In the late eighteenth century, an unlikely inmate was sent by Dutch colonial authorities to the infamous Robben Island, where freedom fighters including Nelson Mandela would later be imprisoned. Tuan Nuruman, also called Paay Schaapie, was an exile who originally hailed from a city on the other side of the world: Batavia, now Jakarta, in the Dutch East Indies. His purported crime? He was accused of supplying escaped slaves with mystical charms that could “render them invincible against recapture.”

Such talismans, or azeemat, drew on Tuan Nuruman’s heritage in South Africa, since “Muslims at the Cape were infamous for their magic and charm-making or ‘Malay tricks,’” as historian Saarah Jappie notes. They’re one type of the varied Malay-origin texts, known as kietaabs.

The term kietaab has its origin in the Arabic word for “book,” but it has come to mean manuscripts and printed books written in Arabic script in the Muslim community of Cape Town. These Cape Muslims descend from slaves, exiles, and convicts transported to South Africa by the Dutch—more than one-fifth of whom may have come from the islands of what is now Indonesia. Magical talismans like Tuan Nuruman’s “derive from Islamic mystical traditions brought over by political exiles and slaves from Southeast Asia and other parts of the Indian Ocean,” writes Jappie.

That tradition was a comfort to Cape Muslims facing harsh social conditions, she explains. Magic men called doekoem, who were related to Malay dukun mystics, stepped up to meet their spiritual needs. Indeed, she writes that “[t]he services of certain charm makers were sought after by fellow slaves, as well as settlers at the Cape, which demonstrates that belief in the effectiveness of the charms reached beyond the boundaries of the slave population.”

Besides actual amulets, kietaabs could also take the form of what Jappie calls “azeemat reference books” that contained instructions on how to create amulets for different purposes. Otherwise, with Islamic madrasahs “one of the only educational options available” for children from enslaved or Free Black backgrounds, religious kietaabs emerged as either classroom readers or the koples boek, a type of notebook for students to transcribe and memorize lessons.

Over time, many kietaabs were discarded by being burned or buried—in line with Islamic customs for disposing of religious literature—and only a “small number of extant examples” now remain. That’s as early kietaabs were written in either Arabic or Classical Malay, which used Arabic-based jawi script. The Malay language was then supplanted by Cape Dutch, a precursor to Afrikaans.

“While many people can read Arabic script for the purpose of Qur’an recitation,” Jappie writes, “they are not familiar with the jawi script and have rarely, if ever, had to use Arabic-Afrikaans.” This means that “the kietaabs’ usefulness quickly diminished” among Cape Muslims. Moreover, “the lack of value seen in the kietaabs was perhaps further intensified by a stigma attached to [them], as objects linked to a pre-modern, subaltern past of slavery, subordination and an outdated form of education.”

But Jappie adds that, after apartheid, “the search for a separate identity for Cape Muslims in the new South Africa had led, for a certain number of people, to an affiliation with the Malay world.” In this way, kietaabs, which originally served “as practical objects used in the educational, medicinal and communicative practices of the Cape Muslim community, have taken on a new meaning. They now act as physical objects that can tangibly connect Cape Muslims with the past.

In fact, in some circles, ownership of kietaabs can be both “used to confirm one’s own ‘Malayness’” and “to indirectly discredit that of others,” according to Jappie. She has found that, ironically, “many kietaab owners admit to not knowing what their manuscripts are actually about.” In fact, they even seem to value the lack of understandable content in their kietaabs as further evidence of the manuscripts’ “significance and sacredness.”

After all, as Jappie points out, the meaning of the texts and the information that they contain have consistently been ignored “[i]n all of the different manifestations of the kietaabs as ‘heritage.’”

Beyond the kietaabs, she observes that the recovery of old African-Arabic manuscripts in Mali and elsewhere “has also resulted in a preoccupation with manuscripts as objects of heritage…. [T]he life story of the kietaabs speaks to greater issues around how we perceive written sources,” and further research may prompt historians to rethink their traditional understanding of written texts as archives of information.

“It illustrates that written documents do in fact change over time, accruing history and value, and acquiring new social functions,” Jappie concludes.

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