Islam and the Accumulation of Urban Real Estate: Colonial Cape Town in the Indian Ocean World

Abstract Colonial South Africa was as much integrated into the Indian Ocean world as it was to the Atlantic. This article argues that post-emancipation Cape Town was home to a community of Muslims with continued ties to the Indian Ocean world, especially the Swahili coast and the Arabian Peninsula where slavery and slave trading continued to thrive well into the twentieth century. The networks that spanned the Indian Ocean provided some members of the Cape Colony's Black population with opportunities to amass significant wealth. Islam stood at the center of this world, which provided access to sources of capital—whether in slave trading in the Indian Ocean or diamond smuggling on the Kimberley diamond fields—vital to the initial stages of accumulation, especially of urban real estate. Thus, the making of a Black propertied class in colonial Cape Town had domestic as well as external origins.