Private property and the problem of the miraculous: the kramats and the city of Cape Town

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the place of kramats the graves of Muslim saints or Auliyah – in the landscape of contemporary Cape Town. The kramat sites have been proclaimed as heritage sites because of their importance as tangible signs of Islam at the Cape. At the same time, the process of the kramats becoming heritage sites has contained moments of intense, often sensational, public contestation. Offering a reading of the discourses surrounding two contested kramats in Cape Town, this paper explores the way kramats mark out a miraculous space in the prosaic modern city and introduce into the post-apartheid evaluation of heritage, alternative conceptions of space and notions of temporality. They are sites of impossibility where, it is claimed, the laws of nature themselves are interrupted to mark the intangible particularities of the site. This paper explores what happens when this miraculous space is subject to the demands of private property and municipal law and the conflicts that arise from this collision of different conceptual and experiential modalities. It considers the effects of the entanglement of legend and history that result from the production of these sites as heritage in a market-driven economy.