The Auwal Mosque

In front of you is South Africa's first mosque. Don't expect a grand monument: from outside it is a modest building, because it began life as a warehouse belonging to the family who donated it. Its importance lies in what it meant to the Cape's Muslim community.

1A faith without temples

For almost a century and a half the Dutch East India Company banned public Muslim worship. Yet Islam reached the Cape very early, with enslaved people from Southeast Asia and with the political prisoners the Company exiled from Indonesia. People prayed in private homes and in quarries outside the town.

In the 1790s, during the first British occupation, the decisive step was taken. Saartjie van de Kaap, daughter of a free man named Coridon van Ceylon, gave the warehouse she had inherited on this street. The first imam was Tuan Guru, a prince of Tidore and former prisoner on Robben Island, who had already been running a madrasa, a Quranic school, here since 1793. Local tradition, and the plaque on the facade, date the mosque to 1794.

In Tuan Guru's madrasa Afrikaans was written in Arabic letters: some of the oldest texts in the language came out of the Cape's Muslim schools.

After Tuan Guru's death the post of imam passed to Saartjie's husband, Achmat van Bengalen, and stayed in his family until 1980. According to the community, the mosque holds a Quran copied by hand by Tuan Guru himself.

2What to look for

• The ‘Established 1794’ plaque above the door.
• The minaret, the result of 20th-century alterations.
• Dorp Street, one of the oldest streets in the quarter.