Tana Baru Cemetery

This guide to Tana Baru Cemetery in Cape Town centers on January 17, 1886, when the colonial government shut down the city's oldest Muslim burial ground and thousands of people defied the closure to bury a child here anyway, led by a man named Abdol Burns. It traces the cemetery's deeper roots to the kramats, the tombs of early Cape imams including Tuan Guru, an Indonesian prince exiled here who wrote out the Quran from memory while imprisoned on Robben Island, and Tuan Nuruman, remembered for the talismans he wrote for the sick. Walk the paths slowly; the kramats sit scattered among the older graves rather than gathered in one row.