Tuan Ismail Dea Malela and Tuan Dea Koasa

Above Runciman's Drive in Simon's Town, in a forest clearing, two shrines stand beside a stream that runs down to the town's mosque. For generations the people of Simon's Town knew them as the graves of friends of God, though no one could say who they were. Families were told never to forget that their ancestors had been princes and princesses of a royal court.

In the 20th century, a kitaab passed down through the family and written in Sumbawanese answered the question. It records their lineage as that of Imam Abdul Karriem bin Imam Jalil bin Imam Ismail of Sumbawa, an island east of Bali and Lombok in Indonesia, and names them as Tuan Ismail Dea Malela and his son, Tuan Dea Koasa. In 1969 a study at the University of Cape Town traced the family to the Dea royal house of Pemangong in Sumbawa. Tuan Ismail Dea Malela had been brought to the Cape as a political exile in 1779.

His grandfather's kramat in Pemangong stands in a setting much like this one: on a hill, beside a stream, near a mosque, sheltered by trees. People in Simon's Town tell of a fire in the 1940s that swept across the mountain and passed around the shrines, leaving them untouched, as later fires have too.