Family history – Adli Yacubi

The Whisper of a Name

Somewhere between the worn edges of oral history and the crisp pages of archived journals, I began to trace the journey of my ancestor — Hadjie Gasanodien, also known as Carel Pelgrim. It is said he was the first Muslim from the Cape to perform the sacred pilgrimage of Hajj, sometime between 1834 and 1837, a period just after the abolition of slavery, when its wounds were still fresh. For years, his story lived quietly in our family’s memory, surfacing in fragments and whispered recollections — until now. I write to honour that legacy, to weave together the strands of fact, faith, and feeling that shaped a man, a pilgrimage, and a community still finding its voice in the aftermath of bondage.

Pilgrimage of Discovery

I first heard his name as a child, tucked into a conversation between my sister Yasmine and our aunts. Years later, Yasmine would take those threads and stitch them into a short family tree, dated July 2004. At the time, it felt like the last echo of a fading past. We had little else to go on. But something stirred in me after I returned from my own pilgrimage. A fever of purpose, a longing to know more. I began writing and publishing reflections under Al Hujjaj Magazine, not yet knowing that my footsteps had mirrored those of my own forebear, nearly two centuries earlier.

Echoes in Academic Footsteps

The name “Carel Pelgrim” returned to me unexpectedly through the work of a neighbour and friend of my father — the late Mogamat Hoosain Ebrahim, a community scholar from Primrose Park. He had long been documenting the Hajj stories of Cape Muslims. In his thesis, The Cape Hajj Tradition: Past and Present (2009), Ebrahim writes: “Hajji Gassonnodien, more popularly known as Carel Pilgrim, enjoys the distinction of having been the first Cape Muslim to have successfully completed the Hajj.” Although I first encountered his name in Ebrahim’s thesis, the full significance didn’t strike me until later — during conversations with the researcher Abdud-Daiyaan Petersen. It was through our exchanges that the identity of Carel Pelgrim truly crystallised. This was not just a figure in history — he was my ancestor. A man who left the Cape between 1834 and 1837 to walk the sacred path when few could even imagine such a journey.

It was through Ebrahim’s meticulous work that I began to understand the context of that time. Hajj was not simply a religious obligation; it was an act of defiance, endurance, and transcendence. For formerly enslaved Muslims in the Cape, to make the pilgrimage was to reclaim a spiritual identity that colonial systems tried to erase. And Carel Pelgrim, in going, carried more than personal faith — he carried the hopes of a generation emerging from bondage.

A Lineage Remembered

George F. Angas (1822-1886). ORIGINAL 1849 Hand Coloured Stone Lithograph. A Malay Priest Prays.

Abdud-Daiyaan Petersen’s research added an entirely new dimension to the story. In collaboration with Turkish scholar Halim Gençoğlu, he co-authored a paper titled Was Imam Gasanodien Carel Pelgrim an Ottoman Descendant?, published in the Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa in 2021. They explored the possibility that Carel Pelgrim may have had ancestral ties to the Ottoman world — a lineage once obscured by slavery and colonial re-naming. Through Petersen, I learned not only of the archival traces, but also of the living memory carried in Cape Town’s communities — stories that had waited generations to be heard.

Petersen’s careful investigations, supported by old burial notices and public records, pointed with growing clarity to the fact that Carel Pelgrim and Hadjie Gasanodien — the man known for teaching Islam and the Qur’an to children in early Cape Town — were one and the same. The fragments were falling into place. What had once been academic became intimate. What had once been folklore became family history.

The Pain Beneath the Pride

The history of Carel’s mother, Pakka, adds further complexity and depth. As documented in Echoes of Slavery: Voices from South Africa’s Past by Jackie Loos, Carel — born into slavery — was the son of Pakka, a slave woman, and Jan Gottlieb Barends, a Christian man of German descent. Their relationship was informal and illegitimate, as was often the case in that era. Carel and his brother Philip inherited their mother’s status as slaves. In 1801, a notarial protocol records their transfer to a burgher, and upon his death, their eventual manumission was stipulated in his will.

Pakka’s exact identity remains debated, though one likely candidate is Janpakka of Batavia, who ran a shop in the Waterkant in the 1820s. Death records from the time, often unreliable, do not mention Carel or Philip, but their presence in community memory is clearer than archival certainty. Pakka’s story, like that of many enslaved women, survives in fragments — yet she remains the root from which this extraordinary lineage emerged. And it is here, in the shadows of that history, that I must pause. My heart aches at the likely truth: Pakka, my great-grandmother, was not loved — she was owned. The man who fathered her children, Jan Gottlieb Barends, did not protect her. He did not free her. Instead, he allowed her and their children to be sold on to another man. Was she raped? Exploited? Discarded? The records are silent, but the silence itself screams.

This is the pain we inherit alongside the pride — the wounds interwoven with the honour. In naming Pakka, I do not just trace bloodlines. I reclaim her dignity, speak her name with reverence, and acknowledge that even in bondage, she gave rise to a lineage that would one day teach Qur’an, lead prayer, and inspire generations. Her story, though faint, demands to be held — not with shame, but with solemn truth and fierce remembrance.

A Husband’s Grief

Carel’s transformation from a slave to a respected teacher, tailor, and hajji is all the more remarkable against this background. And among the most beautiful parts of his story is his deep love and reverence for his first wife, Japoera. Though she was childless, their bond was strong — spiritually and emotionally. When she passed away in their large home in Buitengracht in early 1841, Carel composed a public obituary in the South African Commercial Advertiser. It read: “The Heavenly Father, Lord of Life and Death, was pleased on the 16th instant to call from me my beloved wife Japoera, aged 64 years, 4 months and 16 days, after a happy union of [blank space] years. All who knew her virtuous character will sympathise with my loss, of which I hereby give notice to friends and relatives, requesting to be excused the visits of condolence.” He signed it: Carel of the Cape, the first Pilgrim and Priest.

Death certificate of Hadjie Gasnodien Carel Pelgrim.

In this short but poignant notice, we see not just a man grieving his beloved, but a heart refined by faith and loss. It reminds me that while history often records what men did, it rarely shows how deeply they loved. He eventually adopted the Islamic name ‘Hassan al-Din’ — appearing in records under numerous variations such as Gasnodien and Gasanodien — yet he signed himself proudly as ‘Carel Pelgrim.’ His ability to read and write in both Arabic and European script shows a deep level of literacy and determination to bridge worlds. While some have speculated that he may have spent up to three years in Makkah — a duration not firmly evidenced — what we do know is that he returned with the ability to teach Arabic and Qur’an, and left an imprint as a man of knowledge and devotion. It’s possible that his early literacy was shaped by Cornelis van der Poel, the burgher who once held legal ownership over him and later stipulated Carel’s manumission. Whether through formal tutoring or exposure to Dutch literacy, this early learning may have paved the way for his later mastery of both Islamic and colonial languages.

The directories list Carel van de Kaap as a free tailor living in Hout Street in 1816 and as a Malay schoolmaster in 1830. His brother Philip, born in 1789 and passing in 1844, was also a tailor, but unlike Carel, Philip was not a practicing Muslim. Some of Philip’s children were baptised, and in 1838 he married their mother, Carolina Marteyn of the Cape, in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Meanwhile, Carel was charting a different course. Once free, he began to prosper. In 1817, he loaned Seymen of the Cape 600 Ridollars (a substantial currency at the Cape in the early 1800s, equivalent to several months of wages for a labourer) to enable him to free his slave daughter, Cananga. By 1822, he had purchased his own home in Matfeld Lane. Then, in October 1833, Carel and his wife made a joint will, identifying themselves as the free man Carel of the Cape, alias Gaszimoedien — formerly a tailor, now a teacher in the Arabic language — and Johanna Salomonse, alias Japoera, born at the Cape.

Japoera seems to have been an exemplary Muslim wife, and Carel held her in high esteem. He set out for Mecca soon afterwards, and her encouragement must have been crucial to the success of his pioneering journey.

When Art Becomes Revelation

That intimacy deepened when I looked again at a familiar image — one I had seen countless times in Cape Town homes, books, and exhibitions, without ever imagining a personal connection. It is a watercolour painting by George French Angas, an English artist who visited the Cape in the 1840s. The scene is gentle but profound: a bearded man seated cross-legged, surrounded by children, teaching them the Qur’an. For years, this portrait was simply referred to as a depiction of a “Malay teacher.” But now, thanks to community scholarship and genealogical evidence, we know the truth — that teacher was Hadjie Gasanodien. My ancestor.

Another portrait, also by Angas, is held at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. In it, Hadjie Gasanodien is more formally posed, with dignified composure. What amazes me most is his attire — a flowing Arabic coat, or abaya, layered over a long-sleeved thawb. The painting is filled with symbolic richness: incense burners still glowing in the frame, a minbar placed behind him as if ready for the next call to gather and reflect. To stand before that painting is to encounter the past as presence — not as myth or metaphor, but as family. His face, once anonymous to me, now echoes through mine. The ink of his story has always been part of my blood. Only now am I learning how to read it.

The Living Links

One of the most tender links between this legacy and the living was shared in Lawrence Green’s 1964 book, I Heard the Old Men Say. In Chapter Two, titled “The Living Links,” he introduces a woman named Gatea Jacobs — my great-grandmother and the daughter of Hadjie Gasanodien. In a touching passage, she recalls her father’s return from the pilgrimage to Mecca. She tells of the white robes he wore, the gentle way he taught, and how the community revered him not just as a teacher, but as a man who had seen the heart of Islam and brought its light home.

Yet there is something poignant here: on the death notice of Hadjie Gasanodien, Gatea was listed as his daughter — and she was just 11 years old at the time. Her recollections, as recorded by Green, must have been shaped not only by her own memory but also by the atmosphere that surrounded her father’s name: the reverence of others, the stories repeated in the family, the aura of a man who had left a sacred legacy. In this way, memory extends beyond personal recall — it becomes communal.

Her memories reach across generations with quiet dignity. She spoke not in grand declarations, but in lived detail — the scent of his clothes, the rhythm of his voice in prayer, the gatherings around him at dusk. Through her, his presence remained alive in the bones and breath of our family, long before any of us knew the fullness of his historical significance. It was always there — waiting for us to remember.

Incredibly, Gatea Jacobs lived nearly a hundred years, a living bridge between the earliest days of Islam at the Cape and our present time. In that same chapter, Lawrence Green recounts a remarkable scene: “One afternoon while she was still able to see and hear and talk to her family she called everyone round her. ‘I am too old to live any longer,’ she told them. Then she folded her hands as prescribed in the Islamic death ritual and passed away.” Her funeral drew thousands of mourners, and services were held in mosques across the Peninsula. It was a farewell not only to a beloved matriarch, but to an era.

Her final act — serene, faithful, and deliberate — echoed the strength of the lineage she carried. It is this spirit I now seek to honour, not only in rediscovering our ancestor, but in holding open the doorway for others to trace their own roots, to reclaim the sacredness of our past, and to remember that we, too, are living links.

Author’s Note
Written by Adli Yacubi (pen name), descendant of Hadjie Gasanodien, also known as Carel Pelgrim. This article forms part of a continuing journey to rediscover, honour, and share the stories of Cape Muslim pioneers. May it serve as both record and remembrance.

References

Yasmine Jacobs, Jacobs Family Tree (Oral History), July 2004
Mogamat Hoosain Ebrahim, The Cape Hajj Tradition: Past and Present, 2009
Jackie Loos, Echoes of Slavery: Voices from South Africa’s Past, 2024
Habib Shaikh, “First of Cape Hajis came 3 years after abolition of slavery,” Arab News, 11 October 2013
Lawrence Green, I Heard the Old Men Say, Chapter Two: “The Living Links,” 1964
Halim Gençoğlu & Abdud-Daiyaan Petersen, “Was Imam Gasanodien Carel Pelgrim an Ottoman Descendant?”, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, vol. 75, no. 2, December 2021
Helen Swingler, “Piracy, slavery and a Mecca pilgrimage,” UCT News, 17 March 2021
“Portraits stoke mystery of Hajji Gasnodien,” Cape Argus, 26 February 2021

rugayabil-ii — My mom with her granddaughter, Bilqis, on her lap. Bilqis’s cousin, Omar is standing.

I never really met my grandparents from either my mom’s side or my dad’s. I lie. I met my dad’s dad. Twice. Once in Kingsley Street in Salt River when I was about eight years old. My mom had to say to me, “This is your grandfather.”

I saw this older version of my dad in his sleeveless vest and long white underpants with three kids hanging onto him. My grandfather was short. Like my dad. And I looked at those kids stretching out his vest, my cousins who I also did not know, with envy.

The second time I saw him, I may have been twelve. He was laid out on a metal table in the lounge of the same house in Salt River, covered in white linen up to his neck. My grandfather had passed away. “Kiss your grandfather,” my mom said to me, “don’t be afraid.” I kissed him on his cold forehead and that was that.

My six other siblings were more fortunate I was. They have memories of my dad’s mom who stayed with us for a time when we lived in District Six and the older siblings have wonderful stories about my mom’s mom, Moeder (real name Zubeida), that I love listening to.

Of the two role models in my life, my dad was the more child-friendly. That’s not really accurate. Rugaya, my mom, was a woman who preferred boys over girls. She adored her four sons over her three daughters. This preference became more noticeable when the grandchildren came on the scene. Of her 27 grandkids, there are only eight boys!

My mom, God bless her soul, was also not one to disguise her displeasure or dislike for something or someone. You could often see it in her entire face no matter how hard she tried to disguise it (when she did try, which was not often). So when Sadia, my spouse, gave birth to our first born, this is how she reacted to the news when I called her in my absolute excitement.

“Mom, Sadia just gave birth!” I said.

“What is it?” she asked.

I knew exactly what she meant but said, “The child’s name will be Bilqis.”

“What type of a name is that? That’s mos an Indian name. Is that for a girl or a boy?”

“It’s a girl. Silly. My firstborn is a girl.”

“Your dad will come to the hospital,” she said and put the phone down.

There is this beautiful black and white I took with my dad, Ebrahim or Breima, holding Bilqis with delight in his eyes. She sensed his warmth and smiled back. Breima was great with kids. All kids. He could sing them to sleep within seconds. A true baby whisperer. A storyteller of note and incapable of giving us a hiding. Ever.

Sometime after Bilqis’s naming ceremony or ‘doekmal’ (probably from the Afrikaans ‘doopmal’) my mom and dad came to visit us in Mountain Road in Woodstock. Not one to give my mom a break with her preference for boys, I placed Bilqis on her lap and said, “I want to take a pic of Ouma with her grandchild.” She sat with Bilqis, and about manages to make a smile.

I have no doubt that my mother loved my kids but, somehow, she was not wired to relate to other females as she was towards males. This is why most of her students (mostly female) who she taught in ritual preparation of the deceased (or toekamanie-werk) remember her as stern.

But for all her hard exterior, her students loved her. When she passed, some 500 women attended her janazah (funeral), lining the streets to give her a guard of honour as she was carried to the mosque for the funeral prayers.

When Sara-Nida, my second daughter, was born, I called my mom once more.

“Mom, Sadia has given birth to a healthy baby.” Once more I held back saying the gender.

“What is it?”

“Sara. Her name will be Sara.”

“Another girl!” she said with clear disappointment in her voice, “I’m mos already known as the grandmother of just girls…”

When Ganaan, my youngest daughter, was born, I had resigned myself to the idea that my mom was not going to change. So when Sadia became pregnant with our last, we decided to have a scan done to check the sex of the child. It was a boy! I duly informed my mom.

By the time Jauzi Hashim was born, however, my mom’s health had already taken a turn for the worst. That morning when I called her with the news, we had a heartbreaking conversation.

“Mom, Sadia gave birth!”

“Sadia gave birth?”

“Yes, it’s a boy. His name will be Jauzi.”

“Sadia can’t be due yet.”

“She was due. It’s a boy. This morning. I just saw him.”

“A boy? Whose boy?”

“My boy. Sadia just gave birth.”

“Sadia gave birth? But Sadia can’t be due yet.”

And the conversation went round and round like this for fifteen whole minutes. Her mind was beginning to fail her. She could not retain information. The best news for the granny of just girls. Her youngest son just had a son, only the second of her four sons to have this ‘honour’ and Rugaya’s memory had started to fail her.

What Sadia and I did not know is that when I initially called my mom to say that the scan had revealed that Sadia was going to give birth to a boy, she had already begun to give instructions to my sister-in-law, Zuleiga, to pack a box of baby clothes and other accessories and mail that up to us in Pretoria.

My mom passed away a month later, having never set eyes on her new grandson, the last of eight. The box of baby goodies arrived a week after that.

I am remembering all this now and thinking that all of these experiences are now inside of me. I’m a granddad for the first time. My grandson, Zahi Salman, is adorable. I too find it hard to disguise my emotions. He knows this and responds by holding onto my face when I pick him up. So when I hold him, I think to myself, “Rugaya, your granddaughter has a son. You would love him too. And he would love you no matter your stern face!”