Islam in Southern Africa 1652–1998
Robert C.-H. Shell
Ideas follow trade routes, but not necessarily voluntarily. This was the case when the first Muslim, Ibrahim van Batavia, a slave, splashed ashore in Table Bay in the second half of the seventeenth century, shipped to southern Africa by an unlikely agent of Islam—the Dutch East India Company.1 Islam arrived in southern Africa as a coincidence of geography, colonization, slavery, and the geopolitics of mercantile commerce. A new society emerged, “where the South Atlantic joins the Indian Ocean, and Calvinist Christianity with Roman law bobbed, uneasily, at the confluence of a sad human sea that flowed as much from the Muslim East Indies as from the tip of Africa.”2 The number of South Africa’s Muslims grew until, by the last census of 1996, there were nearly 504,000 of them (in a population of some forty-one million).
South African Muslims can boast one of the highest rates of hajj outside of the Middle East; however, while the study of Islam in North, West, and East Africa has been well documented, the topic of Islam in southern Africa is still in its infancy. After more than three centuries at this southern tip, South African Muslims afford fertile ground for further study: they comprise a well-documented, highly urbanized set of minority communities in a plural, modernizing society.
The First Phase of Immigration
The Cape of Good Hope, which served the Dutch East India Company (hereafter the DEIC) primarily as a refreshment station for its fleets plying the Far East trade, simultaneously functioned as an effective place of exile for political leaders whom the company had dethroned in its eastern possessions. Most of these political exiles were Muslims, sometimes accompanied by a following of coreligionists. Some two hundred spent time at the Cape between 1652 and the end of company rule in 1795. The arrival in 1682 of Makasserese political prisoners of state rank, including army officers and “three Makasserese princesses,” marked the DEIC decision to neutralize all Muslims at the Cape by isolating them on outstations. Sometimes, families were split apart.3
Among these early political exiles to the Cape was Shaykh Yusuf, a man widely regarded as an Islamic saint and a person who embodies the Cape exile experience.4 Yusuf, born at Maccassar (on Sulawesi, in modern Indonesia) in 1626, was a relative of the king of Goa, the ruling dynasty of Sulawesi. Converted to Islam, he went on hajj at eighteen. He studied for several years at Mecca, but who his teachers were is not known. Yusuf then established himself at the court of Sultan Ageng of Bantam, in western Java, where in 1646 he married one of the sultan’s relatives and became the leading religious authority. Regarded as a man of great piety and culture, he spent many years teaching the sultan and his court about Islam. Some have argued he was a Shafii sufi.5
On 1 May 1680, Sultan Ageng, by then the last independent sultan in the archipelago, was forced off the throne by his son, Sultan Haji, one of Yusuf’s pupils.6 This palace revolution was probably engineered by the DEIC, who now held a controlling hand over the new, young, sultan. In 1682, the old sultan tried to engineer a countercoup, forcing his son to appeal to the Dutch at Batavia for help, who gladly seized this chance of crushing the Bantamese power. Shaykh Yusuf, however, continued the struggle in a protracted guerrilla operation, until, more than a year later, he was persuaded to give himself up on the promise of a pardon.7 This promise was never honored by the DEIC, and following Yusuf’s imprisonment in Batavia and exile in Sri Lanka, the company resolved to send him to the Cape. In 1694, Yusuf, now sixty-eight years of age, arrived in the DEIC flute De Voetboog with his two wives, family, twelve disciples, friends, slaves, and followers. In all, there were forty-nine Muslims.8
The DEIC had not forgotten Yusuf’s revolutionary background, and the authorities at the Cape were given orders that Yusuf “was to be located at a distance from the roadstead in Table Bay so that he would not be able to get in touch with any adherents of the old regime.” With this in mind, the DEIC carefully interned Yusuf and his followers twenty miles from the roadstead, on the farm of a Dutch Reformed minister, the Reverend Petrus Kalden, at Faure. At this isolated spot on the False Bay coast, Shaykh Yusuf and his followers erected a few sparse dwellings. According to Jeffreys, this spot soon proved a rallying point for fugitive slaves and other easterners and “thereby brought the exiles into disrepute with the local authorities.”9 This seems to be the first evidence that Islam was being established and spread among the slaves at the Cape.
Yusuf’s home near the Maccassar Downs became a gathering spot for Muslims and runaway slaves until his death in May 1699.10 Reporting on Shaykh Yusuf’s death on 23 May 1699, the local officials uncharitably stated that they “welcomed” the death of the shaykh as a relief from financial expenditure and also from the anxiety of guarding against his escape. They concluded their dispatch by describing the situation at Faure: “These Mohammedans are multiplying rapidly and increasing in numbers. However, Joseph is now dead and we therefore ask you to find a proper method by which to release us from his adherents and their heavy expense, and also that we may in future be exempted from such people.”11
Yusuf was the author of several kitabs (religious writings) that are now housed in Leyden University. These works are today again being used by Cape Muslims. Yusuf is regarded as the founder of Islam in South Africa, although he seems not to have been the first Muslim to arrive there.12
The Bandit Imams
Nearly three thousand convicts (bandietten) arrived at the Cape to work in gangs on the fortification and harbor works of Cape Town. Of all enforced labor groups, they suffered the highest mortality, but they were free if they survived their sentences. Most came from the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago; some were from Java (the bulk of whom were of Chinese descent), but a few came from the Middle and Near East. The DEIC had trading stations at Gamron (Bandar Abas) in Iran and at Mokka on the Red Sea coast. Among these convicts were some exiled imams.
As early as 1725, these holy men were making their moral presence felt at the Cape, in the following case outside the notorious company brothel—the Lodge. Jan Svilt, a bookkeeper on a DEIC ship, de Geertruijd, provides the first commentary on the Islamic moral presence at the Cape:
Near us stood an elderly Moslem, from Persia I believe, who had been watching while our shipmates taunted us. … He pointed at the sailors swaying in line waiting for the whores, and said: “You Dutch Christians preach to us of your superior religion. The Calvinists are, to hear them, the salt of the earth with God-given morals.” He pointed to the line of drunken sailors: “Look at how you really are. You behave like swine, like drunken, whoring pigs. I would never allow my daughter to marry a Dutchman. I would break her neck first. Now you have the better ships, the bigger guns, and you make us your slaves. But one day Allah will be revenged.” I could not reply. The old man walked away. Bandino, whose mother had been a Bug[a]nese slave and a Moslem, was much upset by the old man’s harangue—Oh Christ, how different is your ideal world from the vile existence that surrounds me and my shipmates? That evening aboard our ship, little Bandino asked me to read to him a portion of the Bible which touched on the punishment for sinners who do not tread the narrow path of righteousness. I read him a sermon by St. Paul, which we both took to heart.13
Most early Cape Muslim leaders like the one mentioned here came from the ranks of the freed convicts rather than from the political exiles on the colony’s outstations (buitenposten), such as Robben Island. The bandiet imams, in contrast to the isolated exiles, trickled into the hurly-burly of Cape Town throughout the eighteenth century. Among them were men such as Sapoer (n.d.); ʿAbdul Radeen (n.d.); Abdullah van Batavia (n.d.); Joudaan Tappa Santrij (mentioned in sources in 1713) (santrij = scholar; he is known as “the free Javanese Pope”—the first Muslim martyr at the Cape); Fortuijn Aloewie Said van Mokka (1744) and Hajjie Mattavaan (1744) (these two Muslim “priesters” were chained together to work; Hajjie Mattavaan died the next year and Saʿid Alowie was allowed to work in Cape Town a few years later as a policeman);14 imam Fakirij van de Negerij Niassinna, (1746);15 Agmat, a prince from Ternate, and Al Jina ʿAbdullah (these two were banned on the same day in October 1766);16 Noriman van Cheribon (1767) (he ended his servitude in the slave lodge);17 imam ʿAbdullah (1780); imam Noro (1780); imam Patrodien (1780); imam Abdullah, Prins van Ternate (1780) (also known as Tuan Guru); and an imam simply recorded as Achmat (1795) (he, too, ended his sentence in the slave lodge). All these men were listed as “Mahometaanse priesters” or Muslim leaders in the voluminous bandietrollen (convict censuses). By no means all convicts were Muslims, but the convict population remained a source of Muslims. After the Dutch occupation ended (1795), the Reverend William Elliot, in charge of Christian evangelical activity to Muslims, was surprised to find, in 1829, that “[t]here are at present eighty-three convicts lodged in the battery, about half of whom are Mahometans.”18
Convict imams provided the core of the Cape’s early ʿulamaʾ (Muslim clergy) and also much of their genetic stock until the twentieth century.19 Such imams represent a spectacular example of colonial status inversion: in settler eyes they were convicts, but in the eyes of the autochthonous, slave, and free black populations they became leaders of an alternative culture.
Slaves and Their Religion
The Cape was a growing colony starved of labor. The autochthonous people were too independent to be enslaved, although there were several attempts to enslave them. Since the DEIC was forbidden from slaving on the west coast of Africa by the Dutch Estates General, the company and the early Cape colonists turned to the Indian Ocean for slaves. Some sixty-three thousand slaves were landed in South Africa between 1652 and 1807; then Britain abruptly abolished the oceanic slave trade.
The Indian subcontinent supplied more than a quarter of early South Africa’s formal slaves, and the Indonesian archipelago supplied another quarter, or slightly less. A little more than half of the slaves came from Madagascar, the Mascarene islands of the Indian Ocean, and the east coast of Africa. The Muslim sympathies of these groups were first noticed in the 1770s by the English explorer George Forster, who mentioned that a few slaves “weekly meet in a private house belonging to a free Mohammedan, in order to read, or rather chaunt, several prayers and chapters of the Koran.”20
The institution of slavery generated multiple pathways to Islamic conversion. The colony was ostensibly Christian, and in Dutch Reformed Christianity, baptism—which replaced the Old Testament rite of circumcision—was the key both to the religion and to society.21 The DEIC had an unwavering policy of baptizing its own slaves born at the Cape, but among the slaves owned by the settlers (the overwhelming majority) neither company, church, nor settlers engaged in significant Christian proselytization. Owners who evangelized among their slaves were bound by Dutch Reformed precept—though not by law—to bring them into the realm of legal and social equality. Most important, the right of an owner to sell a fellow Christian was circumscribed, and by 1799 most slave owners believed they would lose the right to sell their slaves if the slaves became Christian. In 1822, W. W. Bird, the comptroller of customs, reported that it was a frequent answer of a slave, when asked his motive for turning to Islam, that “some religion he must have, and he is not allowed to turn Christian.”22 By 1830, Christian conversion by slaves was at a standstill.
Interestingly, Christian and Muslim slave owners were both under similar precepts—the former from the Bible, the latter from the Quran. Both religions derived the stricture about not selling coreligionists from the example of Abraham, who had to circumcise all his household, including his slaves. Neither Christians nor Muslims could keep a fellow religionist in slavery. An imam named Muding explained to a British official in 1824 that “[a] Mahometan who has purchased a slave is forbidden by the principles of his faith to sell him, and they are never sold. If they embrace the faith, they [and their children] are enfranchised at the death of their owner.”23 But as Achmat Davids has observed there were several cases where even revered imams did not manumit their slaves at their death. For example, two of Tuan Guru’s slaves remained the property of his heirs until emancipation in 1834; another of his slaves purchased his freedom from the family nine years after the Tuans death in 1807.24 Whatever the case, the several hundred male slaves who bought their freedom or received it as a gift from their owners did not then turn to Christianity or its missionaries, whom they saw as having rejected them, but to Islam and to the open arms of the Cape imams.
The Muslim free blacks used their relative prosperity to free their own slaves and set a dramatic example by manumitting others, including Christian slaves. The Christian missionary John Philip noticed in 1831 with some poignancy that many slaves once owned by Muslims had been freed: “I do not know whether there is a law among the Malays binding them to make their slaves free,” he wrote, “but it is known that they seldom retain in slavery those that embrace their religion, & to the honor of the Malays it must be stated many instances have occurred in which, at public sales, they have purchased aged & wretched creatures, irrespective of their religion, to make them free.”25 Few such acts of piety for their fellow religionists could be found among the Christian slave owners.
The Reverend James Laing, from the Glasgow Missionary Society, noticed the zeal of the Muslims in the rates of conversion,26 and the Anglican Arabist William Elliot pointed out a powerful, but little discussed, anticolonial motivation for Islamic conversion: converts to Islam owed no intellectual inspiration to the European presence; every Muslim knew his or her religious identity was autonomous. A Muslim convert, ipso facto, was no Uncle Tom. In short, conversion to Islam may be seen in part as a cultural payback for the miseries of the colonial slave regime.
By the early nineteenth century, wine had come to dominate the Cape economy. This, too, opened an avenue for Islamic conversion. Owners of wine estates preferred their overseers and wagon drivers to be Muslim since they did not drink wine. W. W. Bird sums up this attitude: “It is made a question, still with worldly considerations only, whether the Muhammedan slave makes not a better servant than the Christian. His sobriety, as it is affirmed, makes amends for some ill-habits attendant on Muhammedanism. Christians, slaves as freedmen, blacks no less than whites, are, it is lamentable to say, drunken.”27
Under these conditions, Islam spread quickly among slaves and former slaves at the Cape. Christianity, on the other hand, lost—and decisively lost—this vital constituency. This era might be considered the golden age of Islam in Southern Africa in terms of numbers of converts.
Mardyckers and the Public Toleration of Islam
Islam was finally propelled from the private to the public sphere by a shortage of military manpower at the Cape and the concomitant emergence of what may be called the Cape Mardyker tradition.
The Portuguese word meredika was derived from the Sanskrit maharddhika, meaning “great man.” François Valentijn, the Dutch traveler and peripatetic Dutch Reformed minister of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries explained how the term had changed: “Mardijcker was derived from Ambon, where there is a hamlet called Campon-Meredhika [Kampung = village; lit., village of Mardijckers] inhabited by strangers who first arrived with the Portuguese from the Molluccas proper and were employed to help in strengthening the latter against the Amboinese.”28 Thus, in the archipelago, the new Malayo-Portuguese word merdeka came to have a meaning quite different from its Sanskrit roots: it now meant slaves who had been freed for defensive purposes.29 The concept was used in the Cape and can be said to have been responsible for the era of religious toleration following 1804. In that year, the Cape Muslims were enrolled in two artillery units in preparation for the invasion of the British. In return, they were given the right to worship publicly. After slavery they were obliged to fight in “the war of the axe” against the amaXhosa (1846–47), and many of those veterans elected to stay in the new frontier town of Port Elizabeth.30
Prize Negroes
After the formal abolition of the oceanic slave trade, the British acquired a new problem and the colony a new element in the population. What was to be the lot of slaves aboard ships the British navy intercepted at sea? The British Admiralty argued that such persons (who came to be called Prize Negroes) could not be returned to their homeland for the logical—but still somehow perverse—reason that they would run the risk of being re-enslaved. Consequently, two depots for these spectacular casualties of fate were established, one at Sierra Leone and one at Cape Town. Cape Town was doubly convenient as a dumping ground for Prize Negroes since its winter port of Simonstown had become the new South Atlantic base for the Royal Navy—in effect, the Gibraltar of the Indian Ocean rim.
While landing Prize Negroes at the Cape had begun as a philanthropic and liberty-affirming gesture, an ironic problem quickly arose: what was to be the extent of their freedom? The navy and the army could not employ all of them, and soon some were given out to individuals, with conditions of service being stipulated.31 When resistance from the new “employers” was encountered, a compromise was worked out: fourteen years of apprenticeship would have to pass before these slaves could be “free.” It also must be noted that some Prize Negroes’ children, aged from five to eighteen, were folded into the remaining slave population by unscrupulous beneficiaries of this scheme.32
According to Saunders, approximately five thousand such slaves were landed at the Cape between 1808 and 1856, a population (not counting offspring) equivalent to all the 1820 British settlers. In 1822, Bird observed that they were distributed throughout the colony as far afield as Farmerfield and Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, but remained concentrated in the Cape district.33 The navy even built houses for the Prize Negroes in Blacktown, as that part of Simonstown became known.34
It was not to the faith of their Christian benefactors that many of these landed slaves now turned. Despite some official sympathy for them, there was to be no Christian assimilation. Bird recalled in 1822: “A former governor was desirous of having a cargo of prize slaves baptised as they landed, great and small, old and young; but, upon being asked by the clergyman, who disliked the proceeding, whether he would undertake the office of general godfather … it was declined.”35 It was to the Muslim community that the Prize Negroes turned. By the early nineteenth century, Muslim tailors from Cape Town (specializing in naval uniforms) had established themselves in the small but growing naval base, and they became the source for the slaves’ religious inspiration.
Just after the inception of the Prize Negroes scheme officials remarked for the first time on a rapid spread of Islam in the colony. On 4 February 1808, the Earl of Caledon, the first civilian governor of the colony, wrote to Viscount Castlereagh, the British secretary for war: “The imported slaves are mostly from Mozambique, arriving here in total ignorance, and being permitted to remain in that state, they, for the most part, embrace the Mahomedan faith.”36 Imam Muding suggested in 1823 that at least “half” of the Muslims in the Cape colony were Prize Negroes.37 Gray, the Anglican archbishop, wrote in 1848 that “there are a very great number of Mahometans in and around Cape Town; their converts are made chiefly from among the liberated Africans.”38 In the same year, Gray’s colleague Archdeacon Merriman learned from a Cape farmer friend, a Mr. Maynier, “that the native families who had settled on his son-in-law’s … [Versveld’s] estate were all of Mozambique origin, and were, of course, heathen, but that all of them had at least nominally joined the Mohammedans and loved to be considered as Malays.”39 Among the Prize Negroes, religious conversion was unambiguously alloyed with an expressed need for a new ethnic identity.
The Prize Negroes, then, crossed what turned out to be a most convoluted cultural gangplank when they came ashore in dusty Simonstown. In 1864, De Roubaix, a French émigré, put an end to the Prize Negro period. When a Muslim slaving crew from Zanzibar was put ashore in Simonstown by the Royal Navy and treated as Prize Negroes, the crew turned to de Rouxbaix for help. Two years later, he returned them to Zanzibar at his own expense and wrote letters to the British Parliament to stop further shipments.
Doctrinal Disputes
It is usually affirmed that the Cape Muslims were of the Shafiʿi school of law. The basis given for this is that the Shafiʿis were firmly imbedded in the Indonesian archipelago, and it was from there that all Cape “Malays” originated (it must be noted, however, that several contemporary sources questioned what “Malay” really meant in the Cape context).
There is only scant evidence for a Shafii orthodoxy in the Islamic theological kaleidoscope of the early Cape; there is also little evidence on the origins of the slaves themselves. Whatever Islam brought to the early Cape it was not a Shafiʿi uniformity. Recent research has shown that a number of slaves imported to the Cape came from India, in particular from Bengal.40 In Bengal, the Shafiʿi orthodoxy had disappeared in the fourteenth century (to be displaced by the Hanafi school, and some Shiʿites).41 However, as Achmat Davids has pointed out, there were Shafiʿi communities on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. Still, since so many of the early Muslim slaves and later indentured servants were from the Bengal province, one might well dare ask whether the Shafiʿi “roots” of Cape Islam may not have been boosted in the historical literature in an attempt to maintain the embattled yet persistent “Malay” identity for the Cape Muslims.42
Frank Bradlow, a writer on Islam at the Cape, has already suggested this reasoning in respect of the large number of slaves and important “chief priests” from the province of Bengal, such as Frans van Bengal (chief imam in 1806). Bradlow wrote: “There is little doubt however that the immigrants from Bengal, whether they came as slaves, freemen or servants of Company officials … were the most important and influential of the people who established Islam in the Colony.”43 There is also the statement of John Mayson, a visiting English army officer: “The ancestor of the present chief Imam [“Abdul Roof,” 1854] came from Bengal, at the request of Mahometans at the Cape, and was by them elected to that important office.”44 Is it not natural that Indian Muslims in the early Cape, wanting reassurance about the authority of their precepts, should have sent for one from their homeland? Would a Shafiʿi “Malay” congregation have sent for an imam from Bengal?
Mayson was aware only of “orthodox sect[s]” of Sunnis and the Shiʿites in Cape Town. Of them, he wrote: “Few of them are aware of the existence of any phase of Mahometanism than that which is familiar to the confraternity. Differences which prevail among them have not originated in any doctrinal diversity, but in the claims of ecclesiastical candidates, and in the personal quarrels of imams.”45 In the late 1860s, doctrinal differences had resulted in a situation in which Muslim “relatives and other parties had been living in enmity for nearly a century.”46 Such differences can firmly be traced back to at least 1824, when an imam told how one congregation, led by an imam named Jan [van Boegies], “was not recognised by us” because of a separation. Moreover, in the same interviews, each imam told of different mosque disciplines. One congregation flogged disorderly people with canes (rattans) and “excommunicated” them; another only “excommunicated” offenders.47 There were certainly many such disputes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Links with the Outside World of Islam
By the 1790s, free Muslims were numerous enough to form a small, but self-assured, mercantile community in Cape Town, described by both travelers and colonists with approval. In 1799, Mirza Isfahani Abu Talib Ibn Muhammad Khan, a Persian visitor to the Cape, recalled that among the people of Cape Town he had “met with many pious good Mussulmans, several of whom possessed property. I had the pleasure of forming an acquaintance here with Sheikh ʿAbdullah, the son of ʿAbd al ʿAziz, a native of Mecca, who having come to the Cape on some commercial adventure, married the daughter of one of the Malays, and settled there. He was very civil, introduced me to all his friends, and anticipated all my wishes.”48 Imam Muding in 1824 told the Cape authorities that Cape “Arab” imams who had been at Mecca had imposed a limitation of two wives on the Cape congregations and implied that only such high authority could mandate such a reformulation of the traditional Muslim restriction of four wives.49
James Backhouse, a Christian missionary writing in the early 1830s, provides a clue about the routes of the first hajjis: “Their priests wore turbans, and garments of various colors; some of them made pilgrimages to Mecca, going to Arabia by way of Mauritius.”50 On the early pilgrimages along this well-sailed Cape slave route, these hajjis would have met other leaders of their faith. But there were other connections with the East African coast. For example, Mayson even tells of a state visit: “In 1820 and 1821, a number of distinguished Arabs from the island of Johanna, in the Mozambique channel, visited the colony. They were kindly received by the government, and were hospitably entertained by the Malays, whom they further instructed in the faith and practice of Islam, and with whom they have since constantly corresponded, sending them also supplies of the Koran and other books.”51 Even the sultan of the island visited in 1834, as is independently recorded: “Abdola, Sultan of the Island of St. [sic] Johanna,” staying at 61 Bree Street.52
Johanna (a.k.a. Anjouan), the most frequented island in the Comores group in the Mozambique channel, was long subject to Muslim influence and was also a slave entrepôt. The local dynasty was founded in 1506 by Muslims from Shiraz in Iran. The DEIC had contact with Anjouan from 1706, when they incurred a debt. The Dutch visited again from time to time and there was talk of rerouting the Ceylon fleets via Anjouan, but nothing came of this plan. One visit in 1773 by a Cape slaver—de Snelheid—resulted in a cordial exchange of letters in Arabic between the Cape and Anjouan.53 According to James Armstrong, a historian of Cape slavery, the Johannese leaders remembered all the previous DEIC visits to their “ancestors” and looked forward to renewed contact (and also politely never mentioned the debt). Armstrong also mentions the possibility that the Arabic interpreter on board was Tuan Guru, who clearly identified himself as the “oppressed Imam, Abdallah ibn al Mazlum Qadi ʿAbd al Salam al Taduri, a Shafiʿi by religious rite, and Ashʿari by conviction.” This Johannese connection did not die away: elsewhere Mayson mentions that in the 1850s “their Johanese friends” still provided the older Muslims with Areca nuts and Betel leaf.54 Max Kollisch, a late nineteenth-century orientalist, confirmed the continuation of the Johannese connection.55
The Sultan of Johanna may have been responsible for having initiated something of a religious schism in the hitherto orthodox Sunni Muslim community of the Cape (orthodox, that is, by the lights of the dress of the Cape Muslims). According to Mayson, “the white turban is the distinguishing mark of the Sonnites [i.e., “Sunni”]; the red turban that of the rival sect of Shiʿites.”56 Muslims wearing either the white or red turban are portrayed in many of the paintings and watercolors of the early Cape.
By the late nineteenth century, Meccans knew of the existence of Muslims at the southern extremity of Africa and called them Ahl Kâf (the people of the Cape), as the peripatetic Dutch scholar C. Snouck-Hurgronje recalled from his secret visit to Mecca in 1884–85 disguised as a Muslim:
A class of Jâwah [Javanese] who dwell outside the geographical boundaries but who in late years have made regular pilgrimages to Mecca are people from the Cape of Good Hope. They are derived from Malays, formerly brought to the Cape by the Dutch, with a small mixture of Dutch blood. Some words of their Malay speech have passed into the strange, clipped-Dutch dialect of the Boers. On the other hand they have exchanged their mother tongue for Cape Dutch, of course, retaining many Malay expressions. Taking into consideration the genuinely Dutch names of many of these Ahl Kâf (as they are called in Mecca) one is tempted to believe that degenerated Dutch have been drawn by them into their religion, and many types among them increase the probability of this suggestion. Separated from intercourse with other Moslims they would scarcely have had the moral strength to hold to their religion, had not eager co-religionists come to them from abroad. When and whence these came is not known to me; however this may be, the mosques in [the] Cape Colony have been more fervently supported in the last twenty years than ever before, more trouble is taken in teaching religion and every year some of the Ahl Kâf fare on pilgrimage to the Holy City.57
The Reverend Thomas Fothergill Lightfoot pointed out in 1910 that the opening of steamship passages to Zanzibar had “rendered the pilgrimage to Mecca more practicable.”58 He added that “there are now in Cape Town many followers of Islam who have obtained a knowledge of their creed [sic] some at Mecca and Zanzibar.”59 Muhammad Salieh Hendricks, who had grown up in rural Swellendam, had gone to Mecca to study in 1888. On his return to the Cape in 1902, he stayed in Zanzibar for almost a year, acting in various religious capacities.60 Gustav Gerdener, a theologian from Stellenbosch who worked among the Cape Town Muslims, confirmed the continuing importance of the East African links in January 1915, noticing that “Zanzibar has been a source of inspiration on more than one occasion, as when a [Cape] deputation visited that quarter some years ago on behalf of a Mohammedan college [the Tafalah Institute] then in building at Claremont, and as when a deputation of three priests [i.e., imams] visited Zanzibar a few months ago to settle a certain dispute.”61 George Bernard Shaw, en route to South Africa in 1934, stopped in Mombasa and interviewed the resident Muslim scholar, Maulana Mahomet Abdul Aleem Siddiqui. This was of such interest to the Cape Muslims that they reprinted the ensuing debate in its entirety.62 One may conclude that the Cape Muslims enjoyed a wide range of contacts with the other Muslims on the East coast of Africa, contacts maintained in part by the pious obligations of the hajj.
From Slavery to the Era of Emancipation
During slavery, Islam’s authentic universalism had a powerful appeal. Even a humble slave or a convicted felon could be a leader in the Cape Muslim religious community. In this status inversion, in a sense the entire Muslim community could, if not ignore, then bypass the demeaning European-imposed quotidian status categories. But such demonstrations of universalism proved short-lived. Even in the decades before emancipation, the Cape ulama had started becoming a hereditary class. Numerous examples of father-son relationships exist in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ʿulamaʾ.63
Religious leadership in any Islamic community necessarily goes to the most qualified and learned. While it is easy to see how the most qualified might well be the son of an imam, it is also clear that once leadership became the automatic consequence of genealogy, Islam could no longer lay claim to an authentic universalism. The legitimacy of any ulama is vexed, as Jeppe has pointed out.64 The endless succession disputes—by no means peculiar to the Cape—must have qualified Islam’s appeal among other groups over the long term, as did analogous differences in Christian congregations. These led to numerous succession squabbles and sometimes summary exclusions of interlopers. Muslim scholars like Davids and de Costa thus have suggested that litigation became a pattern of virtually all Cape mosque succession disputes: nearly twenty cases were heard in the Cape Supreme Court between 1860 and 1900.
But it would seem churlish to detract from the achievements of these busy and remarkable holy men. They were the first Cape Muslims to go on hajj; they were the first to write religious and other manuscripts—including Azimats—in the new Arabic-Afrikaans; they established madrasas (schools); manumitted slaves; ran congregations; conducted marriages; performed funerals, and, for the most part, successfully interlocuted with the colonial authorities. As Peter Brown described the functions of the holy men of another monotheistic faith, those of Christian antiquity: “It was through the hard business of living his life for twenty-four hours in the day, through catering for the day-to-day needs of his locality, through allowing his person to be charged with the normal hopes and fears of his fellow men, that the holy man gained the power in society that enabled him to carry off the occasional coup de théâtre.”65 But emancipation subtly changed this body of holy men. The immediate effect of the emancipation of slaves was a double religious revival: slaves deserted the rural areas and flocked to the towns and the open arms of the imams or the eager embrace of Christian missionaries. It was a defining moment for all religions in the colony.
The Muslims were most vulnerable on their rites. The magical/mystical Muslim ceremony of ratiep or kalifa had caused an outcry from Cape Town’s Christian population, who considered spectacles like the ritual of flashing sabers passing across unharmed living human flesh to be luring many away from Christianity. One person had been accidentally killed in 1813 by an overly enthusiastic Prize Negro convert.66 Finally, in 1855, after many complaints from Christian commentators, the Cape Town police attempted to ban the kalifa. For their part, the imams conceded that there was considerable dispute among the various congregations about the appropriateness of this ceremony. The imams used the opportunity to complain that the Cape Muslims had never had any missionaries sent out to them, unlike the other peoples of the Cape. Thus was begun an extraordinary effort to petition Queen Victoria to send a Muslim missionary to Cape Town, on the grounds that the Muslims were taxpayers but, unlike other inhabitants, had never had any missionaries.67 It was the first step to orthodoxy, and the beginning of the end for the erstwhile free-wheeling Cape Islam.
After a seven-year delay, the unlikely event of a Muslim missionary sponsored by Queen Victoria came to pass: a Kurdish scholar, Shaykh Abu Bakr Effendi, was sent out to the Cape Muslims in 1862 to teach them the true path.68 However, despite Abu Bakr’s pioneering scholarly efforts in learning the world’s newest Indo-European language—Afrikaans—and introducing Muslim education for girls and women, he was not popular. That he was “Aryan”—to use Van Selms’s shibboleth—must have come as a shock. His efforts by 1888 had resulted in only one congregation and one school in Cape Town, funded among others by Barney Barnato, a Jewish mining magnate whom Abu Bakr supported in an election.69 Perhaps because of his failure in Cape Town, he turned to other mission fields. He established theological seminaries at Kimberley, Port Elizabeth, and at Lourenço Marques (Maputo). His single orthodoxy was the banning of the eating of crustaceans, especially the popular Cape lobster (kreef). This doomed his mission: the issue was even debated in Mecca.
Despite a subsequent domestic scandal, his congregation backed the Kurdish imam, but his preeminent position was now lost—to the relief of his competitors, the nearly eclipsed Cape Town ʿulamaʾ. Thereafter, he and his family fitted into the Cape Muslim scene as just another schismatic element.
Still, Abu Bakr’s short-lived influence had permanently refocused all Cape Muslims onto the wider world of Islam outside of South Africa. The Turkish fez now replaced the toerang and the handkerchief, the traditional headdress of Cape Muslims. When an Australian troopship on its way to the Dardanelles stopped in Cape Town during World War I for coal, a few Australian crewmen, coming across Cape Muslims wearing fezzes, concluded that the Turks had occupied the port, and were thoroughly disconcerted. A new, albeit minor, Turkiya had definitely come to Cape Town.
The kalifa, and along with it much of the “magic,” went out of the religion as Abu Bakr laid the foundations for the modernizing of Cape Islam. But the appeal of the religion was also reduced by the dead hand of orthodoxy. Conversion to Islam slowed. Gone were the days when Cape imams converted all and sundry. Gone, too, it seems, was the open door to Africans like the Prize Negroes. Further growth of Islam in South Africa had to await another overseas migration of Muslims and a completely new chapter in the history of Islam in South Africa.
The Second Phase of Immigration
After slavery was finally abolished in the British empire in 1838 (following a four-year period of apprenticeship), British colonies founded after that date had to devise alternative labor systems, because wage labor was still beyond the capacity of most fledgling colonies. Such was the case when the British and the Voortrekkers attempted to colonize Natal on South Africa’s East coast in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s. Since the local Zulus were unwilling to work in the Europeans’ sugarcane fields or in their coal mines, Indians were brought in, with the permission of the British, as indentured servants to form the last component of Natal’s triracial population. Between 1860 and 1868 and again from 1874 to 1911, some 176,000 Indians of all faiths were brought to Natal. Approximately 7 to 10 percent of the first shipment of Natal Indians was Muslim; then 80 to 90 percent of the second, but smaller, shipments (termed Passenger Indians, because they paid their fares) was Muslim.
Indentured labor from India was supplemented by African labor from Zanzibar. British interest in the island had increased throughout the nineteenth century, partly as a continuing effort to end the oceanic slave trade. This interest culminated in a British protectorate over the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar in 1890. Before the protectorate, between 1873 and 1880, the Royal Navy had brought some hundreds of “Zanzibari Arabs” to the British naval base in Durban to work as stokers. In that city they were obliged to establish their own mosque as they were not embraced by the already established Indian Muslims. The Zanzibari Arabs appear as a named group in the Population Registration Act of 1950. Proclamation R123 of 1968 refers to “Other Asiatics including Zanzibari Arabs” as one of the seven subsections of the statutory “Coloured” community. These curious categories suggest that they were not assimilated, or zealous apartheid clerks were intent on finding ethnic differences even among the tiny Muslim community of Natal.
Islam in Natal
Islam in Natal also boasted its founding fathers. The first Shaykh Ahmad (popularly known as Majzoob Bdasha Peer) arrived with the indentured Indians of the 1860s and was reputed to be a miracle worker and charismatic. Like the Cape’s founding father Shaykh Yusuf, he was also rumored to be a sufi. After an early release from his indentures, he sold fruit and vegetables in Durban until his death in 1886. The second founding father, Shah Ghulum Muhhad Soofie Siddiqui (popularly, Soofie Saheb) established a more lasting tradition. He arrived in 1895 and discovered Shaykh Ahmad’s grave. Since impoverished Natal Indian Muslims were always at risk of being absorbed into the Hinduism of the other Indians among whom they lived, he demarcated special Islamic folk festivals to lure the undecided; he also established Muslim orphanages and several madrasas.
After serving their indentures, the Natal Muslims were free, and a significant number spread into the interior of South Africa during its mining revolution (1867–1948) in a countrywide Muslim diaspora that included many entrepreneurial Cape Muslims from most South African ports. Some Indian Muslims from Natal went to Cape Town, where they set up a separate mosque as early as 1892. Some even made their way to Botswana, traveling the old missionary road.70 Most made their way to Kimberley or the Witwatersrand. The British and Cape governments cited the “unfair treatment” in the Transvaal Republic of a sizeable group of migrating Indians (“citizens of the British empire”) as one of the British “grievances” in their ultimatum leading to the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902).
Despite this diaspora and some intermarriage, the Muslims of the Cape remained separated by geography, doctrine, class, history, and language until well into the twentieth century. The Natal Indian Muslims spoke Urdu, Gujerati, Tamil, Sindhi, and English, and their congregations were based on powerful mosque committees, dominated by merchants; the Cape Muslims, on the other hand, spoke creole Dutch, or Afrikaans;71 their congregations were controlled by a wide variety of artisans, working-class people, and only a small merchant group.
The twentieth century revealed three regional Muslim communities: in the Cape, in Natal, and a third (derived from internal migration) in the inland republic (later, the colony) of Transvaal. There were no Muslims in the Orange Free State because of draconian legislation against “Asian” settlers. John Voll has drawn attention to the 1903 Transvaal fatwa (authoritative legal opinion) and called it “one of the famous documents of early Islamic modernist thought.”72 A Transvaal Muslim, al-Hajj Mustafa al-Transvaali, submitted three questions to Muhammad Abduh, the grand mufti of Egypt, that—it turned out—were of great importance to all Muslims in a modernizing world. It represents a classic case of what Muslims experience when they are a minority, and it also ventilated some of the profoundest problems of the South African Muslims. The questions hinged on issues of dress codes, the offense of slaughtering of animals by axe, and, finally, prayer procedures. The responses were liberal and inclusive and generated considerable debate throughout the Muslim world. Voll is quite right, though, in insisting on seeing the Transvaal fatwa in its South African context.
Johannesburg after the mining revolution and the Anglo-Boer War was the most modern of South Africa’s cities and was the first site where a significant number of Hanafi and Shafii Muslims had to live together. The Natal and Cape Muslims were the most urbanized groups in South Africa throughout its colonial history, but they first came together in the Transvaal. The fatwa responses did little, however, to unite the Muslim groups.
During the Bubonic plague of 1901, the government had placed “Indians” in isolation camps, which prompted Muslim fears. Following the Anglo-Boer War, the South African Moslem Association (SAMA) launched a preemptive program to recruit all “Dutch-speaking Malays” against possible government attempts to create “locations” for them. Curiously, “Indians, Arabs and Afghans” were not allowed to join SAMA; hence, under the simultaneous burdens of ethnic and linguistic division, any seeds of a pan-Islamist movement could not germinate. Names of subsequent Muslim organizations seemed designed to exclude others. For example, in 1920, the Cape Malay Association and in 1923 the South African Indian Moslem Congress represented clear evidence of the geographical and ethnic divisions that continued to divide Natal and Cape Muslims. Some intermarriage of leading families softened, but failed to remove, the gulf between Cape and Natal.
Secularization
But the biggest division was not geographical. The main challenge to Islam in twentieth-century South Africa was secularization. One does not have to be versed in the various Muslim disputes to know that there are two competing visions of the past: some Muslims try to restore strength and sincerity to their convictions by seeking in the Quran and hadith the authority for norms appropriate to modern needs and situations, in the belief that in scripture those needs and situations had been, if not foreseen, then at least provided for. In other words, change is both good and Islamic, or can be rendered so. Other Muslims, equally sincere and idealistic, have wished instead to reproduce exactly the patterns of a past period of human life—a period deemed to be ideal, usually that of the Prophet’s own lifetime and of that of his companions. Change, in this view, has been for the worse, and should be reversed. Muslim debate in twentieth-century South Africa has seesawed over these ancient alternatives.
This basic difference may be perceived at the level of personalities: on the one hand, there were modernists, people like ʿAbdullah ʿAbduhuraman (1872–1940), who promoted both secular and Muslim education; on the other hand, there were traditionalists, like Shaykh Muhammad Salieh Hendricks (1871–1945), who, while promoting education, also wished to protect Muslim women from modern influences and made them cover their aurahs and wear hijab. It is a tribute to the closeness of the Muslim community that these men (both from the rural Cape) were brothers-in-law.
The basic defense against secularization is recognition of religious authority. It is therefore not surprising that the first such recognition should be in the Transvaal, the origin of the fatwa concerning secularization. The first organization of the South African ʿulamaʾ, the Jamiʿat al-ʿUlamaʾ, was founded in that province in 1923.73 In 1940, the most important secular leader of the Muslims, Dr. Abduhuraman, died. In his wake, in February 1945, near the end of World War II, imams and religious leaders in Cape Town gathered to establish an organization to represent the specific religious needs of local Muslim imams and to consider the means to protect Islamic customs. They named their association the Moslem Judicial Council (MJC). It became the platform for the voice of the ʿulamaʾ of the city and constituted itself as the only legitimate representative of Muslims and of Islam to the state. The equivalent Natal Jamʿiat al-ʿUlamaʾ, was launched in 1952. While the MJC was certainly a rational innovation, it remained dominated by the Cape shaykhs, who according to certain critics were too conservative and sometimes arbitrary in their exclusionary tactics.
The conservative character of the South African MJC was challenged by the growing inequalities and iniquities of the apartheid state (1948–1994). The death of Imam ʿAbdullah Haron while in police custody in 1969 radicalized his congregation and sent shock waves throughout the South African Muslim world (although not a shaykh, he sat on the MJC). He had, among several pioneering activities, helped form the Nyanga Muslim Association in the African township of the same name. He also had a large influence on the Muslim youth. Before Steve Biko was killed in custody in 1977, the Muslims had an equivalent martyr.
In 1990, a historic national Muslim conference took place. Delegates from Muslim organizations throughout the country came together to consider their response to the new situation. This resulted in the formation of the Muslim Front. While the Muslim Front canvassed for the ANC in 1994, some Muslims formed alternatives—the African Muslim Party and the Islamic Party. Both failed to return any seats. That same year, the ANC appointed Abdullah Omar, a committed Muslim, to the portfolio of justice in the government of national unity. The influential and scholarly Muslim youth movement, which from time to time still politely challenges the moral authority of the quietist MJC, is bound to inherit a broad Islamic resurgence in the new South Africa.
Islam in the South Africa of the year 2000 could enjoy an awakening in the light of persistent failures of the secular state to provide a spiritual home for the people of South Africa. But there are problems at the community level. The state’s failure to resolve basic law-and-order issues that are close to the heart of all concerned citizens—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—have led, among Muslims, to the creation of grassroots organizations like PAGAD (People against Gangsterism and Drugs), whose members model themselves (at least, in terms of dress) on Middle East Muslims.
Ethnic tensions in the 1990s have run high. There was, for example, a resurgence of “Malay” identity after 1994 as trade and cultural links with Malaysia increased. In 1997, a few extremists vented their fury against a Jewish bookshop owner on the eve of Cape Town’s bid for the Olympic Games. Muslims denounced this regrettable episode as an unfortunate perversion, but to some it was a mini kristalnacht. Women were excluded from appearing on one Muslim radio station. The combination of these developments did not endear the Muslims to the jittery country at large.
There has been a strong, but understandable, tendency in liberal South African history up to 1994 to document the intricate dovetailing of the evils of colonialism, the class system, or “the Boerewors curtain”—apartheid. This historiography of guilt assumed that everything divisive in South Africa derived from the same poisoned well—Europe.
This guilty, intently Eurocentric vision has had several unintended effects. First, it has intimidated (or excused) local communities from critically interrogating their own pasts, thereby cheating communities of essential self-knowledge. Second, too little attention has been paid to the longue durée of sustained autonomous cultural achievement of such “oppressed” groups and all the inspiration to be found in such histories. Third, one may tentatively suggest that internal divisions are not always derived from colonialism and apartheid, although the hidden injuries of those systems may at first blush seem endless. The divisions that continue to split the Muslim communities of South Africa are relics of quite ancient fissiparous tendencies—largely independent of the colonial order—that continue operating to divide ordinary people of the same faith from one another. In this case, one of South Africa’s oldest, and indeed most independent of communities, has been intramurally divided for most of its distinguished and sometimes glorious history—and, let it be said, by the same issues of privilege, language, ethnicity, and gender that have bedeviled their European compatriots.
Still, when one considers the entire history of Islam in South Africa, one can only conclude that the history of all Muslim cultural achievements began at the community level. It is that community ethos that now has to be recovered historically for all groups. From the martyrdoms of Joudan Tappa (1713) to that of imam Haron (1969), from the azimats of the eighteenth century to the FM radio stations of 1998, the voice of Islam has always been heard in South Africa with authority, fidelity, and even, sometimes, tolerance.
Notes
1. Muhammed Haron provides access to most of the sources consulted in this chapter. The secondary works on the subject of South Africa’s Muslims—especially those of M. Ajam; Adil Bradlow and Frank Bradlow; S. Brandel-Syrier; Margaret Cairns; Yusuf da Costa; Suleman Essop Dangor; Achmat Davids; Kate Jeffreys; Shamil Jeppie; Samuel Abraham Rochlin, and Abdulkader Tayob—have provided useful background. I am especially grateful to the late Achmat Davids, Muhammed Haron, Shamil Jeppie, Laura Mitchell, Sandy Rowoldt, Christopher Saunders, and Michael Whisson for reading this chapter and providing additional material and references.
2. I am grateful to Peter Brown for permission to use this quotation.
3. Böeseken et al. 1957, 54–55.
4. Dangor is the only full biography. See also Dictionary of South African Biography (hereafter DSAB), s.v. “Van Selms,” 893–94; Cense 1950, 50–57.
5. Dangor 1982, 4.
6. Theal 1964, 3:261.
7. DSAB, 1:894.
8. Dangor 1982, 3 (section 4):123; 5:47ff. “zyn Sappa (of uitgekaaude pinang) die by wagwierp, als een heilighed eerbiedig opgeraapt, bewaard.” Also, Du Plessis 1972, 4.
9. Jeffreys 1939, 195.
10. Cape Archives Depot (hereafter CAD) “Extract uijt de Generale Resolutien,” C 424 (30 Oct. 1699): 449–59, 453.
11. Jeffreys 1939, 196.
12. Dangor 1982.
13. Agnos 1993, 82–83.
14. Sleigh 1993, 386; CAD CJ 3318, “Bandiette Rolle” (1744): 324–25; Hajji’s death, 355, 526.
15. CAD CJ 3318, “Bandiette Rolle” (1746): 488.
16. CAD CJ 3318, “Bandiette Rolle” (Oct. 1766): 579.
17. CAD CJ 3318, “Bandiette Rolle” (1767): 551, 579, 582, 589.
18. Convict estimate from Armstrong, Jun. 1995; SOAS, Council for World Mission Archives, LMS Series, South African Correspondence, box 11, folder 3, jacket A, Elliot to Miles (1 Jan. 1829).
19. Those who undertook a course of study in the Middle East were termed shaykhs, those who only completed the pilgrimage hajjis, while those who could not afford to go to Mecca remained ordinary imams; cf. Jeppie 1996, 139–62.
20. Forster 1777, 2:60–61.
21. Shell 1997, 268–85.
22. Bird 1823, 349.
23. “Evidence of Two Mahometan Priests,” in Papers Relative, 208.
24. Personal communication with the author.
25. SOAS, Council for World Mission Archives, LMS Series, South African correspondence, box 12, folder 4, jacket B, Philip to the directors, LMS (14 Jan. 1831).
26. Cory Library, MS 16,579: Laing’s journal (28 Jan. 1831). I am grateful to Sandra Rowoldt for this reference.
27. Bird 1823, 349–50.
28. Aspeling 1883, 4.
29. Massleman 1963, 63 and note 18, 77.
30. Shell 1995, 3–20; Davids 1997, 12–16.
31. Public Record Office, CO 414/6 12285, “A Return of the Negroes Imported into the Colony Since 1808” (12 Feb. 1822), folio 45, p. 500 (Kew enumeration).
32. Theal 1903, “Report of John Thomas Bigge upon the Finances” (6 Sept. 1826) 27:493.
33. Bird 1823, 360, s.v. “Apprentices.”
34. Whisson 1985, 153.
35. Bird 1823, 76.
36. Theal 1903. Letter, Earl of Caledon to Viscount Castlereagh (4 Feb. 1808), 6:271.
37. Papers Relative, 207.
38. Gray 1876, 1:169.
39. Merriman 1957, 8–9.
40. Shell 1994, 11–39.
41. Hardy n.d., 7:390–404.
42. Jeppie 1988.
43. Bradlow 1981, 12–19.
44. Mayson 1861, 16.
45. Ibid., 17–18.
46. Kollisch 1867, 6.
47. Papers Relative, 207, 209, 210.
48. Khan 1810, 1:72–73.
49. Papers Relative, 208.
50. Backhouse 1844, 82–83.
51. Mayson 1861, 12.
52. South African Directory and Almanac for the Year 1834, 206.
53. Armstrong 1982.
54. Mayson 1861, 27–28.
55. Kollisch 1867, 13.
56. Mayson 1861, 12.
57. Snouck-Hurgronje 1931, 216–17.
58. Lightfoot 1900, 39.
59. Ibid., 43.
60. de Costa 1994, 106–7.
61. Gerdener 1914, 55. For the Tafalah Institute, see DSAB, s.v. “Abdurahman, Abdullah” [by Thelma Shifrin].
62. Shavian Meets a Theologian.
63. Papers Relative, 207; Jeppie 1996, 139–62.
64. Jeppie 1996, 139.
65. Brown 1982, 105.
66. CJ 805: folio 825, no. 12 (2 Sept. 1813).
67. De Lima 1857.
68. DSAB 1:4–5.
69. Cape Argus (2 Nov. 1888), p. 4, col. 3.
70. Parratt 1989, 71–82.
71. Malayu was heard in mosques as late as the 1930s.
72. Voll 1996, 27.
73. Naudé 1982, 23–39.
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