Growing up, Aina had heard about the transatlantic slave trade which enslaved Africans and took them to the Americas. But on one of her reporting trips, she was shocked to learn that, around the same time, Dutch colonizers were deporting and enslaving Muslims from Indonesia and shipping them thousands of miles... all the way to South Africa.

This week, reporter Aina J. Khan takes us to Cape Town and tells the story of the Cape Malay, South Africa's oldest Muslim community. How they used their faith to survive through 400 years of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. And why, today, they might be facing their most existential threat yet: gentrification.

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EPISODE CREDITS:

Reported by Aina J. Khan.

Produced by Catherine Boulle and Salman Ahad Khan.

Original music and sound design by Salman Ahad Khan.

Fact checking by Heba Elorbany.

Engineering by Alexander Overington.

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This season of More Muslim is powered by Al Mujadilah, a center 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. A transcript of this episode will be available on our website.

More about our show at moremuslim.org.

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Further reading:

Baderoon, Gabeba. Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014.

Jessa, Sirhan, and Jayne M. Rogerson. "Tourism Gentrification in Cape Town's Bo-Kaap: Socio-economic Transformations and Displacement." Bulletin of Geography: Socio-economic Series 69 (2025): 129–143.

Williams, Karen. "The Indonesian Anti-Colonial Roots of Islam in South Africa." Media Diversified, August 25, 2016.

Dangor, Suleman E. "Shaykh Yusuf of Macassar: Scholar, Sufi, National Hero — Towards Constructing Local Identity and History at the Cape." Kawalu: Journal of Local Culture 1, no. 2 (2014).