Kaffir

Categories: History of South Africa

See: kaphir for more information; kaffir lime for the condiment; kafir for the Muslim equivalent of "infidel"; kephir for the fermented drink.

The word kaffir (also keffir or kaffer) is a derogatory term used in South Africa for native Africans. (It was also used historically to refer to the inhabitants of South Africa during the period of colonisation, but this usage is slowly fading away. This second usage is not considered vulgar.)

It is a counterpart of the English-language word "nigger". The source of the word is disputed. It has been suggested that the word comes from the Hebrew word for village, "kafar" or "kefar", via Dutch. It may also derive from the merging of the Dutch word "kever", meaning "beetle", with the Arabic word kafir, which means an unbeliever in Islam. Arabs had been trading and involved in slavery in southern Africa, applying the term kafir to pagan non-Muslims in the south of the continent. The derogatory Afrikaans usage would have taken over this meaning with the extra offensive connotation that Africans were black pests. The term Kaffir language was used to denigrate all native languages in Southern Africa.

The Oxford Dictionary of South African English indicates that from the 1940s onwards, "Kaffir" was also used by whites in South Africa as a pejorative adjective meaning bad, clumsy or inept: "You've done a kaffir job of that painting."

Because both the Muslim and White African usages are pejorative, the term kaffir is often considered to be a culturist and racist term. However in the 19th century some anthropologists used it neutrally as a generic term for pagan sub-Saharan African cultures. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford originally labelled African artifacts as "kaffir" in origin.

In South Africa, while the term is still seen as too wounding and offensive for appropriation by black South Africans – in contrast to the way in which "nigger" has come to be used as a casual term of endearment in black hip-hop culture – "Kaffir" was used in 1995 as the title of a hit song by the Johannesburg Kwaito artist, Arthur Mafokate.

The lyrics included a plea to white South Africans to drop the term from their vocabulary for good: "I don't come from the devil, don't call me a kaffir, you won't like it if I call you baboon".

The word is also used to stinging effect in the title of Kaffir Boy, the autobiography of Mark Mathabane, who grew up in the black township of Alexandra, travelled to the United States on a tennis scholarship, and became a successful author in his adoptive homeland.

A dialect known as "Kitchen Kaffir" or Garden Fanakalo also exists, the name being a derogatory implication that the dialect is used only when communicating with black servants.af:Kaffer de:Kaffer fr:Kufr