Mosque

Off Lower Main Road Obz yesterday. Not much is holding out against gentrification now. The city is content for the few who weren’t already pushed off to distant wastelands by Apartheid to be pushed off to distant wastelands by rising rents and redevelopment. At top right is a mosque that I didn’t know existed. The daily call to prayer is emblematic for me of our diverse city and the history of that diversity in building it. Islam in SA began with Indonesian and Malaysian slaves being sent here by their Dutch colonists. Political prisoners too. The first book ever written in Afrikaans was the Qran, translated by a political prisoner from ‘Dutch Batavia’, Tuan Guru. ...

Scenes from ghostly Jozi streets.

#tbt When the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) cathedral was built it was the largest church in the Christian world and had the largest dome of any building. After Constantinople was conquered by the Turks (the final end of the Roman Empire) it was converted into a mosque (as Christians did to mosques in Southern Spain too) and the minarets were added. But the original 1st church of the Roman Empire still stands today. And this is what it looked like on a nice day in Istanbul in 2000.