Music legend Abdullah Ibrahim pictured with CTIJF Chairman Rayhaan Survé.
I was maybe eight or nine years old when Abdullah Ibrahim played in our living room. I cannot tell you everything about that afternoon, but I can tell you what it felt like. Family and friends had crowded into every available space: people sat cross-legged on the carpet, lined the staircase shoulder to shoulder, and peered in through the kitchen entrance as though a doorframe could be a front-row seat. And then he struck the first note.
The room went still. Not the polite quiet of a concert hall, but the sacred silence of people who understood, without being told, that something important was happening.
Last night, once again, I sat across from Uncle Abdullah as we had dinner at Rooi, the restaurant inside the One & Only hotel in Cape Town, and I was captured again. He is 91 now. His hands, the same hands that held that living room in a trance, now rested on the white tablecloth as he spoke. Not about music at first, but about history and the universe. About telescopes and ancient knowledge. About what we have forgotten and what we never bothered to learn. About time itself.
It was the kind of dinner where you forget to eat because the conversation feeds you more than any meal could.
