Kaffir (Historical usage in southern Africa)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article refers to the use of the word Kaffir in its historical sense as a term to describe black South African languages and cultures.

For its use as a derogatory term of abuse, see Kaffir (ethnic slur).

For other uses of the term, see Kaffir (disambiguation).

The word Kaffir was used in English and Dutch, from the 16th century to the early 20th century as a blanket term for several different peoples of southern Africa. Outside this limited historical context, the word is used today only as a derogatory and offensive term of abuse.

1 Historical usage
2 Etymology
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Historical usage

The earliest use of the term in English is by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, who used the name Caffar for the inhabitants of southern Africa, a region roughly coinciding with the present territories of Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Mozambique.

The word was used, roughly, to describe all natives to the region, at the time of European arrival, besides the San and Khoi Khoi. This includes many ethnic groups, such as the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana and peoples. The distinction was probably made based on differences in agricultural practices, skin colour, and broad cultural features between "Kaffir" people, the Khoi Khoi and the San, but ignored significant differences in language, culture, and possibly ancestral origin within the group.

The word was used officially in this way, without derogatory connotations (apart from the implicit generalisation), during the Dutch and British colonial periods until the early twentieth century. It appears in many historical accounts by anthropologists, missionaries and other observers, as well as in academic writings. For example, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford originally labelled many African artifacts as "Kaffir" in origin. For another example, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica made frequent use of the term, even to the extent of having an article of that title.

Occasionally, the word was used to refer specifically to the Xhosa people, such as in the instance of the book Kaffir Folk-lore: A Selection from the Traditional Tales, an 1886 collection of Xhosa folk lore. Another case was that of the Cape Frontier Wars between the Xhosa and the growing Cape Colony, originally, and occasionally still, called the "Kaffir Wars".

During the 20th century, the word gradually took on negative connotations. By 1976, its use was actionable in court in South Africa. Despite this, the word continued, and continues to be used.

[edit] Etymology

The word derives from the Arabic word kafir (The Oxford Dictionary of South African English, 1996), which is commonly translated as "infidel" or "unbeliever" : i.e. someone who does not believe in, or denies the existence of, God. The term was originally applied to non-Muslim people in the south and east of the continent by coastal Arab traders. It is likely that Portuguese explorers, encountering these traders, misinterpreted the word as referring to the ethnicity of the native African people they had encountered. This mis-interpretation was probably passed on to other European settlers and explorers.