Encounters with Diversity and Arabic in Cape Town

A little more than a week into my stay in Cape Town, I have encountered a rich and diverse range of apparently new foreign social influences in the city. In the first week I have met a range of people from South Asia, Congo (Brazzaville), Malawi, England, Zimbabwe, the People’s Republic of China and from the Horn of Africa. In some ways this is nothing new. Cape Town has, historically, been a proverbial melting pot.

One piece of research I read (I can’t recall the reference) suggested that the Cape Flats was, genetically, one of the most diverse places on earth. Anyway, amid the diversity of people that I have come across in the past week, the most surprised I have been, is by the significant influence of Arabic.

This, too, is not surprising. There is a very large Muslim community in Cape Town, and Islam was “born” in today’s Saudi Arabia from where it was exported around the world along trade routes, and reproduced by diasporic communities. As far as I can recall, Islam arrived at the Cape mainly from the east coast of the Indian subcontinent and especially East Asia. As such the Muslim community in Cape Town was significantly imbued in customs and traditions which people have associated with East Asia.

These East Asian origins had for centuries influenced the language of most Muslims in Cape Town, many of whom would insist on a Malay or Cape Malay identity. I am insufficiently familiar with the literature on identity politics, or linguistics for that matter, suffice to say that a) these issues (of “Malay” or “Cape Malay”) are terribly malleable and labile, b) it seems to me that “Malay” was a portmanteau concept used by the Dutch for most or all slaves and indentured labourers brought to the Cape during the colonial period, and c) I, personally, abandoned the “coloured” and “Malay” identities that were given to me by my family and/or the South African government several years ago.

In terms of the latter, I consider the rising tide of literature on (re)defining “the coloured” as toxic, and a reproduction of the historical racist fractionalisation of European colonialist and settler colonialists. I believe that the reproduction of racial identities, whether it’s “white” or “coloured” or “Malay”, may contribute to increased instability in a country where social cohesion is threatened by growing class conflict.

Nonetheless, as far as I recall, the Malay identity was conditioned over time, in the sense that its routines, rituals and repertoires were handed down, as it were, to generations, and repeated sufficiently over time to the extent that it became fairly entrenched among communities in Cape Town. Part of the conditioned Malay identity among some Capetonians has historically been reflected in the persistence and relative durability of words and expressions that one could, fairly easily, trace to the predominant languages of Malaysia and Indonesia, commonly referred to as bahasa.

As such, it was not uncommon to hear expressions like “trama kasih”, derived from terrimah kasih, bahasa for thank you, or “slamat” which was probably derived from selamat which means “well” or “well wishes”. For instance, in East Asia you may hear the expression, selemat jalan, which means “travel well”. I hope I am not misrepresenting these facts.

Twenty or thirty years ago there were also Afrikaans expressions among Muslims that were, arguably, unique to Cape Town. Among other, expressions like “so lank lewe” were generally inserted after an Afrikaans phrase like, “Ek sal een dag daardie boek lees, so lank lewe”.

Today that expression seems to have been replaced, almost universally, by “insha-Allah” – Arabic for “God willing”. The phrase “trama kasih” seems to have been replaced by “shukran” – Arabic for thank you. It is almost impossible to hold a conversation with family and friends in Cape Town without straining to understand, or keep up with conversations laced with Arabic expressions – or making a fool of yourself.

Hosts and guests on a local radio station, Radio 786, appear to take great pride in extended greetings, incantations and expressions and professions of their faith and piety – all in Arabic. There is, in some ways, no reason to be surprised by the increased use of Arabic in conversations between Muslims, much as it should be no surprise that orthodox Roman Catholic sermons may include Latin phrases, or Jewish prayers may be in Hebrew.

The pronounced shift towards Arabic is also reflected in an increased preference for Shariah principles, which is essentially Islamic. (It is important to bear in mind that not all Arabs are Muslims and, therefore, not everything Arabic is Islamic) The most public of this preference for Shariah/Islamic preferences is the increased presence (which I think started in about 1990) of Islamic banking.

Some of these banks, like Al Baraka, may well be owned by local investors, but may have Saudi Arabian origins. Islamic banking seems to be more stable, for now, at least, than the current system of global finance, which has been fraught with crises. Over the past two or three decades there have been tens of banking crises, notably insolvencies, exchange rate crises and debt defaults. As far as I can remember, Islamic banking proceeds from the belief that society needed a fairer and more equitable financial system specifically directed at rewarding and developing communities. Fairness, equality and community development are, arguably, beyond the individual pecuniary gain that is implicit in the excessive individualist system once described most eloquently by the political economist Thorstein Veblen.

Cape Town seems to have embraced the new social influences from various parts of the world. The great thing about increased diversity, though immigration, is that it can produce exceptional opportunities for innovation and expansion. The best developed example of this power of immigrant communities is probably New York City, which has historically been the entry-port for new immigrants to the United States – a country built on immigrant labour, notwithstanding more recent pogrom-type offenses against people from Latin America.