On his single, “Arabian Gang$ter,” Youngsta CPT (government name: Riyadh Roberts) raps: “In Cape Town there’s 800,000 plus / A large population we’re starting a nation / … half of the Cape is Arabian.” The rapper forms part of a generation of South African creatives of Muslim background who interact matter-of-factly with their social identity. They don’t foreground or explain what it is like to Muslim in South Africa; it is part of the background of their lives. In a previous generation, they included the poet and literary scholar Gabeba Baderoon (who happened to have written a book about Islam’s history in South Africa from the advent of colonialism, through slavery) and the poet and writer Rustum Kozain. 

Now there’s also playwright, Nadia Davids. For Davids, it started with the play “At her feet” (2002), in which one actress portrays multiple roles (mother, teenager, daughter) to make visible the complex lives of Muslim women in Cape Town. As Davids wrote at the time: “When I first began to think about writing a play about Muslim women, the world was reeling from the aftermath of September 11… I began to think very deeply about my place in the world, about the religion that I had been born into, about the country that I called home, and about the major and minor moments that had shaped me as a woman… about growing up in Cape Town, what it means to share one’s stories, and what happens when someone else’s life moves you to rethink your own.” Since that play, Davids completed a PhD. (on memory and forced removals in which her family were victims), moved to New York and then London to teach drama at Queen Mary University of London and has just returned to Cape Town. She also wrote a play about Cissie Gool, a mid-century Cape Town political activist. Now she has written her first novel, “An Imperfect Blessing,” which plot spans the late 1980s through the early 1990s and tells the story of a Cape Town family at the intersection of late Apartheid and South Africa’s political transition. It continues some of the same themes of her earlier work. This interview was conducted over email.