The thesis had, till recently, been his only constant companion, its characters, centuries old, more real to him than anybody, more actual than the affluent family from which he had become estranged, cut asunder, more compelling than the successful career-minded comrades back home, paralysed by self – congratulatory nostalgia for their part in an amicably settled dispute. His characters’ 17th century dilemmas were more vexing than the mundane popular preoccupations of his adopted city. Then time buckled, history flipped and the 17th century became indistinguishable from the 21st. He found it impossible to drag himself from the present and into the past. He was no longer able to distinguish between the two.
“Why not take a break?” his supervisor had advised some months earlier. “You’re way ahead of schedule, so you can spare the time. Go away, maybe South Africa, the weather will be great. Get away from this dark war-mongering winter. It will do you good. You’ll return refreshed.”
I don’t know, he shrugged. A thesis that started off as history now reads like current affairs. How will a holiday change that?
At the door, she glanced over her shoulder for a final wave, but he didn’t turn around, just stared ahead at the screen. She dithered for a moment, but then she left.
He rose to leave not long after she had gone, but was detained by new footage on the screen – a horrendously maimed boy. Like many in the room, he flinched and looked away, but then sat down again and forced himself to take in the horror, holding the long velvet-covered stem of the mouthpiece upright, like a crook, in his tightly squeezing hand.
When the café had emptied, leaving only the regular late-night patrons, he asked to be relocated to his usual seat, in the corner behind the mashrabeya screen. He gathered his papers while the sabby obligingly lifted the elegant pipe with its elongated blue glass base high above his head to ensure its safe passage to the other side of the room. Issa settled in his new position, a vantage point from which he could see without himself being seen. When the sabby had stoked his pipe, Issa offered him the mouthpiece discreetly. The young man accepted it with a smile and drank deeply, pretending only to be getting the pipe going again, making a show of rearranging the fresh, already well-placed, coals. A waiter approached with a clinking tray of glasses and fresh mint tea. The sabby drank one last time, his cheeks sucked right in, then handed the mouthpiece back, picked up his basket of coals from the brass floor and rushed off to attend to other pipes, fragrant smoke funnelling from his flared nostrils.
The waiter aimed the crescent spout at the gold-rimmed glass and Issa watched as he poured, lifting the teapot higher and higher into the air with a gracefully draped wrist, so that the tea bubbled and frothed in the glass below. But when the glass had filled, the waiter did not stop. Issa looked up and followed the waiter’s gaze. Blurred pictures on the giant screen of heavily shackled men in orange overalls behind high-security fences, their arms chained behind their backs to their feet, sent an ominous hush through the room.
Issa’s eyes flashed between screen and glass. Shukran! he exclaimed to prevent a spillage. And then, in fluent Arabic, added, My cup over – floweth.
“Afwan,” the waiter responded, not really aware of the flood he’d almost caused, one eye still on the screen. He set down the pot absent-mindedly and drifted back to his post, never looking away from the footage on which the camera had now settled: a notice on the fence – ‘Honour bound to defend freedom’.
Issa leaned back into his seat and watched as history rose up from the open manuscript on his table and came to hover between him and the images on the screen:
In 1694, Abadin Tadia Tjoessoep, a member of the Macassarese royal family and the nephew of King Bisei of Goa, arrived at the Cape Colony shackled in chains that belonged to what was then “the world’s greatest trading corporation”5, the Dutch East India Company. It is impossible to overstate the impact his detention at the Cape would have on the culture and political ethos of the colony and that of the country into which it would eventually develop.
Dutch interest in the Cape was, at first, specific and the role of their settlement there, narrowly defined: because of its strategic position approximately half-way between the Netherlands and its empire in southeast Asia, the settlement was to be no more than a refreshment station where merchant vessels of the Company could be replenished with fresh produce. Investment was minimal and the settlement was by and large expected to be self-sufficient.
For this reason, Company directors decided to import slave labour – already illegal in the Netherlands – to the Cape; in a global corporation that was, in effect, “a state outside the state”6, the attainment of economic profit and the power to pursue it, unchecked, superseded any obligation to an already acknowledged and adopted ethical policy. Slaves were brought in from Mozambique and Madagascar, but most were shipped to Table Bay from Dutch colonial territory in their eastern empire: India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ceylon. The majority were Muslim who, at the Cape, became known collectively as Cape Malay. Initially, their influence was minimal and their religious practices curtailed, but within just a few decades, their contribution, as even the most fleeting visit to modern-day Cape Town will reveal, would be definitive.
Katinka readjusts her pillow. The movement of air causes the candle to flicker beside her and shadows to scurry across the faces in the photographs. The flame struggles to regain its composure, rising and falling, bowing and twisting. She holds her breath, not wanting to hamper its efforts. She watches the flame gather its layers, like a poised woman rising, adjusting her scarf, straightening her jacket, arranging her charms, until everything is properly displayed – the blue glow at the base, the translucent clove in the centre where the bright tip of the black wick burns like a jewel, the whole arrangement rounded off with the golden yellow crown.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, resistance to Dutch Colonial rule in southeast Asia lead the Company to make a more sinister reassessment of its remote settlement at the Cape. Faced with the threat of increasingly militant opposition to its lucrative enterprise in the East, the Company now saw the colony as more than just a one-stop-shop; because of its geographical isolation, Company directors identified it as a place, far removed, suitable for the incarceration of political prisoners and exiles from the Eastern Batavian Empire.
In 1667, the first banished exiles landed at the Cape. Men of high social standing, all of them were prominent Muslim leaders. Their arrival would be formative; with it, fierce opposition to colonial subjugation on the one hand with political exile, banishment and incarceration as its punishment on the other, became defining traits of the fledgling colony just fifteen years after its establishment. The arrival of these exiles rekindled a new spirit of political resistance – the Khoi, now virtually decimated, no longer posed any serious threat to Dutch rule – and brought a new momentum to the struggle of the dispossessed and subjugated against colonial domination, a struggle, which, for the next three centuries, would be the hallmark of the country into which the Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Africa would eventually evolve.
Although nearly seventy years old by the time he arrived at the Cape, Tjoessoep was the most influential of these exiles, remembered as Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar, the father of Islam in South Africa. During his brief five-year incarceration at the Cape – he died in captivity there on 23 May 1699 – “Skeikh Yusuf established the first Muslim community in South Africa, attracted runaway slaves who converted to Islam, and represented a symbol of resistance to European colonialism.”7 Throughout his imprisonment, Yusuf continued to agitate against Dutch colonial rule so that the history of Islam in South Africa is therefore synonymous with the struggle against oppression. Three centuries later, as South Africa was preparing for its first democratic election of April 1994 under the leadership of another insurgent septuagenarian, Muslims were also celebrating the tri-centenary of Islam in the country. “The high point of the celebration was a mass encampment around Sheikh Yusuf’s tomb. It was a sig
nificant indication of how Sheikh Yusuf had been adopted as a symbol of Muslim presence in the country and Islamic resistance to colonialism and apartheid.”8
He shuts the manuscript. On the screen, an ancient city now lies decimated, smouldering. How, he thinks, will a holiday change that? History has arrived at his table with its intricate geometric pattern and mother-of-pearl inlay. When he has wound the mouthpiece neatly around the stem of the pipe and tucked the mutilated broadsheet into his rear pocket, he leaves his payment on the table and moves towards the door, forced into a new consciousness of himself. On his way, he brushes past the waiter, almost touching, a handkerchief already concealed in his left hand. But the waiter, staring at his ruined home town, does not notice the silent departure; only closes his welling eyes and inhales, trying to decipher the sudden, delicate fragrance – jessamine, violet, rose – which has started to snake its way through the columns of apple scented smoke. By the time the waiter turns around, sniffing left, sniffing right, searching for its source, his eyes settling on the empty seat in the corner behind the mashrabeya screen, the wound-up pipe, the serviette, folded neatly next to the empty glass the abandoned manuscript, Issa has already slipped through the door into a dawn that is beginning to illuminate the devastation wrought by the violent night.
When she wakes in the middle of the night, the candle is spent. It has given itself entirely to the struggle against darkness. She watches as the flame clings desperately to the burnt out wick, fluttering, like sleepy eyelids almost shutting, then flaring back to life again with optimistic determination: flutter and flair, flutter and flair. She once received a greeting card in which the inscription read: ‘There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of one small candle.’ But there is, she thinks. The flame stumbles, like a flogged princess, tries one last time to lift itself against the night before it collapses, exhausted, under the crushing, all consuming darkness. You should have stayed with him. He was clearly disoriented. You should not have left him alone... She never saw him again.
1 Eric Auerbach; “Philology and Weltlierature” trans. M. Said and E. Said, Centennial Review, (Winter 1969): 4-5.
2 VC Malherbe; Krotoa, called Eva: A woman between; 1990:4.
3 Freda Troup; South Africa: An Historical Introduction; 1972: 130.
4 Ibid.; 5.
5 Leonard Thompson; A History of South Africa; Yale University Press; 1995:33.
6 Ibid.
7 Abdulkader Tayob; Islam in South Africa Mosques, Imams, and Sermons; University of Florida Press; 1999:22.
8 Ibid.
II
The Bookshelf
‘All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realised even then that this was the dangerous. moment,. I was safe, so long as I could not read – the wheels had not begun to turn, but now the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere!
Graham Greene
The Lost Childhood
1951
The Silent Minaret
AFTER DINNER, FRANCES INVITES KAGISO to sit out on the roof for a while. “It’s only a makeshift affair out there,” she confesses, as she leads the way through the open window, “but in this heat, it provides a pleasant enough escape from a stuffy London flat.”
Once outside, Kagiso walks over to the low wall at the front end of the building and leans out over the bustling street below: a constant stream of commuters still pouring out of the station; the increasingly animated revellers who have spilled out of the pub on the corner and taken over the pavement; a group of kids on skateboards practising routines under a giant, brightly coloured mural across the road; the incongruous bird-like couple outside the station – she in a high-necked frilly white blouse, he sporting a comb-over and black dinner jacket with velvet lapel – anxiously expecting their lift. And all the while the continuous coming and going of buses in the terminus.
He turns around. The image of Frances sitting in the front seat of a sports car, the letters GTi in neon green on the headrest, makes him chuckle.
“Where’s the rest of it?” he asks.
She laughs too. “Issa dragged this up here last summer. He’d ripped it out of an abandoned car that had been down there for weeks. He intended going back for the other seat the next night, but by then the car had been towed. So he got that deck chair instead.”
Kagiso unfolds the chair next to the upturned crate on which Frances has balanced their glasses. He leans back into the chair and throws his head up to the sky. Not the mass of stars he’d been expecting. Not the chirping of crickets, which as a boy he took for the sound of twinkling stars.
“Light pollution,” Frances explains. “In a big city like this, only the brightest ones shine through.”
It occurs to him that he is now in the northern hemisphere once more. “Which is the North Star? Do you know?” he asks, while making a mental note to check the direction in which water spins down the drainpipe. He forgot to do so during a brief visit to DC.
“I’m afraid I don’t and isn’t that shameful? Issa asked me that very question when we were out here once. He was reading about the first European explorations down the west coast of Africa. For centuries, European sailors were terrified at the thought of crossing the equator because they’d lose sight of the North Star if they did. I didn’t understand why that was such a terrifying prospect until he explained that they used to navigate by it and so would have wanted it constantly in their sights.
“Anyway, I expect you probably know all this stuff, but I found it very interesting and we pledged to locate it but never did. In my case,” she shrugs reaching for her glass, “too much sitting around to do.”
Kagiso smiles as he watches her recline. She must be the same age as his grandmother, he thinks, yet she seems so much younger. Though more frail and with none of that big African sturdiness about her, her eyes retain a mischievous and enthusiastic sparkle.
“I remember the first time I brought him up here. It was to see the minaret,” she recalls, tilting her head towards it.
Minaret? Kagiso puzzles, then quickly scans the skyline for clues. I haven’t heard a mosque.
Then, suddenly, there it is, right in front of him, as though it had just stepped out from the shadows.
‘The Silent Minaret,’ he used to call it.
At home, minarets declare God’s greatness five times a day, but here they stand silent, like blacked – out lighthouses.
Kagiso returns to the low wall. From here he can only see the small domed enclosure at the top of the minaret with its windowless pointed arched openings from where traditionally the muezzin would call azaan:
Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Hayya alas Salat...
The railway bridge and a criss-cross of overhead electricity cables obscure the rest of the building.
“Another night, he told me about mosques and minarets: the one at the bottom of your road in Johannesburg, the one you grew up under, as he so quaintly put it. And the white mosque in the city centre reflected in the glass building across the road. The mosque in Durban sounded impressive too.”
“I only have vague memories of Durban,” Kagiso interrupts with a faraway stare. “I remember the journey more than I do the place.” He turns to face her, leaning with his back against the wall. She doesn’t seem to mind the interruption, so he continues. “Issa and I went there secretly one weekend. We’d told our mothers we were going hiking with friends in the Eastern Transvaal as it was called then, but we jumped into a taxi to Durban instead.”
“Were you found out?”
“No. But that was down to Issa’s cunning.”
“Why Durban?”
“Oh,” he sighs, “One of h
is quests. I just tagged along to lend authenticity to the lie.”
“Did he find what he was searching for?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Did you see the mosque?”
“May have,” he shrugs. “We went to so many places, I really can’t recall. Wish I’d paid more attention... Why? What did he say about it?”
“That it was the largest mosque in the southern hemisphere. That it stands so close to the Catholic cathedral that from certain angles the two buildings almost seem one. I rather liked the sound of that.”
Yes Frances, imagine that, a sky that echoes simultaneously with azaan and the Angelus.
She tried:
Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary
Allah-u-akbar, Allah-u-akbar
And she conceived of the Holy Spirit
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee;
Ashadu an la illaha illAllah
Blessed art thou amongst women
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Ashadu anna Muhammad ar Rasool Allah
Holy Mary!
Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners, now,
And at the hour of our death.
Amen
“It all suggested such pictures to my mind, such sounds to my ears. I can’t think of such a place or imagine such a mingling of sounds here. That would need to be nurtured with love and respect, not battering rams and riot gear...
Silent Minaret Page 6