Muslims arrived as exiles, convicts and slaves. The exiles were mostly political leaders whom the Company had dethroned in their Eastern possessions and arrived at the Cape accompanied by a following of co-religionists. Among the early political exiles was Sheikh Yussuf, widely regarded as an Islamic saint, who arrived at the Cape in 1694 with a party of 49 followers. His home near the Macassar Downs became a gathering spot for Muslims and runaway slaves until his death in May 1699.
The core of the Cape’s imam community was drawn from the nearly 3 000 convicts (bandietten) who arrived at the Cape from the East to work in gangs on the fortification and harbour works of Cape Town.
A Malay funeral in Cape Town, as depicted by ‘E.K.’ in 1858.
The majority of the Cape’s Muslim population was drawn from the slaves imported by the VOC from the East. The Muslim sympathies of this group were first noticed in the 1770s by George Forster, an English explorer 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’.
The private slave owners at the Cape had very few slaves baptised or manumitted. Many of the several hundred slave men at the Cape who bought their freedom or received it as a gift from their owners did not turn to Christianity or its missionaries, whom they saw as having rejected them, but to Islam and 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 that the Muslims ‘seldom retain in slavery those that embrace their religion, & to the honour 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’.
Islam, as an egalitarian religion, appealed to many freed slaves. This picture shows a Cape Muslim couple.
Islam’s authentic universalism had a powerful appeal. Even a convicted felon or a humble slave could be a leader in the Cape Muslim
religious community. In this sort of status inversion, the entire Muslim community could in a sense, if not ignore, then bypass the demeaning European-imposed slave status. Achmat of Bengal, a slave in the eyes of the settlers, for example, was appointed chief imam of the Dorp Street mosque in 1807.
The Cape ulama became a closed, hereditary class in which, increasingly, sons followed fathers as imams. 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 madrasahs; manumitted slaves; ran congregations; conducted marriages; performed funerals; and, for the most part, successfully interlocuted with the colonial authorities.
