This research report will attempt to show that, in an attempt to cater for tourist tastes for the exotic, a Cape Malay identity has been constructed for the residents of the Bo- Kaap community which is made to date back to the 17th Century. Two books from popular tourist literature and three travel guides have been analysed. Furthermore, this research report will demonstrate how the built environment of the city and its surrounding areas can provide us with a much more nuanced narrative than the one which is currently being presented to tourists.

This research paper analyses the culture and community in Bo-Kaap, which is battling to preserve its heritage amid growing gentrification. Gentrification in this area is analysed as a special case in point, as although gentrification is happening in other neighbourhoods in Cape Town, Bo-Kaap is the home of Islam in South Africa, and is geographically set in a prime location of the city. This research paper includes an ethnographic study, as well as a photographic essay and a podcast series which supports the research in creative forms.The researcher interviewed several people from the area to discern the culture and the issues faced by the community. This paper examines the ethnographic lived experience of the researcher, as well as that of a local family. Three main events are examined to provide insight into the culture and community, namely an AirBnb traditional cooking experience, Eid AlAdha and the visit to the area by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The findings of this paper show that significant changes have and continue to occur, although the community is resilient in their efforts to preserve the culture. This research aims to provide additional and alternative records of the culture of the community as it stands in present day, in a holistic research effort. It also showcases the importance of the rich culture of the community which society needs to ensure is preserved.

Magister Artium - MA / Bo-Kaap (BK) is a neighbourhood in Cape Town which has long been home to a predominantly Muslim community with deep ties to the area’s colonial and slave history. In recent years, BK has become a hotbed for developers investing in property in Cape Town. Due to its sought-after location (close to Cape Town’s CBD), a flurry of interest in property development has ushered in an important turn in BK’s history and has begun changing the landscape of the neighbourhood. Important for this study is how BK residents grapple with the influx of rapid gentrification whilst trying to maintain their ‘Malay’ heritage. Historically, BK was known as a ‘Malay Quarter’ and had a distinctive ‘Malay’ identity1 constructed under apartheid legislation. It is this identity and concomitant Malay heritage which is of particular interest in this study. Under the continued threat of wholesale gentrification and arguably a loss of the rich history of early Muslims of the Cape this study hopes to investigate how community members who self-identify as ‘Malay’ signal their legitimacy to the area when discussing the fast pace of gentrification in the area. Notably, variations of BK’s Malay heritage have been documented over time. These works nonetheless point to the complex relationship between the documented/historicized construction of Malay heritage and the lived experience of having a Malay identity. Casting aside the notion of any homogenous Malay identity, this study opts to explore the manner in which a Malay identity is claimed and constructed discursively as legitimate discourse strategies against gentrification. This study adopts an ethnographic approach to studying narratives of Malay heritage in BK obtained through purposive sampling. A Discourse Analysis of narratives of heritage in BK is undertaken to draw attention to the discursive strategies employed by self-identified ‘Malay’ community members in the area. / 2023-12-01

This study explores the emergence of changing values associated with heritage in postapartheid South Africa, expressed as a shift from tangible to intangible heritage values. Central to the study is an understanding of the evolutionary construction of changing values in a rooted heritage community within the urban historic environment of Bo-Kaap, the oldest residential suburb of Cape Town. Exploring changing values in Bo-Kaap, where tangible and intangible heritage intersect in the contemporary moment, showcases how heritage ably and fluidly adapts and transforms as an ever-shifting cultural process, and forges new, or altered, modes of identity construction. Bo-Kaap, as the case study, is a significant historic urban environment of Cape Town's central city with a vibrant community having cultural rootedness in place, in slave ancestral heritage, and existing living heritage deserving of protection. It is examined against a backdrop of the localised political, governance and civic agency milieu. The study follows the narrative of Bo-Kaap from its origins as a residential quarter of the early Cape colonial settlement, through the mid twentieth century when Bo-Kaap became largely fashioned and formed into an ethnically defined 'Malay' quarter, conforming to essentialised notions of race and ethnicity dominant in nationalist ideology, through the apartheid regime and the penetrating effects of Group Areas on the social and physical fabric of the area, until the present day where we are witness to a sea-change in outlook of the public on the very meaning and purpose of heritage. Heritage claims and heritage activism entered the realm of active public discourse in 2019 in response to free-market developmental pressures in Bo-Kaap, with inflections of social justice touching the edges of the heritage debate, and invited a broadening of the outermost limits of heritage discourse. Integral to this story is how heritage systems have been shaped by the past and colonial histories, new systems of governance post 1994, and a culture of intensifying identity politics. Following the arc of time illuminates the complex interrelatedness of heritage values with social, historical, and political trajectories, and aims to examine just how dynamically heritage values arise, merge and shift within the inter-relational temporal space; what activates them, who activates them, and to what end; and how they have entered into a space of heritage activism and public discourse. I suggest that this present change in discourse and the display of emerging sets of heritage values requires a highly critical reflexivity on the part of heritage structures and the profession, to look at what these changes mean for heritage praxis and governance and, more importantly, how to advance the relevance of heritage to a sector of South African society advocating for a decolonised heritage value framework.

The Bo-Kaap is traditionally a Cape Muslim Afrikaans-speaking community, and sociohistorically it is particularly relevant to the development of Afrikaans at the Cape (Davids 2011, Mahida 1993). The Cape Muslim Afrikaans spoken in the Bo-Kaap is a sub-variety of Standard Afrikaans (Kotzé 1989, Davids 2011) and is distinguishable by its retained lexis (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008) from languages historically spoken by slaves at the Cape, such as Malay, Arabic, Gujarati, and Konkani. Over time a number of socio-cultural, geographic, and historical factors have introduced the use of South African English alongside Cape Muslim Afrikaans in this speech community. The goal of this study was to provide insight into the nature of bilingual talk in the Bo-Kaap community, and to make a useful contribution to the growing body of codeswitching1 (hereafter CS) research generally. Based on natural language data collected during group interviews with members of the community, the study explored the language contact situation in the Bo-Kaap today, taking the viewpoint that what is occurring presently may be considered CS Three aspects of the CS documented were analysed and quantified. Specifically, the study investigated language interaction phenomena (Myers-Scotton 1995, Deuchar et al 2007) triggers (Clyne 1987) and directionality (Muysken 1997, Deuchar et al 2017, Çetinoglu 2017). A quantitative approach was taken to the data analysis. The interview audio files were downloaded and transcribed in ELAN. (Max Planck Institute). The annotations2 produced in ELAN were organised in a spreadsheet for analysis, resulting in a data set comprised of 356 annotations. The full data set was divided into subsets and tagged for language interaction phenomena, triggers, and directionality. These data sets were then sorted and quantified to identify trends in these three areas of interest. The study found Intra-sentential switches to be the most common type of language interaction phenomenon in the CS of this speech community, being present in 79% of the sampled annotations. Results from other CS studies echo this finding in other speech communities (Al Heeti et al 2016, Koban 2012, Falk 2013). The most common trigger for Intra-word switching in this corpus was in the head of the past tense Verb Phrase. Out of 27 occurrences of Intra-word switching, 16 were of this nature. In all of those an English verb head was housed within an Afrikaans past tense structure. No exceptions were observed in the data set, a strong indicator of the relationship status of the two languages involved. Cape Muslim Afrikaans almost certainly playing the role of the Matrix language, with South African English embedded. In terms of directionality, switching from Cape Muslim Afrikaans into South African English was by far the most common, at 85%. This further supports what the findings on triggers suggest about the hierarchy between these two languages.