Kaffir
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The word Kafir an Islamic term usually translated as "infidel". The words kaffir, kafir, and their variations may also have the meanings described below.
[edit] Use outside Islam
By the 15th century, the word kafir/kuffar was used by Muslims in Africa to refer to the non-Muslim African natives. Many of those kuffar, were enslaved and sold by their Muslims captors to European and Asian merchants, mainly from Portugal, who by that time had established trading outposts along the coast of West Africa. These European slave traders adopted that Arabic word to refer to their captives, and eventually changed it into many forms — cafre (in Portuguese,Spanish and Greek), caffar, kaffer, kaffir, kafir, etc. (in English, Dutch, and Afrikaans); see South Africa Kaffir people. Those words were then used to name many things related to Africa, such as the Kaffir Wars, Kaffraria, kaffir lime, kaffir corn, and so on; see kaffir (disambiguation). It is now illegal to use the term "kaffir" in South Africa.
Some of those African slaves were taken by the Portuguese to work in their colonies in Asia. In some cities of Sri Lanka, in particular, the descendants of those slaves still constitute a distinctive ethnic group, who call themselves Kaffir.
In South Africa the word kaffir eventually became a racial slur, applied pejoratively or offensively by some whites to African blacks or to dark-skinned persons in general. In Jamaica it is applied by some Jamaicans of Indian ancestry to Jamaicans of African ancestry. See kaffir ethnic slur.
- South Africa
- Kaffir (ethnic slur), an offensive ethnic/racial label, used mostly in South Africa and Jamaica
- Kaffir (Historical usage in southern Africa), an obsolete blanket term for the majority of natives of Southern Africa
- Nguni languages, called the Kaffir languages in the 19th century
- Fanagalo, derogatorily called Kitchen Kaffir or Kaffir language, a pidgin or creole spoken in South Africa
- Sri Lanka
- Sri Lanka Kaffir people, an ethnic group
- Sri Lanka Kaffir language, a creole spoken by that people
- Kafirstan, now Nuristan, and related to it
- Hindukush Kafir people, now Nuris
- Hindukush Kafir language or Kafiri, spoken by some of those peoples
- Products
- Sunbeam Kaffir, an engine from the Sunbeam Car Company
- IAI Kfir or Kafir, an Israeli fighter jet
[edit] See also
 |
This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. |
