I Am Pasha Liffey

'I Am Pasha Liffey' were the last recorded words of the young man from Lesotho in southern Africa, guilty of the brutal murder of 61-year-old Mary Jane Jose in Larkhall, Lanarkshire in August 1905. His crime, trial and punishment and the resulting publicity reveal what it was to be Black and poor, on display and on the move, in the years between his birth and his execution.The narrative shows how of perceptions of race, white civilisation and ‘African savagery’ shaped Pasha’s life, in Africa and Britain, where he worked as a stable boy, house servant, groom, stage performer, milkman, muleteer, army scout, circus hand, barman and boxer. It is also an account of his victim – the Cornish pit-head worker, migrant and mother whose family struggled with poverty, dangerous and deadly working conditions, infant deaths, mental illness and alcohol in the mining communities of Lanarkshire.