Tana Baru Cemetery

Tana Baru lies on the eastern slopes of Signal Hill, where the Bo-Kaap street grid runs out and the hillside takes over. It is reached at the top of Longmarket Street, and it is a fenced and gated precinct rather than open ground. The Tana Baru Trust describes it as the first officially recognised Muslim cemetery in South Africa. Most of the people who established Islam at the Cape are buried here, and in 1886 the order to close it produced one of the most serious confrontations between a Cape community and the colonial authorities of the nineteenth century.

The name is Malay for new ground, although the ground was not new when it was named. There is evidence of Muslim burials on this hillside well before any formal grant, and the Trust dates unofficial use to 1772. What happened in the early nineteenth century was less the creation of a cemetery than the recognition of one.

That recognition followed a change in the law. On 25 July 1804 the Batavian administration issued a church order extending legal protection to religious bodies other than the Reformed Church, which for Cape Muslims made lawful both a mosque and a designated burial ground. On 2 October 1805 the Raad der Gemeente granted burial land here to Frans van Bengalen. The Trust records the grant as having been made partly to hold Muslim loyalty against a feared British invasion, and the British landed at Blaauwberg three months later. The ground was not registered in the name of the Mohametan Population of Cape Town until November 1830, twenty-five years afterwards.

Tana Baru is not one parcel of land, and that matters more than it sounds. A second public burial ground was granted in 1842 by the Governor, Sir George Thomas Napier. Between the two public grounds lies a block of private plots bought between 1857 and 1861 by individual imams for their own congregations. The arrangement was described at the time: in 1858 Imam Hadje told the Cemeteries Committee of the Municipal Commissioners that besides the two public Mahomedan burial grounds at the top of Longmarket Street there lay between them a private ground bought by four priests for their respective congregations. In 1920 the Moslem Cemetery Board fenced the whole area as one cemetery. The distinction still has consequences, because the privately bought plots carry ordinary title histories and have been threatened with sale.

The graves are why most people come. Tuan Guru, the Tidore prince banished to Robben Island who opened the country's first madrasah and led the congregation that became the Auwal Mosque, died in 1807 and is buried here. So is Tuan Nuruman, known as Paay Schaapie, banished from Batavia in 1770 and sent to Robben Island in 1786 for helping runaway slaves; he dug a well on this hillside to water grazing animals, and its remains are still visible near his grave. So is Tuan Sayed Alawie, who came from Mocha in Yemen, arrived in 1744, was imprisoned on Robben Island, and who on his release became a policeman because the work gave him access to the enslaved people held in the Slave Lodge. Abu Bakr Effendi, the Ottoman scholar who wrote the Arabic-Afrikaans Bayan al-Din, was buried here in 1880.

Three of these graves are kramats, the Cape term for the shrine-tomb of a venerated Muslim figure: those of Tuan Guru, Tuan Sayed Alawie and Tuan Nuruman. Kramats stand at many points around the Peninsula, and in Cape Muslim tradition they are understood to form a circle around the Cape, to which local belief attaches protective significance. That is a matter of belief rather than record. What is documented is that the South African Heritage Resources Agency has identified twenty-seven kramats for heritage protection and declared seven of them national heritage sites in 2024, none at Tana Baru.

The closure came out of Victorian public health policy. Smallpox swept Cape Town in 1858 and again in 1882, with heavy mortality among Muslims, and the municipal objection was to burial inside a dense residential area immediately above the town. Under the Public Health Act No. 4 of 1883, the Tana Baru was officially closed on 15 January 1886. The community had organised against it for roughly a decade through the Malay Cemetery Committee, whose secretary was Abdol Burns, a cab driver from the Auwal congregation. He had chaired a protest meeting of some five hundred Muslims in June 1885 and had refused the alternative burial ground offered at Observatory. The objection was not chiefly practical: the Tana Baru held the graves of the people who had established the faith at the Cape, and the community treated it as a symbol of the religious freedom granted eighty years earlier.

Two days after the closure, on Sunday 17 January 1886, a child of Amaldien Rhode, a Muslim fisherman living at Burke Cottages in Woodstock, died. That afternoon around three thousand people led by Abdol Burns marched from Woodstock along Sir Lowry Road to the Tana Baru and buried the child in open defiance of the order. The twelve policemen sent to the scene were pelted with stones and forced to withdraw. Disorder continued for three days and the authorities put twelve hundred men of the Corps of Volunteers on the streets. Burns and twelve others were arrested on 20 January and charged with causing a riot; at trial in March they were convicted and sentenced to two months with hard labour. Historians treat this as one of the most significant political events in nineteenth-century Cape Muslim history, less for its outcome than for what it showed: an organised campaign run through a formal committee, with public meetings and named leadership, decades before that kind of politics is usually dated at the Cape.

The closure held. Burials nevertheless continued for a time afterwards, carried out at night in continued defiance, though how long is not recorded. The Cemetery Board eventually bought the Observatory ground that Burns had refused. Tana Baru has never been reopened for burial.

The twentieth century was hard on the site. Older photographs show many more headstones than stand today; stones were taken by souvenir hunters, buried under rubble and destroyed by a flood in the 1970s. Nobody knows how many people are buried here, and the Trust says so plainly. A committee to preserve the Tana Baru was formed in 1978 and the Tana Baru Trust was registered as a legal entity in 1998. In April 2019 the lower part of the precinct was declared a national heritage site, and fencing, pathways and landscaping followed in 2021. The upper plots fall outside that declaration, which is why the Trust continues to campaign against their sale.

What a visitor finds is a sloping, largely open hillside with little shade, entered through a gateway building at the end of Dawes Street. Tuan Guru's mausoleum stands close to the entrance and Tuan Sayed Alawie's white-washed shrine is nearby. Paay Schaapie's grave lies at the top of the slope, deliberately without a wall around it, near the well he dug, and Abu Bakr Effendi's grave is signposted midway up. Between them are hand-cut slate headstones carrying Malay and Arabic inscriptions, some dated by Hijri year, and a great deal of unmarked ground. The city and the harbour lie below, but that is not what the place is for.

Tana Baru is a sacred burial ground in the care of a trust, not a site with reliable visiting hours. The most recent arrangement the Trust has published dates from October 2020, when the cemetery reopened to visitors on weekends between 10am and 2pm, described then as a first phase. No updated hours have been published since, and the times shown on mapping sites do not come from the Trust. Entry is free and the Trust has confirmed that it charges nothing. Visitors are asked to register in advance through the visitor form on the Trust's website, and the Trust can be reached on 021 423 7690 or at info@tanabaru.co.za, which is the sensible way to confirm access before walking up. Guided tours are run on Heritage Day and at open days. The kramats are sacred and appropriate dress is expected, and the ground should be treated as what it is: a place where people are buried and where their descendants still come.