Paper short abstract:

This presentation addresses questions of memory, heritage, and kin-making in the transnational context of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Ottoman Turkey, by analysing the curatorial practices that reconfigure local Muslim genealogies in the Effendi Room exhibition of the Bo-Kaap Museum.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the constructions and contestations of the Ottoman past in South Africa by examining the Effendi legacy in Cape Town. Abu Bakr Effendi (1814-1880) arrived in Cape Town in 1962 as the emissary of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz to teach Islamic law and resolve the religious conflicts within the Muslim community. The nineteenth century Muslim community of Cape Town was mainly composed of the political exiles and slaves brought from the East Indies by the Dutch colonial authorities. The legacy of Abu Bakr Effendi’s religious authority is a site of contestation and competition in today’s South Africa. Turkish governmental bodies and heritage entrepreneurs have recently put tremendous amount of effort in ‘preserving’ his memory by renovating his tomb, incorporating it in the museums of Islamic heritage in Cape Town, and most remarkably, by granting exceptional citizenship to his descendants. This presentation addresses questions of memory, heritage, and kin-making in the transnational context of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Ottoman Turkey. More specifically, it focuses on the curatorial practices that reconfigure South African Muslim genealogies in the Effendi Room exhibition of the Bo-Kaap Museum. In doing so, it examines how the reworking of Ottoman memory within the framework of decolonising a museum that was founded on apartheid ideology remains tethered to dominant narratives of nation and imperial legacy in Turkey.