Coffee, Resistance and the Racialization of Islamic Indigeneity in South Africa

The defeat of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress in 2024 has accompanied renewed attention to the ways in which struggles for racial justice have long been mobilized through creolized religious formations. Focusing on “Colouredness” as a site not only for enacting and policing colonial white supremacy but also for phenomenological attentionality, trans-sociality, kinship and remembering, this paper explores the ways in which South Africans have used coffee – a plant, medicine, trade good, “tot-system” commodity, symbol and potential ethical resource – to facilitate indigenous forms of anticolonial resistance. Attending to Western Cape writers and religious reformers as well as cultural and political activists, I show the ways in which Islam, and Islamic secularity, provide critical leverage for realizing this resistance work. At the center of my paper is consideration of a short story and novel by Zoë Wicomb; I will also discuss related literary material as well as my own fieldwork.