In late December 2019 I heard of a new book that told the melancholic odyssey of Somali seaman, Mahmoud Mattan, to 20th century Tiger Bay, Cardiff where he was wrongly found guilty of the murder of Lily Volpert, and sent to hang in the gallows on September 1952. My great grandfather also lived in Cardiff during that period and it wasn’t long before I tracked down the author, Nadifa Mohamed, and inquired if he was in the novel. He is, she assured me, but “a very brief part though.” I would have bought it anyway but that news only increased my anticipation. It’s not everyday that one is accorded the flattering accolade of finding a kinsperson in a Booker nominated novel.

I was born and raised in Cardiff, and was surprised to find that my great grandfather, referred to in the book as “Dualleh the Communist,” was present at Mattan’s trial. He was a prominent activist and a thorn in the side of the South Wales police force who thought he was “unwittingly associating with Communists,” according to their archives. Did they actually think he wasn’t aware of what the hammer and sickle symbolized, I laughed, as I sifted through their records about him.

I still got through much of my life without any knowledge of the fact that the last man sentenced to death in Britain was Somali, hung where I grew up and probably knew a relative of mine. What’s more astounding is the manner in which it was quietly brushed under the carpet and willfully forgotten until Nadifa Mohamed dug it up and helped the story reach a global audience. Mattan was posthumously exonerated in 1998, but that would have been little consolation to his friend’s, children (one of whom took the revelations about his father very hard) and grieving wife, Laura.