Even more so than with Christianity, education and religion were closely tied up in the Muslim schools. The first madrasah was established in 1793 in Dorp Street, Cape Town. The Muslims were sufficiently impressed by the greater religious tolerance of the new British rulers to ask permission in 1800 for building a mosque.
Madrasahs taught more pupils of colour than all the other educational institutions in town. A school conducted by the imam taught more than 370 slaves in the 1820s. Two years later an even larger madrasah instructed 425 free blacks and slaves. Many schools were run by elderly retired imams. In the 1850s it was reported that the two large schools taught pupils to read the Koran in Arabic.
George Angas’s painting of a Cape Town madrasah. Afrikaans was the medium of instruction in the Muslim religious community.
The language of the Cape Muslims was Afrikaans. In their schools pupils were taught to read and write Afrikaans in the Arabic script. During the 1840s an observer wrote: ‘All the Malays in Cape Town speak Dutch but the better class understand and write Arabic and Malay.’ But the Dutch was, actually, Afrikaans (or a creolised Dutch). The first Afrikaans book, printed around 1856, used Arabic script. By the end of the century at least eleven Arabic-Afrikaans works had been produced.
Thus it was not the Afrikaner community or the Christian church that used Afrikaans first as a written medium but the Muslim community in Cape Town. When Arnold Pan nevis, in the early 1870s, considered translating the Bible into Afrikaans because of the large numbers of illiterate people, both white and coloured, Afrikaans was already an established medium of religious instruction in the Cape Muslim community. English was becoming the language of the Afrikaner elite in Cape Town and many rural villages. J.H.H. de Waal, one of the main protagonists of Afrikaans, later wrote that by the 1890s only the Muslim community had remained loyal to Afrikaans.
