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The story of Ebrahim Ismail, who lived as ‘Abraham Davis’ under apartheid, reveals the complex intersections of war, race, identity and belonging in South Africa.
By ANWAR OMAR
Recently, I stumbled upon a fragile handwritten version of The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers by my paternal uncle, whom we affectionately referred to as Ami. This had been carefully preserved over the decades. As I unfolded the ageing pages and read the fading words, I realised that this was more than a wartime song. It served as a gateway to a forgotten chapter of our family history and into a broader South African story that has largely escaped mainstream heritage narratives.
This handwritten ballad immediately brought back memories of my uncle, Ebrahim Ismail, a man who fought in the Allied forces during the Second World War in Egypt and Italy, but who later lived much of his life in apartheid South Africa under the pseudo-name Abraham Davis.
His personal journey reveals the complex intersections between war, race, identity, memory and survival in the context of twentieth-century South Africa.
Ebrahim Ismail and the life of ‘Abraham Davis’
As a child growing up in Salt River, I remember my uncle returning home over weekends after spending the week in Cape Town’s city centre, where he occupied an entirely different world. Under the name Abraham Davis, he worked as a co-director for the Gundelfinger shipping company, stayed in a flat at Tulbagh Square, and moved within spaces reserved exclusively for whites under South Africa’s racial order.
Yet on weekends he returned home to his family in Salt River.
He would sleep in the same room as my older brother and I, comfortably resuming his place within the family he could never publicly acknowledge within white society.
I remember how we collected him at the old River Club along the Liesbeeck River, housed within one of the area’s historic colonial-era buildings, which has since been demolished. As non-whites, we could not enter the club itself and had to wait quietly and patiently outside, almost in secret, until he emerged to join us so that we could take him home.
Looking back today, those moments reveal the deeply fractured realities of race and belonging under segregation and apartheid.
The scars and medals of war
Another memory remains deeply etched in my mind. From time to time, my uncle would ask my older brother and I to massage his back. As children we did not give it much thought, but I remember feeling the roughness and embedded fragments and remnants of shrapnel across his back, wounds that he had sustained during the war.
Those scars were physical reminders that beneath the carefully constructed identity of ‘Abraham Davis’ was a man who had endured the brutality of battlefields far away in North Africa and Italy.
In later years I came to realise that his body itself carried a hidden archive of war. Scholars of embodied memory remind us that trauma does not only live in the mind, but settles into the body itself, inscribed in muscle and bone. Ebrahim Ismail carried this, the war and the double life, not only in his memory but in his very bodily flesh.
My uncle was also awarded the War Medal 1939–1945, Africa Star, and the Italy Star for his wartime service. These medals represent far more than ceremonial objects. They signify participation in some of the most brutal military campaigns of the twentieth century. For many South African veterans, especially those whose histories were later marginalised by apartheid, these medals remain among the few tangible forms of recognition they ever received.
The ‘D-Day Dodgers’
During the Second World War, ‘Abraham Davis’ served in the Allied campaign in North Africa and Italy, most likely within structures associated with the British Eighth Army. Soldiers who fought in Italy became associated with the now-famous term ‘D-Day Dodgers’.
The phrase emerged after the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Troops serving in Italy felt that their sacrifices were being overlooked as public attention focused almost entirely on D-Day and the liberation of France. The term ‘D-Day Dodgers’ was reportedly used sarcastically by some British politicians and commentators to imply that soldiers in Italy were somehow avoiding the ‘real war’ (Nasson, 2012).
The soldiers themselves responded with humour and irony through The Ballad of the D-Day Dodgers. Yet the reality of the Italian campaign was anything but easy. The Allied advance through Italy involved some of the harshest fighting of the war. Thousands of Allied forces, including many South Africans, fought and died in these campaigns (Nasson, 2012).
The irony embedded in the song therefore reflected a deeper frustration amongst soldiers who felt forgotten by official wartime narratives. In many ways, this sense of historical marginalisation mirrors the later erasure of many non-white South African veterans from mainstream public memory altogether.
Passing and the Cape experience
What made my Ami’s life possible was the complicated and often painful phenomenon known as ‘racial passing’. He was light of complexion as a result of the genes he inherited from his mother, Maria Vermeulen, who hailed from Robertson, and could easily pass as white. During the war, overseas military service may have enabled him to move more easily within white military structures. After returning to South Africa, he continued navigating this dual identity to access economic and social opportunities denied to non-white South Africans.
The phenomenon of racial passing has been extensively discussed by scholars whose work demonstrates that racial identities under apartheid were never fixed biological realities, but socially constructed categories constantly negotiated and contested in everyday life (Adhikari, 2005; Erasmus, 2001). Adhikari (2005) explores how many light-skinned Coloured South Africans occupied deeply ambiguous social positions within the racial hierarchy, while Erasmus (2001) highlights the fluidity and complexity of Coloured identity in the Cape.
Passing was not merely an act of deception. For many, it was a strategy of survival within an oppressive racial order that determined where one could live, work, travel, socialise, educate one’s children, and eventually be buried. Some individuals permanently severed ties with their families to sustain white identities. Others, like my uncle, moved constantly between two worlds, publicly performing whiteness while privately maintaining family, religious and cultural connections.
Family, faith and quiet resistance
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Despite his ‘white’ professional life, my uncle never abandoned his family or faith. One memory remains particularly significant to me. In the early 1970s, when my older brother, Imam Rashied, approached my father with the desire to study hifz, my father simply could not afford the fees. Without hesitation, my uncle volunteered to pay for his studies. Looking back now, that gesture carried profound meaning. It was also my Ami who persuaded and supported my father financially to perform his hajj in 1967 at the age of 40. On my father’s return, my uncle flew to Johannesburg to be the first to welcome his younger brother and receive his hajj blessings.
Beneath the constructed racial identity he was compelled to perform in public, my Ami remained deeply connected to his roots, his family and his Muslim identity. In many ways, his quiet support for my brother’s hifz education and my father’s hajj represented a reclamation of self within a society that demanded concealment and fragmentation.
Politics, fear and the burden of dual identity
My Ami died on January 17, 1977, on Imam Rashied’s 18th birthday, only a few months after the Soweto uprisings of 1976, when apartheid entered one of its most volatile periods.
In September 1976 my older brother and I were detained for anti-apartheid activities, whilst at the same time my uncle’s health had begun deteriorating badly while he was bedridden at our family home in Salt River. Our arrest must have been profoundly traumatic for him.
Throughout our youth, he consistently discouraged us from becoming involved in politics. At the time, I understood this as fear of state repression. But in hindsight, I believe there was something deeper at play. My Ami had spent much of his adult life carefully navigating a fragile and dangerous dual identity. Publicly he lived as Abraham Davis within white professional society, while privately he remained Ebrahim Ismail within his family and Muslim community.
The anti-apartheid political climate of the 1970s increasingly demanded political clarity and racial positioning in ways that threatened the delicate boundaries he had spent decades constructing around his life. Our detention therefore likely represented more than simply concern for our safety. It may also have represented the terrifying possibility that the political realities of apartheid South Africa were finally closing in around him, threatening to expose, destabilise, or collapse the dual existence he had maintained since the Second World War. This must have been an immense emotional and psychological burden for him.
Seen in this light, the final years of my Ami’s life are deeply symbolic of the broader South African condition during the 1970s, a society increasingly consumed by political confrontation, racial anxiety, and moral fracture. Yet despite all these contradictions, he ultimately returned to his family, his faith, and his community.
Burial, memory and historical irony
Today, Ebrahim Ismail is buried at the Mowbray Muslim Cemetery. His final burial place says more about belonging than the racial categories that shaped so much of his life ever could. There is a profound historical irony in this. He is buried in the same cemetery where 13 other Commonwealth soldiers, who served during the Second World War but who did not, or could not, ‘pass’ as white within South Africa’s racial order. In life, apartheid and segregation divided these men through rigid racial classifications. Some occupied white military and social spaces, while others remained confined to the subordinate racial categories imposed by the state. Yet, in death, they now rest together within the same sacred burial landscape.
The irony extends even further.
Approximately 35 years later, my own father was buried in the very same grave as his older brother, Ebrahim. In death, the artificial racial distance that apartheid demanded between ‘Abraham Davis’ and his family collapsed entirely. The brother who had spent much of his public life navigating whiteness eventually returned fully to the family and community from which he had never truly separated himself.
This layered burial history speaks powerfully to the meanings embedded within the Mowbray Muslim Cemetery itself. The cemetery is not merely a burial ground; it is a social archive of Cape Muslim history, memory, kinship, and identity. Within its burial spaces lie stories of colonialism, apartheid, migration, war, faith, class, and resistance.
The fact that Commonwealth soldiers and my father experienced radically different racial realities in life from that of my uncle, yet now share the same cemetery, foregrounds a deeper truth about both Islam and death: that the hierarchies constructed by society dissolve before mortality.
Heritage beyond official narratives
Stories such as these remain absent from official heritage discourse because they complicate simplistic racial narratives. They expose the deeply constructed nature of race under colonialism and apartheid and reveal the emotional burdens carried by families forced to navigate these artificial divisions (Adhikari, 2005; Erasmus, 2001).
South African heritage discourse often foregrounds monumental political events, famous leaders and officially recognised struggle histories. While these remain important, there are equally valuable histories embedded within the intimate experiences of ordinary families.
Conclusion
Thousands of non-white South Africans served during the Second World War, yet many of their stories remain absent from archives, museums and heritage institutions. Families across the country still carry memories, photographs, medals, handwritten songs and oral histories that have never entered mainstream public history. If heritage is about human experience and memory, then these hidden intangible stories deserve recognition alongside the grand narratives that dominate South African public history.
Anwar Omar is a South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) councillor. A founding member of the Salt River Heritage Society, Omar holds a master’s degree in Conservation and the Built Environment from the University of Cape Town (UCT).
References
Adhikari, M. (2005). Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Erasmus, Z. (Ed.). (2001). Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town. Cape Town: Kwela Books.
Nasson, B. (2012). South Africa at War, 1939–1945. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.
