Gabeba Baderoon thinks of herself as an average reader, so what interested her about the ideas she discusses in her book is how it made her more aware of her own complicated history.
“It helped me understand better a part of South African contemporary life and South African history that in some ways is hidden in plain sight,” she said in an interview in Cape Town.
She worked on Regarding Muslims: From slavery to post-apartheid for almost 10 years, drawing on research used for her dissertation “Oblique Figures: Representations of Islam in South African Media and Culture”.
Baderoon completed her doctoral studies in media studies at UCT in 2004.
Her poetic side comes through strongly in the book.
“It’s percolated for a long time and I hope that is reflected in the book. Not only in the ideas but that it’s not written in a heavy anxious language that prevents people from appreciating or enjoying the ideas,” said Baderoon.
Baderoon’s point is to bring to the fore the role of slavery in the formation of South African culture.
The book also delves into the meaning of the particular racial classification “Cape Malay”.
“Part of it had to do with my own falling into the trap of my concept of the history of apartheid. During apartheid, Cape Malay had a particular meaning: divisions, the impossibility of Colourness, seven categories,” she said.
But in the same way the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in the US uses the word coloured to recall certain aspects of their politics, she has started thinking of “Cape Malay: as a more nuanced way of using an historic marker of identity”.
In the book she explains how the term originated from the lingua franca the slaves learned to speak at the then Cape Colony and hence the term references slave roots.
At the recent book launch at Wits in Gauteng she pointed out that she concentrated on the Western Cape because she is familiar with it, and that published research into the Muslim experience in other parts of the country is available.
“What I argue is that our sense of our national beginnings and what counts as national can’t be provincial, so it can’t only be about Gauteng. We must be able to, for instance, think about how our longer colonial history included KZN and the Eastern Cape and also the Western Cape, which is profoundly influenced by slavery.
“So, part of what this book is trying to say is, ‘we can’t underplay that part of history in thinking of ourselves generally as South Africans because unless we understand that history better we won’t know why someone for instance thinks of coloured people in terms of a particular tone of pathos’.
“Where does that come from? It comes from the lens of slavery,” is her theory. “If you’re thinking about the epidemic of sexual violence we’re experiencing today (in the country), it goes back to slavery,” is another contention.
The book carefully unpacks the link between slave women being used as prostitutes at the Cape 350 years ago and contemporary commonplace sexual violence meted out on women, especially black women, because their bodies are seen to be things to be used.
“We know that Anene Booysen (raped and murdered in Bredasdorp) was not an isolated case, we see it being played out all the time.
“Her case just captured our horror somehow, speaking to that unspoken but vaguely known class of knowledge.”
While she doesn’t want to evade complicated questions, she is curious about what prevents those conversations. As she is an assistant professor of women’s studies and African studies at Pennsylvania State University in the US, Baderoon spends much time engaging with American scholars.
“When you’re in a group of African American scholars or writers and you say you never speak about slavery, that would be so weird to them. You couldn’t do that in Brazil, or the Caribbean.
“So, why aren’t we doing it here? This is a crucial part of how we came to be who we are.
“That is, again, extraordinary to imagine. Not only do we not have debates about it, but at the popular level, say some memory of childhood from looking at a cookbook with old Malay recipes, we actually have this idea that slavery was a mild, okay thing that brought about positive benefits to the country and we never speak about the absolute brutality of it.”
* Regarding Muslims: From slavery to post-apartheid is published by Wits University Press and available through Amazon and good bookstores.