Cape Malay: The Indonesian Roots of South African Islam

Sohaira: Our story today comes to us from reporter Aina J. Khan.

Aina: I’m a British Pakistani foreign correspondent, and I travel the world telling stories.

Sohaira: Aina has worked for some of the biggest news organizations in the world.

Aina: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times, NBC.

Sohaira: But recently, she’s been a bit burnt out from the industry as a whole.

Aina: I got so sick of it. And to be honest, I think there came a point where I didn’t want to be permanently embedded in a news organization, especially after the genocide in Gaza.

Sohaira: She’d always been interested in reporting on different kinds of Muslim communities around the world.

Aina: Maybe this is part of my bias as someone who’s Muslim, but the level of diversity among Muslims around the world — I’ve never seen anywhere else.

Sohaira: For the past two years now, Aina has been traveling the world, reporting in all kinds of places.

Aina: Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Qatar, Egypt, Ghana, and then Lebanon.

Sohaira: That’s all in one year?

Aina: I know, I know, I know. I took a break, but then I packed all my life possessions, shoved it into a storage locker, and then by almost end of April, I’d packed up and I moved to Cape Town.

Sohaira: And she moved to Cape Town after learning about South Africa’s oldest Muslim community in a neighborhood called Bo-Kaap.

Aina: The Muslim community in Bo-Kaap. They’re called the Cape Malay, and they’re like nothing I’ve ever encountered. Their food is mixed, their names are mixed. Even their prayer is like nothing I’ve heard before.

The melody that they sang that devotional recitation in — I’d never heard anything like it up until that moment. And it’s because when I was growing up as a British Pakistani Muslim kid in London, we used to recite Qur’an, devotional recitations, in a really monotone tone. It was boring. And when I sat in that masjid in Cape Town and heard them recite this dhikr, this devotional recitation, in one of the most melodious, choral-like tunes I’ve ever heard — it moved my soul. It really did. I literally had chest pains. I was so moved by it.

The more time I spent in Bo-Kaap, the more clues I found as to why this vibrant Muslim community was here in South Africa. And they seemed to trace back to a particular cemetery.

Daiyaan Petersen: So this grave that you are standing in front of right now is a woman by the name of Rosetta.

Aina: Daiyaan Petersen, a local researcher and tour guide, took me to this cemetery called the Tana Baru, so that I could see the grave of a Cape Malay woman named Rosetta.

Daiyaan Petersen: I like to call her Lady Rosetta, because of how she’s described on her tombstone.

Aina: The gravestone is made of a blue-grey slate, and it’s in amazing condition considering how long ago it was erected. The text was faded, but it was still legible.

This was etched back in — what year did Rosetta die?

Daiyaan Petersen: Lady Rosetta? 1842. So on the top here, you see what’s called the Basmala, which is invoking the name of God, the most gracious, most merciful. And then this is sort of where the mix of Arabic and a colloquial Cape dialect — of how they were speaking the Malay language at the time.

Aina: Rosetta’s grave is, in some ways, the genesis of this entire story. Because oftentimes when you see things like a grave, it really transports you to a time period that no longer exists.

Sohaira: This week on the show, reporter Aina Khan takes us into the heart of Cape Town’s oldest Muslim neighbourhood, to dive deep into the world of Cape Malay Muslims, to find out how this neighbourhood of Indonesian and Southeast Asian Muslims came to be.

Aina: Before I travelled to Cape Town, I knew about the UK’s role in the transatlantic slave trade that enslaved Black Africans in the 1600s. But I had absolutely no idea that just around the same time, Dutch colonisers were deporting and enslaving Indonesians — and had brought them all the way to South Africa.

And Rosetta’s story is the story of that community.

Sohaira: But she also learned how this community, today, is fighting for its survival against a very different force.

Mohammad Groenewald: You know, we survived Dutch colonialism, British colonialism, we survived apartheid. I’m not sure if we’re going to survive gentrification.

Sohaira: This is More Muslim — a show about the Muslim experience, with all its messiness. I’m Sohaira Siddiqui.

Aina: Mohammad Groenewald is an oral historian based in Bo-Kaap, and he’s the one who first introduced me to the history of the Cape Malay people.

Mohammad Groenewald: I always say that we have a, maybe a very short history, but we have a very interesting history in this part of the world. And that history basically started in Indonesia.

Aina: It’s the 1600s and the Dutch are trying to take control of the maritime route.

Mohammad Groenewald: Of course, those years, whoever controls the maritime route controls global economies.

Aina: And on one of these voyages, they came across a collection of islands in what we know today as Indonesia. And here they find an absolute bounty of spices.

Mohammad Groenewald: Remember, spices at the time were like — like people go to war over oil and other resources — spices, people used to go to war over these commodities.

Aina: And so, as colonizers did at the time, they colonized.

Mohammad Groenewald: There’s three things a colonizer does to you. They either kill you, they exile you, or they imprison you.

Aina: But what the Dutch found in Indonesia was a fierce resistance — a resistance led by noblemen and scholars and community leaders.

Mohammad Groenewald: In Indonesia’s struggle, it was the leadership that rose up against the Dutch — the princes, the religious scholars, et cetera.

Aina: And one of those scholars was a man called Sheikh Yusuf.

Mohammad Groenewald: One of the icons — our founding father of Islam at the Cape.

Aina: Sheikh Yusuf was a renowned intellectual who studied in India, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. And when he returned home to Indonesia, he became a resistance leader.

Mohammad Groenewald: And so Sheikh Yusuf then, you know, runs a very successful resistance against the Dutch.

Aina: But eventually the resistance collapsed. And when Sheikh Yusuf lost the fight, the Dutch gave him an ultimatum.

Mohammad Groenewald: They make Sheikh Yusuf an offer — to give himself up and be imprisoned. And so eventually they send him to the Cape of Good Hope.

Aina: So Sheikh Yusuf lands at the Cape of Good Hope in 1694, which at the time was a Dutch fueling station that would later become Cape Town — a halfway stop for ships sailing from Europe to Asia.

Mohammad Groenewald: Because of these long voyages, the big challenge for the Dutch were often their food supply and fresh water, fresh food — because a lot of men died of various diseases.

Aina: This halfway fueling station would eventually become known as Cape Town. And the Dutch decided that this remote outpost would be the perfect place to banish political prisoners. Prisoners who were causing chaos in their colonized territories. Prisoners like Sheikh Yusuf.

Mohammad Groenewald: Remember, these were — in terms of their own communities — they were aristocrats. And these people then were forced to come to the Cape, and often without even saying goodbye to family and relatives.

Aina: Most of the rebels were rounded up, expelled from their homes, and then put on these ships as prisoners — and some even as slaves.

Mohammad Groenewald: And I often ask these questions to myself — you know, what it was like for them, coming to a land, placed on a ship and come to a place that you don’t even know where you’re going to end up.

The idea of the Dutch was: we send you to the Cape with the idea that you come here, you die here, and whatever you believed in also dies here.

Aina: With people like Sheikh Yusuf, they assumed exile would break them — make them lose all sense of their religious identity as Muslims.

Mohammad Groenewald: And that was the kind of idea that the Dutch had when sending them to the Cape.

Aina: But what they didn’t realise is that you might physically take people out from their land, but you can’t entrap the mind, the intellect.

Mohammad Groenewald: They were very highly learned scholars.

Aina: And that’s exactly what they took over to Cape Town.

Mohammad Groenewald: They were not only pillars of piety — but for us, they were also pillars of resistance.

Aina: They didn’t lose their culture. They didn’t lose their faith. In fact, Islam started to spread in the Cape — especially among slaves. Islam offered them a sense of belonging, a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood, and also a culture and identity apart from their masters. And this is where the Cape Malay community begins, back in the 17th century, with the arrival of Sheikh Yusuf.

Mohammad Groenewald: And Sheikh Yusuf arrives at the Cape, and then he was the first kind of notable Muslim.

Aina: In Bo-Kaap today, Sheikh Yusuf is often called the “father of the Muslims of the Cape.” As the leader of this first group of captives from Indonesia, he laid the foundation for what would come to be known as the Cape Malay community.

A hundred years would pass, and the community would continue to grow. And as the Dutch kept banishing more political prisoners and religious leaders to the Cape, the more firmly the Muslim community planted their roots here. And it’s around this time — in 1780 — that another pivotal figure arrives in the Cape. An enslaved Indonesian prince who went by the name Tuan Guru. If Sheikh Yusuf was considered the founder of Islam in the Cape, then Tuan Guru was its implementer.

Mohammad Groenewald: For him, the need at the Cape was to educate the people of the Cape. So that is why the first thing he wanted — he organized and he galvanized the Muslim community, because everyone was scattered all over. And of course, under the Dutch rule at the time, Islam was not allowed to be practiced publicly.

Aina: Tuan Guru needed a madrassa — a place to teach. And in 1794, he was given a property on the lower slopes of Bo-Kaap, where he set up what would become the first mosque in South Africa — Auwal Masjid. The very masjid where I first fell in love with the Cape Malay community.

Mohammad Groenewald: This madrassa then becomes a focal, central point for the Muslim community.

Aina: Islam had already grown a lot in the hundred years since Sheikh Yusuf’s arrival. But now, there was a place to practice. It was discreet — but still, it was a place the community could come together to pray.

Mohamed, I’m going to ask you to do something that might make you laugh. I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you are Mohamed Groenewald — not of the Bo-Kaap of 2025, but the Bo-Kaap from the 1600s or the 1700s. I just want you to close your eyes and maybe imagine and describe what you think it might have looked like.

Mohammad Groenewald: Okay. First of all, I have to practice secretively and creatively as well. And I’m walking through the streets, and people probably remind each other — it’s time to pray — or secretively pray in their own spaces. Our mosque didn’t look like a mosque because Islam was a banned religion. And I’m imagining wearing wooden shoes — what we often refer to as a kaparang. Walking on those shoes makes quite a bit of noise on the cobblestones that still lay here in Bo-Kaap. Whilst we reciting our adhkar in different melodies… you know, the oppressor probably just thought they may be just singing some songs. But what I also imagine is a very close-knit community, ready to help — despite everyone being poor. Everyone helped in feeding each other, nurturing each other, and helping each other.

Aina: This community of Muslim slaves were trying to adapt to their new environment — practicing in secret, disguising their call to prayer, even starting to form a creole version of Dutch, a language that would eventually develop into Afrikaans. This is the community buried in the cemetery where my journey through Bo-Kaap began. The same sacred ground that holds the grave of Lady Rosetta, and the remains of Tuan Guru.

Bo-Kaap’s history of struggle, though — it changes radically in 1806, when the British take control of the Cape and abolish slavery there as part of a push to abolish slavery in all of their colonies. For the Cape Malay community, this marked a fragile turning point. Freedom, but still under colonial rule.

But a century later, an entirely new system of oppression and control would come to shape Bo-Kaap and South Africa as a whole.

[Archival audio — Verwoerd:]

Apartheid means that there must be separate development — for the Bantu on the one hand and the European on the other.

Aina: The advantages of apartheid were meant for only one group: white people. Anyone the regime considered non-white was a second-class citizen.

[Archival audio:]

It means, therefore, that in the course of time, we should separate the spheres of influence and of work of these two racial groups.

Aina: And this determined everything — where you could live, which beaches you could swim at, even who you could marry.

Mohammad Groenewald: Look, apartheid is basically a system where — as long as you stay in your lane, you’re okay. You can be tolerated. Don’t come to our areas unless you have a permit, or unless you’re coming to work, and so on. But be out at a certain time.

[Archival audio:]

There is a white housing shortage in Johannesburg.

Aina: Apartheid policy divided neighbourhoods by race.

[Archival audio:]

And the Sophiatown area is to be bulldozed out of existence, and a modern housing development will be erected here for whites.

Aina: You had separately designated areas for Black South Africans, for whites, for Indians, and for people classified as “coloured” — mixed race. All over the country, the most desirable neighbourhoods were classified as whites-only areas.

But the community of Bo-Kaap wasn’t white. And it also wasn’t classified as a Black neighbourhood. As other people of colour were kicked out of their homes, their land taken and entire communities uprooted — the Cape Malay stayed in Bo-Kaap.

And what I couldn’t understand was why this neighbourhood — which is prime property, right next to Cape Town’s central business district — didn’t become a whites-only neighbourhood like so many others.

Mohammad Groenewald: So there was a plan to flatten Bo-Kaap and to extend the CBD. But I think they changed their mind — because there are two versions to that story.

Aina: Turns out, there are actually various versions to the story of why Bo-Kaap was one of the few inner-city areas in the country that didn’t end up being demolished and rezoned for whites. Some historians say it’s because Bo-Kaap was already an established Muslim area with historic and religious significance — that its high concentration of mosques helped save it.

Mohammad Groenewald: And the other was — look, we are an apartheid state, but keep Bo-Kaap so we can show that there are Black people living in the city. So how can you call us an apartheid state?

Aina: In other words, a strategic kind of window-dressing — to show the outside world that all is well in apartheid South Africa.

Another, stranger reason comes down to this man called I.D. du Plessis. Du Plessis was a white Afrikaner who was the early apartheid government’s Commissioner of Coloured Affairs, and who happened to be interested in — maybe even obsessed with — preserving Bo-Kaap as a Cape Malay area. Not for liberal or empathetic reasons, but because of a racist, orientalist vision of the Cape Malay community as being superior to other so-called “coloured groups.”

Mohammad Groenewald: Because apartheid really tried to segregate people on very, very different fronts. And that was to kind of make mixed-race people rather fight against each other than against them. So they make one group feel a bit more superior, one group slightly less superior — and so they go on down the line.

Aina: These different theories help explain why Bo-Kaap remained a Cape Malay community during apartheid. But to account for how the people of Bo-Kaap survived apartheid — for that, Mohammad looks to the area’s long history of repression and struggle, stretching back to Sheikh Yusuf’s time.

Mohammad Groenewald: For us, people like Sheikh Yusuf and Tuan Guru — they were not only pillars of piety, that someone perhaps wants to make them out to be, but they were also pillars of resistance. Because they came here and laid the foundation of resistance in South Africa against a colonial force. And that gave us that strength — that before us, there were people that fought colonialism in a far more harsher manner than what we had to confront.

Aina: There’s the memory of ancestors, but also the traditions and practices that the community has passed down over centuries. Like the Islamic practice of repeating phrases that praise or remember God — known as dhikr.

Mohammad Groenewald: Now the dhikr in itself, even during apartheid, would help us, you know, overcome. And that is why often when we recite Allahu wa ni’mal wakeel in the melodious voice that we recited — and that is why Hasbunallah wa Ni’mal Wakeel becomes this very popular dhikr in the Cape.

Today we, of course, sing it at our marches — especially Palestine marches. But at the end of it, you know, it’s this dhikr that sustained us. It’s a dhikr that allowed us to survive.

Aina: But now, this community built over 400 years is at risk of disappearing.

Mohammad Groenewald: You know, we survived Dutch colonialism, British colonialism, we survived apartheid. I’m not sure if we’re going to survive gentrification.

Aunty Shereen: Look there — that’s a road where we used to drive our little…

Aina: Is this the hill that you used to go and play on when you were a child?

Aunty Shereen: This is the hill that I came up. God, it’s so steep! Walked up here.

Aina: I’m being driven around the upper slopes of Bo-Kaap by a woman called Shereen Habib — also known as Aunty Shereen. Aunty Shereen was born in Bo-Kaap in 1952, and like Mohammad Groenewald, she’s a legend of the neighbourhood.

Aunty Shereen: Yeah. I don’t want to drive too fast because the car is still not warm enough…

Aina: As a child, Aunty Shereen remembers watching from the window of her school — in a neighbourhood just down the road from Bo-Kaap, called District Six — as the area was destroyed by the apartheid government.

Aunty Shereen: And every day I would see the skyline change because there was this big black ball, you know, just swinging. We used to sketch the black balls against the walls…

Aina: As an adult in the late 1980s, Aunty Shereen and her husband sheltered anti-apartheid activists in their home.

Aunty Shereen: So, in the time of us having that safe house, it was very nerve-wracking — because at any time the police could pick me up.

You could have been…

Daiyaan Petersen: Arrested and jailed.

Aunty Shereen: Yeah, we did. We were arrested and jailed.

Aina: After apartheid ended, Aunty Shereen ran as a candidate for the ANC — that’s Nelson Mandela’s party — for ward councillor of Bo-Kaap. And she also went back to study. She trained as a tour guide and she says she became the very first female Cape Malay tour guide, specialising in the history of Bo-Kaap, which had been basically written out of South Africa’s official narrative until that point.

Aunty Shereen: I trained about 17 tour guides here in the area. The last subject that they had to know was the history of Bo-Kaap. They didn’t know the Malay Indonesian history at all. They didn’t know where the first mosque in South Africa was.

Aina: Right now though, we’re on — I guess you could call it — an informal Aunty Shereen-led Bo-Kaap tour. We’re headed towards a specific site behind Auwal Mosque that I’ve asked Aunty Shereen to take me to. And along the way, she’s showing me around this neighbourhood where every street, house, mosque, and deli was once familiar to her.

Gosh, you can see the sea and the docks on the right.

Aunty Shereen: I must tell you that this here — this was all our playground. My grandfather owned these houses here. All the houses here. This front here — when I was a child, I was born in this first room.

Aina: My God, you were born in what is now the Dock Hotel.

Aunty Shereen: Yes. You see the side here — this was my bedroom here on the side, and we could see the whole mountain.

Aina: But the Bo-Kaap of Shereen’s childhood is very different from the neighbourhood we’re winding our way through. She says her childhood home, for one thing, has been converted into a boutique hotel. And the signs — and sounds — of construction are everywhere.

Aunty Shereen: This is how we used to see the harbour, you know, without anything in front.

Aina: It’s an amazing view of the harbour. And still, again, so many cranes everywhere. I can, I can see — oh gosh — at least three.

Aunty Shereen: Oh, this is like Mecca. When you go to Mecca, you just see more cranes and more cranes and more. Oh, it’s hard. They just took the sanctity away of the place. They’re building, building, building now.

Aina: This rapid development of Bo-Kaap goes, of course, by another name.

[Archival audio:]

For several weeks, locals have taken to the streets in anti-gentrification demonstrations, calling instead for the iconic neighbourhood to be preserved.

Aina: Like a lot of working-class urban neighbourhoods around the world, Bo-Kaap has been hit by gentrification. Foreigners — many of them European — are buying properties in the area, while locals are struggling to afford to live there. In Bo-Kaap, gentrification is driven largely by tourism.

[Archival audio:]

The development of a new multi-storey hotel in close proximity to the country’s oldest mosque is causing major controversy in Cape Town’s Bo-Kaap.

Aina: I was on my Instagram one day and I remember seeing a petition and posts being shared by members of the Cape Malay community protesting against the approval of a hotel development in Bo-Kaap. Some of these people were from Bo-Kaap, some of these people were from outside of Bo-Kaap, but they were Cape Malay. And they were really angry about the plans that had been approved. They were saying that it was going to cause even more gentrification in Bo-Kaap, which had been an issue for a while. And I remember seeing that and thinking — God, this is still happening.

Aunty Shereen: This house is also for sale. It was for sale. It’s bought up now.

Aina: Does that happen quite a lot here — where for sale signs go up and they disappear quickly?

Aunty Shereen: Yeah.

Aina: Do things get sold here very quickly?

Aunty Shereen: Very quickly. And then, you know, with a pound and a dollar, you can buy for very cheap.

Aina: When apartheid sort of ended, Bo-Kaap became a hotspot for tourists, and it’s stayed the same today. Every single day of the week, you can find busloads of tourists coming around, taking selfies in front of the rows of brightly-coloured houses. Cape Town’s also a hub for international conferences, language schools, and more recently, Airbnbs and digital nomads. And this influx of wealthy foreigners and foreign developers has sent property prices absolutely soaring, pushing locals out of areas that they were able to afford in the past.

Mohammad Groenewald: If we look at and study, you know, same with many other parts of Europe — that same developers are coming here. And in fact, they’re not buying here to come and stay here. They’re buying here to put up Airbnbs, investments for them, and so on.

Aina: That’s Mohammad Groenewald again.

Mohammad Groenewald: And gentrification is very much encouraged by city officials here. The old nostalgia — for these developers, get rid of that. We want posh, we want new, we want all of that. And then we crush all our businesses. We make them disappear. Because now, a person cannot go back and say, “I want to rent a space here” — because now the space that he wants to rent is way unaffordable. What they are doing now, they’re surrounding Bo-Kaap — and all these small little spaces or buildings, developers are buying it up.

Aina: New buildings that are being developed — I could see them all over Cape Town. Not only while driving around Bo-Kaap with Aunty Shereen, but in the view from her living room.

Shereen, I wondered if you could just describe what is outside — literally directly outside your window.

Aunty Shereen: That’s apartment buildings, but this went up eight or nine floors. And somehow they redesigned while they were busy building, and now there is again another floor going up.

Aina: This background sound — we can hear drilling, two giant yellow cranes in front of us. Has there been a time in recent years where this hasn’t been outside your area, or you know, you have this noise surrounding you?

Aunty Shereen: As the years go by, more and more buildings, you know, it goes up.

Aina: Aunty Shereen says she has lived in this house — a big family home in the heart of Bo-Kaap — for the past 30 years. It’s where, in the garage right beneath us, she says she used to teach young tour guides about the history of Bo-Kaap, going all the way back to its slave origins in the 1600s.

But now, there are moving boxes scattered all around her.

Aunty Shereen: Yeah, very soon I will be leaving here. I don’t know where I’m going.

Aina: Shereen, why are you selling — so you’re selling this home, why? You’ve had so many memories here. You’ve seen so much change in the neighbourhood…

Aunty Shereen: In your country. I’d like to close this chapter. None of my children want to stay here. They all want something different, and they all want to get out of the cities. And now the city is coming right on top of us.

Aina: It’s suffocating.

Aunty Shereen: In another 10 years, I wouldn’t be able to see Table Mountain. So for me, I’m almost 75, and maybe just have another 10 years or 20 years if God gives me. But I just think that I don’t want to be in the city anymore.

Aina: In selling her Bo-Kaap home, Shereen made it very clear that she wouldn’t hand it over to just anyone.

Aunty Shereen: It’s 10 years now that my house has been off and on the market, because I had three buyers in the meantime, in between. And they weren’t fit to take this house. So I didn’t, I didn’t approve. I didn’t approve for one reason.

The people who built this house built this house with Salawat. Every brick they put in this house was with gratitude on the name of God. So every brick in this house has a purity that has been practiced since the house went up.

Aina: And you want…

Aunty Shereen: That legacy to continue? And I want that legacy to continue.

Aina: Sitting with Aunty Shereen, on what was maybe the last time she’d ever host a guest in her Bo-Kaap home, it got me wondering about who is going to continue the legacy of Bo-Kaap’s traditions and culture in the future.

Ateeqoh Johnstone: I can speak for myself. I would love to be able to purchase a home in the Bo-Kaap and reconnect with my ties to the Bo-Kaap and also keep it within the Cape Malay community.

Aina: Ateeqoh Johnstone is a young Cape Malay woman with ties to the Bo-Kaap that date back to the 19th century. She says her great-great grandfather, Abdul Wahab Manan, was actually buried in the Tana Baru cemetery — the historic cemetery where my tour of Bo-Kaap began.

Ateeqoh Johnstone: The proof was literally there in stone. So that was a very, very poignant day for me. And yeah, it’s something that I will — it still gives me goosebumps thinking about it.

Aina: And Ateeqoh is one of those Cape Malay people who wants to go back. She wants to go back to where parts of her family’s origins are.

Ateeqoh Johnstone: But what has happened is the City of Cape Town — our mayor, who I do not appreciate at all — has raised the property taxes of the Bo-Kaap area to these exponential rates that the elderly of the neighbourhood cannot even afford using their pensions. So what ends up happening is you have these families who owe the City of Cape Town tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of rands in property taxes on properties that they already own. So you find people are selling their homes. And it’s a forced situation. And you can speak to anyone who’s actually from the Bo-Kaap and from my generation or even younger — they would love to purchase their family’s homes. But they cannot afford to.

And that is a very, very sad reality of what is happening.

Aina: But if there was a way to return to Bo-Kaap, that would be Ateeqoh’s dream.

Ateeqoh Johnstone: And it’s, it’s, it’s not “would be the dream.” It actually is the dream. If I have to be honest about it — is that I can live in the Bo-Kaap area. That my children will be able to walk with their father. I’m unmarried, but the dream is that my husband will be able to hear the adhan in the morning for Fajr, and be able to walk with our child to the masjid and make salah in the masjid that has been the oldest masjid in South Africa — which is the Auwal Masjid. To be able to have my kids walk around our neighbourhood and actually have a sense of community that goes beyond just our household. Because one thing that has been lost within our sense of community that I was brought up in — which was, everyone knows who everyone is. You travel together. You are in each other’s company. Your neighbour will make sure that you are fed. It’s a beautiful way of living, where what you want for yourself, you want for your neighbour as well.

Aina: Ateeqoh’s vision for her future reminded me so much of Mohammad Groenewald’s imagined version of Bo-Kaap in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Mohammad Groenewald: Everyone helped in feeding each other, nurturing each other, and helping each other.

Aina: There’s a rare kind of neighbourliness — forged out of repression and resistance — that defines the Bo-Kaap of the past. And maybe, hopefully, in the future too.

And in the present, driving through the neighbourhood, I feel this sense of community as Aunty Shereen greets everyone she passes.

Aunty, you know everyone here, right?

Aunty Shereen: That’s my sister’s, my brother’s son.

Okay, have a lovely day, ladies.

Aina: Or points out things and places I should know, or people she can connect me to.

Aunty Shereen: The oldest woman — 99 years old — lives in this orange house. If you are here a little bit longer, then I can take you to her.

Aina: But the reason for our drive is actually to see the site that, for so many residents, represents another step in the slow erosion of the community’s spirit.

It’s the empty plot where a multi-storey hotel will soon be built — right behind Auwal Masjid, which Tuan Guru, the Indonesian scholar, set up all those years ago in 1794.

We can also see the minarets of Auwal Masjid just up above this island of tarmac. How does it make you feel? Because I know that for over a year, the Bo-Kaap community have been resisting the plans for this new hotel to be built here. How does it make you feel now that it’s been finally given the green light?

Aunty Shereen: Yeah, we’re dealing with very pushy people — very, you know, they have no respect for the community. There is just not any way that you can reason with them, because everybody signed against it and they will still go ahead and do it.

Aina: So many residents I spoke to are furious about the new hotel. But others have just kind of given in. They don’t feel like their voice or their protests make much of a difference anymore. And as Mohammad Groenewald reminds me, resisting gentrification is not an easy — or an even — fight.

Mohammad Groenewald: All other struggles you could fight — you could resist, you know, you can protest, you can burn your tires and you can be disruptive, because that is what protest is about. Let’s be disruptive. Gentrification is a completely different ball game. And you must also remember — in order to fight gentrification, you need to have millions. There’s just no other way to fight it. And it’s this very subtle move — it’s not in your face. And so gentrification is almost like — we say — somebody that smokes, you know, is a silent killer. And that is basically what gentrification is.

Aina: For Aunty Shereen, it’s personal. As she prepares to leave her house and to leave Cape Town for good, the hotel feels like a closing chapter — a symbol of the Bo-Kaap she no longer recognises.

Aunty Shereen: And I want to tell those scoundrels who’s coming to build here with all their agendas — who’s coming right on top of us in Bo-Kaap and trying to capitalize here. I want to let them know that there are consequences to everything. And I’m not threatening, because I’m not made up of what they, how they do it. I just know that spiritually they don’t understand us. And people here are very God-conscious, you know. But if God steps in — they’re going to be really dealt with.

Catherine: More Muslim is hosted by Sohaira Siddiqui and created by Salman Ahad Khan. This episode was reported by Aina J. Khan. It was produced by me, Catherine Boulle, and Salman Ahad Khan. Fact-checking by Heba Elorbany. Original music and sound design by Salman Ahad Khan. Engineering by Alexander Overington. Production support by Rabia Bhatt, Bushra, Saniya Ruhi, and Sara Tia. This season of More Muslim is powered by Al-Mujadilah, a centre and mosque for women in Qatar. If you liked our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. More about our show at moremuslim.org. We’ll have a new episode out in two weeks. Thanks for listening.