History does not always survive in archives. Sometimes it survives in footsteps, in quiet hills, in names spoken softly so they are not lost. In South Africa’s Western Cape, the Kramats, sacred tombs scattered across mountainsides and coastlines, are such remnants. They are not loud monuments, yet, they hold the memory of a community that was never meant to endure.
The Circle of Saints, the latest work by award-winning journalist and author Shafi Morton, traces the early Muslim presence at the Cape through these sites of memory. Commissioned by Awqaf South Africa as part of its Leaders and Legacies series, the book is less an attempt to correct the historical record than to rescue it. Its purpose is preservation, before the fragments that remain are lost entirely.
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Faith in exile
Between 1668 and 1795, the Dutch East India Company exiled Muslim scholars, political leaders, and spiritual figures to the Cape. They refused colonial authority. They refused to compromise their faith. Exile, intended as erasure, became the unlikely beginning of a Muslim community in what colonizers believed to be the edge of the world.
Morton refused to romanticize this history. The figures he documents lived under surveillance, forced labor, and the constant threat of punishment. Faith was practiced quietly, knowledge was passed orally and community formed in spaces never meant to sustain it. What exists today, a deeply rooted Muslim presence in South Africa is the long echo of defiance.
What distinguishes The Circle of Saints is its method. The book draws heavily on oral tradition, lived experience, and anecdotal history. Morton has visited the Kramats for more than forty years, returning to them not as static landmarks but as living sites of memory. History, in his telling, is rarely complete. It survives in scattered pieces, waiting to be carefully connected.
That approach carries urgency. Oral history is disappearing at a speed that digital archiving cannot replace. As people pass on, so do the stories that never made it into official records. Data may be stored, but memory, once lost, cannot be retrieved. The book stands as both documentation and warning: communities that do not record their histories risk being written out of them.
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Reclaiming a wounded space
The symbolism of the book’s launch venue reinforced this message. Held at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, the event took place in one of the city’s most painful historical spaces. Under the Dutch East India Company, the building housed enslaved men, women, and children and remains marked by documented brutality, particularly toward women. Yet it was also a place where some of the very Muslim figures Morton writes about ministered to the enslaved. To return to that space was an act of reclaiming it, not sanitizing its past, but refusing to let it remain defined solely by violence.
Preserving this history, however, is not without resistance. Many of the Kramats are located on land now threatened by development and gentrification, particularly in affluent areas such as Camps Bay. While legal victories have secured heritage status for several sites, protection remains fragile. Sacred spaces are often treated as inconveniences in the path of progress. Vigilance, Morton suggests, is not optional.
The book is intentionally accessible, structured as a series of stories rather than an academic treatise. Photographs accompany the narratives. Readers are encouraged to visit the Kramats, to ask questions, and to document their own family histories while they still can. Understanding where one comes from, Morton argues, shapes the confidence with which one imagines a future.
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A responsibility for us
There is a broader invitation embedded in the work of Shafiq. The Cape Muslim story is not the only Muslim history in South Africa. Other communities, including Indian Muslims, remain under-researched and under-documented. The Circle of Saints gestures toward a larger communal project, one that needs to be spoken about.
The book is about belonging. The saints that Morton writes about arrived in chains, in exile, in silence. The fact that their memory survives at all is testament to a resistance that speaks loudly.
History, when neglected, can be entirely replaced. The Circle of Saints insists on remembrance as an act of responsibility, and on memory as something that must be actively protected, before even the quietest traces are gone.
To find out more about the book, watch the video below:
Image via TimeOut.
