, and how it has been read and received in Britain and elsewhere.

The post Great Writers Inspire at Home: Nadifa Mohamed on travelling, home and belonging in <em>Black Mamba Boy</em> appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Nadifa Mohamed, 2010, Sabreen Hussain (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Nadifa Mohamed’s writing is concerned with disrupting and confronting unequal power dynamics, and in particular with presenting histories and narratives from a Somali perspective. As a writer, she is interested in exploring the day-to-day details of people’s lives – ‘what they think about, what they dream about and hope for’ – arguing that this detail is missing from a lot of narratives about Africa. She has also observed that the existing histories and narratives written about Somalia are ‘sparse’, highlighting that those that are published are often written by non-Somalis and ‘can be quite hostile’.

Mohamed’s debut novel began life as a biography and is a work of fiction based on the life-story of her father, which draws on firsthand interview accounts. Black Mamba Boy opens in London in 2008 with the first-person narrator identifying herself as ‘my father’s griot’ (1). The novel then moves back to 1938 and into the third person to follow the story of protagonist Jama, who journeys around the Horn of Africa and beyond before finally ending up in the UK. While Mohamed’s first novel tells her father’s story, her second novel’s first acknowledgement is to her mother, ‘from whose stories this book emanated’ (337). The Orchard of Lost Souls is set in 1980s Hargeisa, very deliberately offering a gendered perspective on Somalia on the brink of civil war. The story is told through the eyes of three interconnected women: Filsan, a young female soldier; Kawsar, a widow and victim of the military regime; and Deqo, a refugee girl.

As Aminatta Forna highlights in the New York Times, in both of Mohamed’s novels she is ‘generationally at a remove from the event she describes’, revealing how the ‘echo of war reverberates down the generations, and why every nation needs its storytellers’. In an essay exploring Black Mamba Boy as a narrative ‘born out of displacement and diaspora’, Emma Bond suggests that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of ‘post-memory’ offers a potentially productive frame for reading Mohamed’s work.

—Kate Wallis, 2017

Cite this: Wallis, Kate. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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This extract comes from pp. 1–2 of Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy. Feel free to highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passage with your own thoughts.

I am my father’s griot, this is a hymn to him. I am telling you this story so that I can turn my father’s blood and bones, and whatever magic his mother sewed under his skin, into history. To make him a hero, not the fighting or romantic kind but the real deal, the starved child that survives every sling and arrow that shameless fortune throws at them, and who can now sit back and tell the stories of all the ones that didn’t make it. I tell you this story because no-one else will. Let us call down the spirits of the nine thousand boys who foolishly battled on the mountains of Eritrea for Mussolini, who looked like my father, lived like him but had their lives cut off with blunt axes, the ones starved to death, the ones who lost their minds, and the ones who simply vanished. Boys like Shidane Boqor Our fiery boy! Our pilferer of canned goods! Our dead child! Light the torches for his flight to heaven. Let his shadow always haunt his tormentors. Let them bathe for all eternity in the Shebelle and Juba before their sins are washed away.

My father’s life has been an exercise in a strange kind of liberty; if he outwitted death then his life was to be completely, perfectly his own, owing no debts to anyone or anything. Like his mother before him, he sharpened his spirit on the knife edge of solitude; stylites on their pillars, they saw loneliness, aloneness, oneness as divine states. The mother of all sailors is meant to be the sea, but Ambaro was more powerful, more tempestuous, more life-giving than any puddle of water. She gave life to my father over and over again, guarding him as did Aeneas. She took his paltry little life and moulded it into something epic. Her love was violent, thick lava that she poured into her son’s mouth, she cut her veins and transfused her hot wild blood into his soul. She was all that he needed in life and he remains here testament to what a mother’s love can do, it turns wax into gold.

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As Tina Steiner argues in her examination of the divergent pulls of space and time in the novel, Black Mamba Boy can be read as both ‘an adventure tale and as a historical novel’. In addition to the lyricism of Mohamed’s prose and the gripping account of her father’s history, the novel has drawn praise for providing alternative perspectives on world historical events. For example, it shows the pervasive impact of the Second World War beyond the battlefields that tend to dominate the accounts of history books: Jama witnesses the many casualties of Mussolini’s occupation of Eritrea, and later joins a ship transporting Jewish refugees from German concentration camps denied entry to Palestine and seeking safety in Britain. These scenes are some of the most difficult, and most moving, in the novel.

Cite this: Boehmer, Elleke and Wallis, Kate. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 April 2026.

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