ABDURAHMAN ACHMAT SALIE

Long Street master tailor who dressed Cape Town and never forgot District Six

In the window of a shop on Long Street, a navy suit hung for sixty years with a small card pinned inside the lapel: 'Made by Salie.' Half the lawyers, ministers and bridegrooms of the Cape wore one at some point, and most of them would swear Oom Abdu had measured them for life.

Born in District Six in 1938, Abdurahman was the son of a tailor and a koesister seller, and he grew up above his father's shop on Hanover Street. He left Trafalgar High School at fifteen to apprentice at the family business, learning to cut cloth by eye and to hide a stitch so well that a customer once accused him of cheating. In 1960 he began working for a gentlemen's outfitter on Long Street, and eventually bought the shop.

In 1971 the family was forcibly removed from District Six under the Group Areas Act and resettled in Athlone. Every working day for forty-seven years he took the early bus into the city, passing the empty lots where his old street had been. He never complained about the journey, only about the grass growing where houses used to be. He helped the District Six Museum record the memories of his old neighbours, and gave his time freely to young researchers.

He sewed the satin costumes of Cape Malay choirs and minstrel troupes, and on the second of January each year stood on a pavement in Bo-Kaap to watch the Tweede Nuwe Jaar parade go by, a glow in his face that his grandchildren photographed. He loved bobotie, Friday prayers at his local mosque, and the sound of a good sewing machine at dawn.

Oom Abdu died peacefully in Athlone in October 2023. He leaves his wife Zaitoon, three children, and eleven grandchildren, one of whom studies at UCT and wears the first suit he cut for her.

“A good seam is invisible. A good man is the same.”