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COMMEMORATING NATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
As the country celebrates Women’s Day, PROFESSOR ASLAM FATAAR pays tribute to a woman who has been a driving force for over decades in the field of early childhood development.
Decades of life, leadership, and devotion to the community converged in a warm gathering in Cape Town on Friday August 8 for Mareldia Tape, Executive Director of the Grassroots Educare Trust, whose work in early childhood development has profoundly shaped the lives of thousands across the Western Cape.
Mareldia’s life is deeply rooted in the Indonesian, African, indigenous, and enslaved heritage of the Cape. As the evening unfolded, the air was rich with the scent of tea, mingling with the laughter of children and the warm greetings of relatives as they arrived to share in the joy.
The gathering was more than a birthday celebration; it was a living tribute to a life that reflects the Qurʾānic ethic of iḥsān, doing what is beautiful, and a moment where heritage, love, and community converged in celebration.
The Qurʾān teaches in Sūrat Fuṣṣilat:
And who is better in speech than one who invites to Allah and does righteousness and says, ‘Indeed, I am of the Muslims.’ And not equal are the good deed and the bad. Repel evil by that which is better; and thereupon the one whom between you and him is enmity will become as though he was a devoted friend. But none is granted it except those who are patient, and none is granted it except one having a great portion [of good].
These verses outline a life ethic: to speak and act with integrity, to meet challenges with generosity, and to cultivate the patience that transforms discord into friendship. They remind us that the better way often requires quiet strength and moral steadiness.
A heritage of cultural weaving
Mareldia is a fifth-generation descendant of Imām ʿAbd Allāh ibn Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Salām, known as Tuan Guru, exiled from Tidore in the late eighteenth century and revered as one of the founders of institutional Islam at the Cape. He established the first mosque, founded a madrassah, wrote the Qurʾān from memory while imprisoned on Robben Island, and produced an ʿaqīdah text that is still followed today.
This inheritance is part of the larger Cape experience, which brought together people from across the oceans and continents. Enslaved Africans and Asians, indigenous knowledge-keepers, and settlers from Europe met and remade their lives in a new environment. Out of hardship grew a society that combined skills, languages, tastes, and beliefs into a living culture of mixity.
The community learned to survive through fluidity, taking elements from different worlds and shaping them into new forms of belonging. In kitchens, Malay spices met local produce. At weddings, Arabic phrases blended with Cape melodies. In family conversations, Afrikaaps, Muslim Afrikaans, English, Arabic, isiXhosa, and traces of Bahasa Indonesia still flow, echoing the journeys of those who came before. This was not the erasing of origins, but their reimagining into something resilient and shared.
An ethic shaped by two traditions
From her Indonesian–Cape Muslim heritage, Mareldia embodies soppang: quiet dignity, moral discipline, steady productivity, and devotion to family. From her African context, she draws on Ubuntu: the conviction that a person’s humanity is bound to the humanity of others, and that care must be mutual for a community to thrive.
In her life, these traditions merge into a single way of being, offering elegance, moral steadiness, generosity, and connection, which is a moral framework well suited to the Cape’s history of adaptation and cultural mingling.
Service and leadership
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At Grassroots Educare Trust, Mareldia has established a reputation for leadership characterised by strategic vision and personal attention. She has steered the organisation through shifting policy and funding demands and community realities, always keeping the child at the centre of the work. Her efforts to integrate training, curriculum, and local needs have had a lasting impact, providing countless children with a stronger start in life.
Her leadership reflects her hybrid ethic: valuing collective achievement over individual acclaim, understanding that the well-being of the community is tied to her own. This approach fulfils the Qurʾānic principle that calling to what is right must be expressed in action and the dignified treatment of others.
The gentle currents of connection
The Cape story has its ebbs and flows. Families have experienced seasons of closeness and times when connections loosened. Such movements are a sad, consequential part of life, leaving their mark in the rhythms of gatherings and in the way people slowly find their way back to one another.
The same adaptability that built the Cape’s communities offers a way to keep these connections alive. Skills that once enabled survival, such as listening, adjusting, and finding common ground, also support the repair and renewal of relationships. The Qurʾānic vision of turning enmity into friendship is, in many ways, the Cape’s own story: a place where unexpected combinations often become the basis for new ways of living together.
An evening of warmth and memory
Her seventy-fifth birthday celebration reflected this spirit. Four generations of Mareldia and her husband, Ismail Tape’s family, gathered with friends and colleagues. The room was full of warmth, the aroma of food prepared with care, and the comfort of familiar company.
Her brother, Shaykh Luqman, spoke about genealogy and legacy as living commitments that require nurturing and care. His reminder that identity is actively shaped through care for relationships resonated deeply with me.
The sounds of the evening carried us further into memory. In the style of earlier times, cousin Mareldia sang beautifully with a friend, evoking memories of her mother, Fatima, and her mother’s Jappie sisters, among them my own mother, Jawayer, who once sang at weddings.
Their repertoire mixed Cape love songs with popular ballads, creating a soundtrack of joy for their community. Her brothers sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in Bahasa Indonesia, a gentle reminder of the oceans that carried our forebears here.
The better way in action
In gatherings like this, one sees what the Qurʾān means by ‘repelling with what is better’. The better path is the decision to value presence over absence, shared joy over remembered hurts, and connection over the pull of distance. It is a path that grows from the ethic of iḥsān, the practice of doing what is beautiful.
Mareldia’s life shows iḥsān in the way she leads with humility, builds others up, and integrates the moral poise of soppang with the relational generosity of Ubuntu. Her ethic reflects the adaptability that has allowed Cape Muslim life to endure and flourish: drawing strength from heritage while shaping it to meet the needs of the present.
A promise for the future
For me, her celebration was more than a milestone. It was a reminder of the ongoing work of tending the bonds that hold us together. In a place whose history is woven from many strands, connection is sustained through intention and care.
Our Cape past is one of adaptation: scholars, nurturing women who led communities, enslaved artisans, carers and community builders, indigenous leaders, African traders, and European settlers each left a mark that was reworked and made our own. This legacy teaches that cultural fluidity is a form of strength. It has been the key to our community’s formation and survival.
Differences will always be part of our shared life. The Qurʾān calls us to meet them with integrity, generosity, and patience. The Cape’s history shows that cultural adaptation can be both a survival strategy and a source of beauty.
In her seventy-five years, Mareldia has embodied this truth, living an ethic shaped by heritage, rooted in moral poise, open through generosity, and grounded in the cultural mixity of a community that is always becoming more than the sum of its parts.
May Allah grant her health, joy in her family, and reward for the goodness she has sown. May we, too, walk the better path, shaped by the deep currents of our shared history and by the call to live with beauty, patience, and moral courage.
Aslam Fataar is Research Professor in Higher Education Transformation, Department of Education Policy Studies, Stellenbosch University.
