Make Believe

Hakim Jamal (real name Alan Donaldson) was born in Roxbury, a black district of Boston, in 1933. His father was a drunk, his mother left when he was six. He started drinking at ten and was using heroin at fourteen. In his early twenties he spent four years in prison and was committed to an asylum for two attempted murders. At twenty-seven he was converted by the teachings of Malcolm X, leader of the Black Muslim movement, Nation of Islam, and his life changed. He became an eloquent spokesman for the black urban underclass in America. He was briefly Jean Seberg's lover. By the late 1960s Hakim Jamal was living in London with Gale Benson, a divorcee in her twenties, the daughter of an British MP, who took the name Hale Kimga. Diana Athill met Hakim Jamal when she edited his book, From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me, published by Andre Deutsch. Against all odds, they became friends, sometimes lovers.
In Make Believe, originally published in 1993 and out of print for some years, Diana Athill describes, with her trademark unflinching honesty, her relationship with Hakim and his milieu, the devastation wrought on his personality by his background, his increasingly bizarre behaviour and his descent into madness. Both Hakim Jamal and Hale Kimga were murdered, separately, in the early 1970s.