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In January 1809, Van der Kemp wrote to his nephew that his 'dear wife's father' was a Muslim priest, and Sara had been brought up as a Muslim

The period between 1770 and 1800 proved extremely fertile for the spread of Islam in the Cape Colony. There were at this time, in the Colony, many freed convicts and ex-slaves who were well-schooled in Islam, and were only too eager to convert other slaves to Islam. They were assisted by the prevailing attitude of White settlers who argued that a Muslim slave, being of sober habits, made a better domestic servant.

The total registered population at the Cape in 1775 was 12 000; approximately one-half of this population constituted slaves. This became a matter for concern for the Dutch authorities who then legislated to control the slave numbers at the Cape. Among the placaaten [statutes] which were issued was one which prohibited the sale of baptised Christian slaves. The colonists, who feared the loss of their slaves, should they become Christians, indirectly encouraged the spread of Islam among the convicts and slaves; so, by 1800 the benches in the Groote Kerk [Church] of Cape Town which were traditionally reserved for use by slaves, had become virtually empty.

Most early Cape Muslim leaders came from the ranks of the convicts (bandietten), not the political exiles. Bandit imams (Muslim pastors) -labelled on the convict rolls "Mahometaanse priesters" (Mohammedan priests) - trickled into the Cape throughout the eighteenth century: among them, Sapoer (n.d.), Abdul Radeen (n.d.), Abdullah van Satavia (n.d.), Aloewie Said van Mokka (1744), Hadjie Matraram (1746), Agmat, Prins van Ternate (1766), Al Jina Abdullah (1766), Imam Fakirij van de Negerij Niassinna (1746), Noriman van Cherihon (1767), lmam Abdullah (1780), lmam Noro (1780), lmam Patrodien (1780), and simply Achmat (1795). Islam flourished among the convicts even after the end of Dutch rule. ln 1829, the Rev. William Elliot, in charge of Christian evangelism among Muslims, was surprised to find that "there are at present eighty three convicts lodged in the battery, about half of whom are Mahometans." These early imams, who formed the core of the Cape's ulema, or Muslim clergy, became a hereditary class. An imam interviewed in 1824 said that his father was a "Mohammedan priest," who "came to the colony from java when about sixteen years of age; he was brought here as a slave, and was purchased by an old Malay priest, who gave him his freedom after instructing him in the Mahometan faith and when he died, my father succeeded him as priest. This hereditary group of early imams included the first Cape Muslim to go on hajj (Hajji Hassan al-Din ibn 'Abd Allah, or as the English street directories listed him, "Carel Pilgrim") and also the first Muslim scholars to write the now celebrated religious and other manuscripts in the new Arabic-Afrikaans. Several of these nineteenth-century imams were also ancestors of the twentieth-century Muslim clergy.