Mahmood is a petty thief and a gambler who is far from saintly, but he's not a murderer. With emotive detail she depicts the diverse community of Cardiff's Tiger Bay with its West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. In her novel “The Fortune Men” Nadifa Mohamed fictionalizes the case of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali-born merchant seaman who was arrested and executed for the murder of a shopkeeper in 1952 despite overwhelming evidence proving his innocence. Or you might find this fact sadly unsurprising given the way non-white men are still profiled and marginalized in this society – as depicted in “Open Water” by Caleb Azumah Nelson. How do we deal with the knowledge that an innocent man was executed by the state because of the colour of his skin? The response from many people in Britain would most likely be that this was a form of institutionalised racism which isn't found here today.
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