Before you lies Tana Baru, Malay for ‘new ground’. From a distance it looks like a patch of open hillside, but for the Muslims of the Cape it is the most revered cemetery in the city. Out of respect, stay at the edge and keep your voice low.

1The prince who wrote out the Quran from memory

Until 1804 the Cape's Muslims could not practise their faith in public. That year the Batavian administration granted freedom of worship and, in 1805, gave this land to Frans van Bengalen as a burial ground. Two years later Abdullah ibn Qadi Abdus Salaam, known as Tuan Guru, the ‘Master Teacher’, was buried here. A prince of Tidore in the Moluccas, he had arrived in 1780 as a political prisoner of the Company and spent years locked up on Robben Island. There, according to his community's tradition, he copied out the Quran by hand from memory. Once free, he founded the country's first madrasa and first mosque.

2The stand of 1886

On 15 January 1886 the colonial authorities closed the cemetery on health grounds. Two days later some 3,000 people came up here to bury a child in defiance of the ban. It is seen as one of the first acts of collective disobedience against colonial power at the Cape.

Tradition holds that the kramats, the tombs of Muslim saints, form a circle around Cape Town that protects it from earthquakes and disasters.

That circle begins on Signal Hill and runs on through Oudekraal, Constantia, Faure and Robben Island.

3What to look for

  • Tuan Guru's kramat, one of the whitewashed shrines.
  • The slopes of Signal Hill, where the Noon Gun fires every day at twelve.
  • The view of the Bo-Kaap at your feet, with Table Mountain opposite.
A white domed kramat in the Tana Baru cemetery
One of the cemetery's kramats.

Documented

The land was granted as a Muslim cemetery in 1805; Tuan Guru, who arrived in 1780 as a political prisoner, was buried here in 1807, and the closure of January 1886 led to a mass burial in defiance of the law.

Oral tradition

That Tuan Guru wrote out the Quran from memory is held by his community, and the protective circle of kramats belongs to popular religious tradition.

Sources and credits

Tana Baru Trust, history of the cemetery; South African History Online (SAHO), ‘Circle of Kramats, Cape Town’ and ‘Historic Tana Baru Muslim cemetery forced to close’; Achmat Davids, ‘The Mosques of Bo-Kaap’ (1980).

Photos:

  • Entrance gate to the Tana Baru cemetery in the Bo-Kaap: Nkansahrexford, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • A white domed kramat in the Tana Baru cemetery: Nkansahrexford, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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