The Doctor of District Six: exploring the private and family history of Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, City Councillor for District Six of Cape Town (1904-1940)
Abdullah Abdurahman is best-known in South African historiography for his four-decade career as the first coloured City Councillor of Cape Town and the President of the African Political Organisation. However, most literature on Abdurahman lack study on the personal and intimate life that animated his politics. Often painted as a tragic narrative of a dynamic man who failed in his struggle against racial segregation in the first half of the twentieth-century, Abdurahman is largely neglected in South African historiography. This project is a partial biography of Abdurahman focused on examining his personal and family life. Research for this project began with the exploration of the well-known Abdurahman collections at the University of Cape Town and Northwestern University and then expanded to include British, American, and Turkish records. This thesis follows a thematic structure, focusing on Abdullah as a son, a doctor, a husband and a father, with a final chapter focusing on Abdullah's many identities. Through the biographical method, this thesis explores the changes and continuities in coloured, Cape Malay, Indian and Muslim politics, attitudes, and identities at the Cape from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The complications and nuances brought about by the ways identities intersect with race, gender, class, religion and other ethos are revealed by focusing on the personal and the intimate. Situating Abdullah Abdurahman within global flows of people, ideas, faith communities, and political ideologies, this thesis allows insight into how coloured, middle-class, Muslim families lived in the early twentieth century and the limits of nonracialism and political organisations of the time. By reincorporating Abdurahman's personal and family life into historiography, the influence of affect and emotions in politics, the import of childhood and early political socialisation, and the role of education in producing citizenship and subjectivity rise to the fore. This unveils themes of how political philosophies are generated, challenged, and transmitted between and across generations. This thesis argues for a transnational and trans-generational approach to considering the contributions of marginalised groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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