In the heart of Cape Town’s affluent southern suburbs, a Heritage Day walk retraced the erased footsteps of communities uprooted by apartheid, with an imam and a mosque at the centre of the story.
The walk began where memory hurts most: at the iconic Newlands Cricket Stadium in Cape Town, on land where homes once stood and communities once prayed, played and belonged.
Last Thursday, on Heritage Day, hundreds fell in behind two unlikely procession leaders — Claremont Main Road imam Dr Rashid Omar in his kufi, and St Saviour’s Anglican priest Father Mark Anthony Andrews in his collar — across the Campground bridge, down Main Road, past the Claremont Masjid, into Draper Street, through the subway to Stegman Road Masjid, on to Mariendahl and the old Athenaeum bioscope, and back.
It was billed as a Walk of Remembrance. In truth, it was a sermon on foot.
And at its centre stood the imam and the mosque— not as relics of 1854, but as living witnesses.
The mosque that stayed
The Claremont Main Road Masjid and St Saviour’s Church were both founded in 1854. They are patrons of the Newlands/Claremont Heritage, Environmental Justice and Restitution Society (NCHERS), and are among the few institutions that apartheid could not remove.
People were forcibly removed under colonialism and apartheid. Streets were renamed. Homes were bulldozed. Families were scattered across the Cape Flats. But the mosque remained.
“Their continued presence provides an important bridge between past and present,” Imam Omar told the crowd. They are not merely historic buildings, he said, but “living custodians of memory”.
That is the angle NCHERS understands so well: while the state succeeded in removing people from the land, it did not succeed in erasing their presence. The mosque proves it.
“One of NCHERS’s most important public initiatives is its annual Heritage Day Walk of Remembrance,” Omar said. “These walks are understood as symbolic acts of resistance against the gradual erasure of the histories of dispossession and displacement.”
They recover, step by step, the stories of homes, places of worship, sporting grounds and landscapes that apartheid tried to delete from memory.
The imam as keeper of justice
For Omar, leading the walk is not nostalgia. It is theology in action.
The mosque’s involvement with NCHERS, he said, is “a natural extension of its social justice mission”.
“Remembering the forced removals is not simply about nostalgia for a lost Claremont,” he said. “It is about resisting historical erasure, restoring dignity to displaced communities, supporting the continuing quest for restitution and justice, and ensuring that future generations understand that the prosperous suburbs of contemporary Newlands and Claremont also contain the labour, memories, tears, and dreams of communities that were forcibly removed.”
Standing at the foot of Table Mountain, along the Liesbeek River, he reminded walkers that this land “holds the graves, labour, memories, tears, and dreams of our ancestors”.
In that telling, the imam is not just a prayer leader. He is an archivist, advocate and moral compass — using the authority of the minbar to insist that remembrance must lead to restitution and environmental justice, not merely reflection.
Echoes of Imam Haron
No story captured that role more powerfully than the memory of Imam Abdullah Haron.
Haron, the Claremont imam brutally killed in police custody in September 1969, was remembered by his daughter, Fatima Haron-Masoet, herself part of NCHERS.
She spoke of a father who “empowered the youth, gave a voice to the voiceless and… opened the Masjid not only to Muslims but also to non-Muslims”.
Then she told the story the crowd will not forget: of Dennis Wessels, a man hunted by the security branch who ran into the mosque for sanctuary.
Her father, she said, gave him a kufi and told him to join the prayer. When police entered, they saw only rows of worshippers in salah — no tall white stranger, no fugitive. He blended in. Haron later helped smuggle him out of South Africa to England.
Ten years ago, Wessels’ daughter wrote to Haron-Masoet. Every Christmas, she said, her father would sit at the table, place that red kufi on his head and say a prayer for Imam Haron before the Christmas prayer. He would then remove it, place it beside his plate and eat with his family — children who grew up with a father because an imam had risked his life.
“If it wasn’t for Imam Abdullah,” he would say, “he would not be sitting at the table… and yet Imam Abdullah Haron never had the opportunity to see his children grow up.”
It was ubuntu in a kufi: no prejudice of colour, religion or race. Just sanctuary.
What heritage means
“Commemorating Heritage Day, one always asks the question, what is Heritage?” Haron-Masoet said. “We try to find the answers of our predecessors… heritage as a full range of our inherited traditions, monuments, treasures and cultures and elements of who we are and how we identify ourselves.”
“We walked through the streets of our childhood memories and reconnected with our landmarks,” she said. Families dispersed across the Cape Flats “played an integral part in this community in creating history”.
Authors joined too: Dougie Oakes with No Normal Sport, a biography of Hassan Howa; Fatima Galant with Bilal, on Imam Haron, narrated by her father, Hadji Abduraghmaan “Pienkie” Galant; and Professor Omar Esau with Scrumming Against All Odds, on 15 rugby players denied Springbok colours by apartheid.
But the loudest text was the masjied itself.
As Imam Omar concluded: “The survival of [the Claremont Main Road Masjid], and its contemporary partnership with NCHERS, represents an ongoing commitment to remembrance, restitution, environmental justice, and the reclamation of belonging.”
The apartheid state removed the people. It could not remove the imam’s duty — to remember, to shelter, to resist.
On Heritage Day, led by an imam, Claremont remembered how.
