The Mihrab Built by a Christian Cleric

What does this story of Lalu Abdul have to do with Blue Gums and its ghosts, you well may ask? The thread that connects this fascinating history of religion, rebellion and runaway slaves to Blue Gums, leads us to the corner of the stone house that faces north-east, across the blue-grey waters of False Bay to the mainland of Africa, and to Mecca beyond.

This corner of the stone house is unmistakably designed as a “mihrab”, an Islamic prayer niche. It is positioned with incredible accuracy, in the direction of the “Ka’aba” in Mecca. All Muslims around the world face the “Ka’aba” during prayers. (This is called facing the “Qiblah”).

The Mihrab in the North-East Corner of the Stone House – as it Appears Today

 The stone house was built in the early 1920’s, by Padre Green, to replace the tiny barracks that he built when he first arrived here and fondly called “The Good ‘ole”. The stone house was a very simple structure: two square buildings, the smaller one closer to the mountain, and the larger one closer to the sea. The “mihrab” in the north-east corner, overlooking the sea, was all the more striking because of the simplicity of the rest of the house. The longstanding and utterly plausible assumption, offered as evidence for decades was that the Reverend Green, being a navy chaplain, who had travelled the seas for many years before settling at Blue Gums, based his design of the stone house on a West African slave fort.

 

Blue Gums Stone House Modeled on a West African Slave Fort?

But this explanation does not quite fit with the dedication to detail that accompanied the inclusion of the “mihrab” into the simplistic design of the remainder of the house. Before the entire living room floor had to be replaced in 2001 because of incessant flooding, there were three jade stones, positioned in a triangle in the middle of the “mihrab”, exactly where a Muslim, in ritual prayer ,would place his palms and his forehead (“sajdah”).

 For the first few years of my stay in Blue Gums I would often wonder why a Christian Cleric had gone to such lengths to reconstruct a Muslim prayer niche in his house. It was not likely that Muslims would have been part of the first generation of Blue-gummers, who visited the place at the Padre’s invitation during the two world wars. South Africa’s racial segregation would have made that extremely improbable.

Blue Gums Prayer Niche – Facing the Qiblah.

The mystery continued to perplex me, until my dear friend and Blue Gums benefactor, Dr. Adnaan Mia, got me interested in the history of the Imams and runaway slaves of the “deep-south”.

And that is where horses make their return to the Blue Gums saga. There is a story that Lalu Abdul befriended one of the farmers who had been given land at Cape Point, and that every few months he would borrow the farmer’s white horse and ride into Simon’s Town to see his family and his followers. Perhaps the very shaded grove that P.E. Hugo created fifty years earlier was what first drew the fugitive from Indonesia to this place. The Blue Gums, now stately and tall, offered Lalu Abdul’s horse the shade they were intended to provide to the horses of the self-same colonists who had posted notices saying that the runaway slave had to be captured at any cost.