Bo-Kaap Museum

In nineteen seventy-eight, the Bo-Kaap Museum opened here. Its organizers intended to show the home of a prosperous nineteenth-century Cape Town Muslim family. They connected the house with Abu Bakr Effendi—an Ottoman theologian sent to Cape Town to settle disputes over doctrine and teach local Muslims. His name appeared on the museum labels. The error lasted for decades: before the opening, the people who had actually lived at seventy-one Wale Street were evicted, and traces of their lives were removed.

One of the oldest houses in Bo-Kaap was chosen for the museum. Jan de Waal built it in seventeen sixty-eight, when a new residential district was only beginning to take shape beyond Buitengracht Canal. Of the houses he built, this one preserved its early form better than the others. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, its interior had an entirely different layout.

From eighteen ninety-four, the house belonged to Mahmud Fakih Emin Effendi—a Cape Town-born Muslim teacher whom the Ottoman Caliphate appointed to teach the local community. The house then passed to his son, Muhammed Dervish Effendi. He worked as a pharmacist's assistant and continued his father's work. When Ottoman funding for the school on Castle Street stopped because of the First World War, Dervish closed it and began holding classes here, in his own home. The residential address thus also became a place of learning.

After Dervish died in nineteen forty, his widow Mariam and their eight children remained here; later, his children and grandchildren lived with her. In the late nineteen seventies, the family was given one month to vacate the house for the museum. Mariam and her relatives moved to Heideveld.

Meanwhile, the restorers removed later alterations, narrowed the entrance hall to its presumed original width, laid new floors, and replaced old iron fittings with copies based on eighteenth-century examples. Visitors were shown a restored early Cape Town interior, while Abu Bakr Effendi was named as the former owner.

The reason for the confusion was quite mundane. In Ottoman tradition, “Effendi” was an honorific title for an educated person; sharing the same title did not mean kinship. The well-known Abu Bakr did indeed have an Islamic school on the same Wale Street, but at its intersection with Bree Street. He did not live at number seventy-one.

The historian Halim Gençoğlu decided to check the museum's version against the documents. For two years, he compared Cape Town property records with papers in Turkish archives and established the chain of owners: Mahmud Fakih Emin Effendi, his son Dervish, then Dervish's widow and descendants. After the study was published in two thousand fifteen, museum staff agreed to rework part of the display.

In two thousand nineteen, an exhibition about the Effendi family opened in the front room. Descendants took part in creating it and returned old photographs, Arabic books, documents, and family belongings here on loan. These items are again at seventy-one Wale Street; the layout around them remains the one the restorers created after Mariam Effendi had already left.