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

From the 16th-20th centuries, access to coffee and its consumption signaled distinctions of class and cosmopolitanism, prestige-markers that were acutely attuned to social transformations across Muslim-majority Arab, Persian, African, Ottoman, and Southeast Indian Ocean colonial worlds. At the same time, coffee was continuously smuggled across continents and their networked socialities; in South Africa, coffee became a prized object and signifying practice for early Muslim slaves and Southeast Asian exiles, Dutch East India Company merchants and freeholders, rank-and-file British soldiers, indigenous Africans, non-European colonial conscripts and the country’s steadily expanding ranks of enslaved, indentured and subordinated colonial workers. Coffee’s bodily, sexual and status/class associations became instrumental in these hierarchized and mutually constitutive worlds, particularly as people used the plant to define as well as negotiate and contest their constraints.

My research suggests that, in comparison with Africans elsewhere on the continent, South Africans’ access to coffee was both more widespread and more subject to complex forms of cultural contestation for two reasons: the country’s long coastlines and their proximity to global shipping routes, and also South Africa’s especially prolonged history of setter-colonialism. Given the fact that many of the country’s earliest enslaved people were Muslims from Africa and Asia, individuals familiar with Islam’s complex traditions of environmental ethics, their contributions and the uptake of their legacies were all the more pronounced. My work unpacks this transcultural and multi-faith history through English and Afrikaans-language literary works written from the 19th-21st centuries, particularly those that address the topic of “Colouredness.”

As a political, cultural and ultimately legalized category of identity, South Africa’s “Coloured” designation reflects a complex history in which the British empire sought to keep majoritarian-Black communities divided: “Coloured,” on the one hand, signified mixed-race descent from Christians; “Cape Malays,” conversely, were held to be indigenous non-Whites who had, at some point, married Muslims or become their descendants. Print media regularly announced such mixed-race marriages and made sure that white partners were understood to be “Muslim,” with no discussion of genuine religious conversion having taken place. Given the arbitrary and racist conflations of race and religion “from above,” how did “Coloured” individuals, as well as others implicated by the designation, employ coffee culture to affirm, critique or reflect on these distinctions “from below”? The answer to this question requires attention to South Africa’s early as well as late postcolonial worlds. Insofar as coffee was an esteemed beverage among Javanese nobles in the Dutch East Indies, for example, coffee provided late 18th-century Javanese Muslim slaves in Cape Town with a way to incorporate traditions from their homeland into newfound diasporic Muslim cultures. In the late 19th-century, when disputes broke out in Cape Town about mosque leadership, coffee consumption was among the techniques employed to build solidarity between disputing parties and remind South Africans of their connectedness with centuries of Islamic spiritual reflection and ethics. 

Through prior archival research and fieldwork in Cape Town over several years, I have identified extensive sources on the history of South Africa’s coffee trade, mercantilism, agricultural production and consumption. In order to consider the ways in which this history has shaped, and in turn been shaped by culture, religion and politics, I focus on both English and Afrikaans literature (the latter of which I have reading proficiency in.) While some of this literature dates back to the 17th and 18th centuries, most of it was written during, and in the wake of, South Africa’s indigenous coffee-plantation boom during the 1860s-70s, a period that marks two important currents in the racialization of the country’s economic and social worlds. First, during the prior half-century, British mercantilists had advanced across rural South Africa, gaining leverage over their Dutch or “Boer” competitors through mortgage-capital that gradually upended agriculture- and slavery-based economic hierarchies. In the process, coffee became not only more closely associated with debt and servitude for European as well as non-European descendants but also a material and cultural resource for anticolonial critiques of British empire that cut across racial and religious groups, notably Muslims and Boers but also European Jews, South Asian Hindus and indigenous Africans. In league with societal transformations elsewhere in the world, this period, leading up to the Anglo-Boer wars in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries, definitively shaped the religio-racial dimensions of South African nationalism. Second, the post 1870s-period marked a new era of African-Arab exchange and South African Islamic cosmopolitanism in the form of a steadily-growing stream of South African Muslims who took advantage of British-Ottoman collaboration in facilitating travel to Saudi Arabia for the annual ḥajj. I have identified a range of late 19th- and 20th-century literary sources that speak to the opportunities that coffee and coffee-culture offered in light of these transformations. I have also conducted fieldwork with Cape Muslim coffee consumers, merchants and entrepreneurs, and will be doing so in the summer of 2025, attending especially to Sufism and to their recently renewed interest in a 17th-century Yemeni ʿAlawiyya scholar known for his writings on coffee and spirituality. While reviewing my findings in the co-sponsored panel, I will be devoting special attention, in this paper, to several works by early Coloured, non-Muslim writer Zoë Wicomb. This approach will help me to explore the ways in which the contributions and legacies of Islamic coffee-culture have shaped the views, and transcultural religious resistance, of South Africans broadly.

In his book Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties across the Indian Ocean World, 1775-1945 [2022: 72], historian Michael Laffan has written about the existence of “two competing models of authority” among 19th and 20th century Western Cape Muslims. The first of these models emphasized Javanese descent; the second focused more on consensus among qualified “Malay” Muslims, typically men with British military backgrounds. I anticipate identifying a third model of religious authority, one more attuned to mixed-race indigenous and African heritage. My work will contribute to a growing body of scholarship that is revisiting how southern African Muslims and their interlocutors understood and acted upon Islam’s contributions on the continent.