South Africa's Vibrant Cape Malay Community Is Synonymous With Creativity

19.02.2024 - 09:03 / cntraveler.com / Art

To see where Cape Town's cool kids hang out, stop by the Pot Plant Club. Set amid the Victorian row houses on trendy Bree Street, the boutique, cofounded by Salik Harris in 2022, doubles as a social club for locals, who linger at the shop's café and rifle through racks of oversized jackets and denim. The emporium's collection includes emerging labels like Asa Sadan, the Paint Company, and Yarns Worldwide alongside Harris's own streetwear brand, Leaf Apparel. All were founded by talents from the Cape Malay community, a South African ethnic group with a huge impact on the city's cultural life.

Artist Thania Petersen's Rampie and Layer II, a textile by Thania Petersen; Igshaan Adams surrounded by his artwork.

“I always found Cape Malay people to be so creative,” says Harris. “We resonate with Black people, we resonate with white people. We're in the middle of all the chaos.” Cape Malay is something of a misnomer, a blanket name assigned to a layered identity unique to the tip of the African continent that developed as the result of Indonesian and Malaysian exiles mixing with Africans, Europeans, Indians, and Arabs over the centuries. “The term Cape Malay is used to describe a Creole community, a community that is completely mixed,” says artist Thania Petersen, who explores her heritage through photography, painting, textile, and performance. “We don't exist anywhere else in the world.”

For most visitors, brushes with Cape Malay culture are limited to Bo-Kaap, a warren of rainbow-bright houses and mosques on the slopes of the iconic Signal Hill. Tour buses regularly choke Wale Street to disgorge passengers for quick selfies or to sample koeksisters, plump pastries steeped in cardamom and dusted with coconut. But the scale of influence this community has had on South Africa is often overlooked on the tourist circuit.

Pot Plant Club's streetwear brands may be rooted in Cape Town's current sartorial moment, but they have strong ties to the city's past. For generations, Cape Malays were, as tailors and factory workers, at the forefront of a once booming textile industry. “We never owned the businesses, but we were the hands that grew these businesses,” says designer Imran Mohamed in his studio in Woodstock, a suburb that's emerged as a creative hub. “We never saw people like us in this space. I wanted to portray our people in that luxury-fashion context.” In 2021 the Central Saint Martins alum launched Asa Sadan, a high-end streetwear label named for his grandmother and inspired in part by Cape Malay silhouettes; this year his work was included in the “Africa Fashion” exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

The dining room at the Happy Uncles

Today, creatives across Cape Town are exploring their