Slamse in Cape Town

In this essay, I investigate two figures in the vernacular vocabulary of Muslim expression in Cape Town, South Africa: the koesisterslams— the ‘traditional Muslim’— and the waterslams— the ‘diluted Muslim’. Using personal narratives and an intersectional discourse analysis of secondary literature, I investigate how these figures circulate in Muslim traditions and signify varying ideas about modernity, normativity, and transgression. Travelling with the significance of these food- based figures, I also explore how the interconnected and global networks of enslavement, trade, memory, and religion facilitated through the Indian Ocean rendered— for multiple generations of Muslims living in Cape Town— the koesisterslams and waterslams as viable ways to make sense of what it means to be Muslim in Cape Town. As a result, I frame the figures of the koesisterslams and the waterslams as a living out of multiple trans- oceanic religions traditions and trajectories in and to present- day South Africa.