Abstract
Gabeba Baderoon’s Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid 1 offers an interesting engagement with slavery, colonialism and Islam in the Cape. She historicizes the link between Islam and slavery in South Africa through an original engagement with the representations of Muslims in visual art, literature, and news media. Regarding Muslims, although titled somewhat misleadingly, offers the reader a very thought-provoking approach to studying the way in which slavery and Islam have shaped contemporary conceptualizations of gender, ‘race’ and popular agency; this with particular reference to the Western Cape, South Africa.
Baderoon sets out by highlighting how etymology and the picturesque mode of representation were used to legitimate a sense of white belonging in South Africa. She also notes that etymologically the word ‘kaffir’, the most abusive term in the lexicon of South African racism, was taken from discourse by Muslims (the term denotes someone who has closed their heart to Islam in Arabic) and turned into discourse about Muslims. The Arabic term used by Muslims to denote the ‘other’ came to render them the ‘other’ (p.31), thus creating white subjectivity and belonging in South Africa through the denial of Muslim subjectivity. Alongside this, the picturesque mode allowed for ‘Malays’ to become what she terms ‘ambiguous figures’ (p.38). They are present in paintings, but always compliant, apolitical and marginal, thus being ‘constructed as the boundary that enabled the [white] centre to be formed’ (p.156). Baderoon correctly points out that representations of ‘Malay’ people have by and large remained picturesque, thus trivializing their agonizing history of slavery. From the outset Baderoon recognizes a peculiar silence in contemporary popular discourse around the fact that the foundations of modern South Africa were laid by the traumatic enslavement of Muslims in the Cape. We have, she concludes, allowed ‘dominant society to gesture to the presence of enslaved people while denying the brutality of slavery’ (own emphasis; p.50).
Baderoon shows that although Muslim slaves in the Cape were systematically denied their subjectivity, the ‘Malay’ slaves managed to find ways of claiming their agency. Regarding Muslims emphasizes how the interaction between settler and slave was not on a battle field, but rather within the domestic space (p.49). Here slaves were able to claim some agency by means of shaping a new creolized South African culture in the intimacies of the settler kitchen. Baderoon’s discussion of food and its potential for reclaiming subjectivity is thoughtful, although she does not problematize the implications of this sufficiently. How does one recognize the agency of slaves in shaping a new reality without simultaneously rendering them – at least partially– complicit in their continued oppression? This is not a question that has a simple answer, but rather one that adds nuance to any discussion of oppressed people. It offers a potentially fruitful niche for further exploration.
Baderoon also shows that the journey of going to Hajj was one that allowed oppressed ‘Malay’ people of the Cape some autonomy. Muslims journeying to Mecca and Medina were in a space where they could ‘uncover parallel modernities’ (p.76). Here they are able to – momentarily – escape the force of colonial oppression.
Baderoon highlights the systemic brutality of slavery. She shows how slavery and sexual abuse were often synonymous concepts for Muslim women. She shows how the contemporary silence and denigration around the sexual violence against black female bodies is a direct legacy of slavery (p.87). Regarding Muslims considers various forms of art and literature to show how the body of the ‘Malay’ 2 woman is seen as a space for objectification, ‘revulsion and attraction’ (p.92). If Muslims in the Cape were oppressed because of their ‘race’, then Muslim women were doubly oppressed. They were (and possibly still are) simultaneously the picturesque and compliant non-subjects and the victims of an ambiguous sexual objectification. Right up until the emergence of Pagad, a vigilante group opposing gangsterism and drugs, in the mid-1990s Muslims in the Cape were almost exclusively featured in the picturesque mode.
Pagad, via portrayals of ‘masked men and veiled women’ (p.107), changed the peculiar silence around Muslims in the South African public sphere. Muslims were now represented, by both themselves and the media, as menacing 3 rather than picturesque and compliant (p.109). This shift towards the menacing saw Muslims ‘as the local incarnation of a global “Islamic threat”’ (p.111). Sensation-seeking journalists and leaders 4 of Pagad both embraced the idea of ‘dangerous men and vulnerable women’ (p.118) to link global discourses around Islam with the local movement. These ignored the many women who were involved with this instance of popular politics. Baderoon shows how this portrayal of Pagad 5 saw Muslim men portrayed as irrational aggressors, whilst seeing Muslim women as silent non-subjects. Thus Muslim subjectivity remained unattainable. Representations of Muslims as compliant with the status quo and representations of Muslims resisting it both negated their agency, history, suffering and contribution to what has become contemporary South Africa.
Baderoon ends her book with some of the more recent portrayals of Muslims in literature and art. Her engagement with these texts and other forms of art points towards the importance of engaging the links between Islam, representation, history and subjectivity in South Africa. It is, however, worth noting that Regarding Muslims is concerned with the specific role of Muslim slaves who came to the Cape in the late 1600s and later became known as ‘Cape Malay’. The focus of the book is therefore not with other Muslim communities who have come to form a part of South African society. The Muslims who came to South Africa as Indian indentured workers and merchants, or the numerous Muslims from other African countries (Somalia, Egypt, Nigeria, etc.) who have recently immigrated to South Africa are therefore not Baderoon’s subjects of study. Nevertheless, she does an excellent job at negating the idea that intellectual engagement with Muslim history is too general to take on, whilst being too specific to matter. Regarding Muslims provides a well-researched and fresh look at South Africa. It should be read by anyone who is interested in history, art, literature, representation, [counter]hegemonic discourses, agency and of course Muslims. This book has initiated a conversation that must be had and continued in a South Africa that is hoping to move towards a better and unified future.