The jazz man was a trumpeter called Donny "Zulu" Stevens. Donny was not, of course, a Zulu. His family was Caribbean and before that, in so far as anyone could guess, they’d been Fula. The name of the Zulu, however, is so rooted in British mythology that you’d think they were almost the only Africans, ubiquitous across the entire continent and ready to take on at any moment another army under the command of Michael Caine. Any black man who was seen to do anything other than play cricket, deliver letters or drive a taxi was clearly of that fabled race who fought the redcoats and beat them down. Donny wore the label without blinking because he was first of all a performer and he knew when not to buck a legend—which is not to say that it did not anger him, because it did, every day and every time he saw it written on a poster next to his own face.