Reading the Hidden History of the Cape: Islam and Slavery in the Making of Race and Sex in South Africa

Abstract

This chapter traces the place of Islam in South Africa during the colonial period and argues that the presence of Muslim slaves played a foundational role in the making of concepts of race and sex in South Africa. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company established a refueling station at the Cape, the southwestern tip of Africa, a settlement at first focused solely on provisioning ships engaged in the Dutch trade in spices and slaves from the East. Forbidden by its charter to enslave indigenous people, the Dutch instead enslaved people from India, South East Asia and East Africa to serve as labor in the Cape Colony. Slavery and Islam are therefore intricately connected at the Cape because many slaves were Muslim and, in addition, there was a high rate of conversion to Islam among slaves and indigenous people at the Cape, since being Muslim offered “a degree of independent slave culture” separate from that of slave-owners (Worden 1984: 4). Since enslaved people eventually constituted the majority of the population of the Colony, and slavery was central to the social and economic systems of the Colony, the presence of Muslim slaves played a foundational role in the formation of concepts of race and sex in South Africa. In this chapter I explore the place of Islam and slavery in South Africa by analyzing recent fiction that revisits the Cape’s racialized and sexualized history and its subsumed tropes of slavery.KeywordsEnslaved PeopleMuslim SlavesSwahili CoastVerenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)Black womenBlack WomenThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.