Kaffir (racial term)

• 1. Introduction

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  Kaffir is one of the most charged words in the South African lexicon. It carries the weight of centuries: a term that began in Arabic theology, crossed the Indian Ocean on trading ships, moved through the pens of Portuguese explorers, and arrived in Southern Africa as a neutral geographic descriptor before being weaponised into a racial slur during apartheid. Today it is euphemistically known in South African English simply as "the K-word", a status it shares with a handful of other terms so toxic that speaking them aloud in the wrong context can result in criminal conviction. How did a word meaning "unbeliever" become a legal category of hate speech? And what does its long journey tell us about the relationship between language, power, and race?

• 2. Roots in Arabic and Arabic Ocean Trade

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  The Arabic word kāfir, written كافر, was primarily a theological term meaning "disbeliever" or "non-believer". It was applied to non-Muslims of any ethnic background, without inherent racial meaning. Along the Swahili coast, however, the word took on a more specific edge: it was used, in particular, to describe the pagan zanj, the sub-Saharan African peoples who were increasingly drawn into the Indian Ocean and Red Sea slave trades. Portuguese explorers arriving on the East African coast in 1498 encountered the word already in common use among coastal Arabs. The Muslim Swahili locals, it is worth noting, tended to prefer a different term for the people of the interior: washenzi, meaning "uncivilised". The Portuguese absorbed the Arabic word into their own language. The poet Camões used the lusitanised plural form cafres in the fifth canto of his famous 1572 epic The Lusiads. From the Portuguese, the word spread into non-Muslim areas in unexpected directions: as khapri in Sinhalese and kaappiri in Malayalam, both used without offense in Western India and Sri Lanka to describe black African people.

• 3. Cafraria on Early Maps

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  Leo Africanus, writing in the 16th century, described the Cafri as non-Islamic peoples and named them as one of five principal population groups across the continent. He described them as "as blacke as pitch, and of a mightie stature, and (as some thinke) descended of the Jews; but now they are idolators." He located their heartland in remote southern Africa, in a region he called Cafraria. Richard Hakluyt's works followed that lead, referring to the same population as "Cafars and Gawars, that is, infidels or misbeleeuers". On early European maps of the 16th and 17th centuries, Southern Africa northwest of the Khoikhoi was labelled Cafreria by cartographers. During the Dutch and British colonial periods, through to the early 20th century, the word carried no derogatory connotation in formal use. It appeared in anthropological accounts, missionary writings, and academic texts. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford originally labelled many African artifacts as "Kaffir" in origin. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica used the term frequently enough to publish a dedicated article under that title.

• 4. Apartheid and the Slur

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  During the South African general election of 1948, campaigners who supported the establishment of apartheid ran under the openly racist slogan "Die kaffer op sy plek", meaning "The kaffir in his place". By the mid-20th century the word had completed its transformation from a descriptive term into a pejorative instrument of racial domination. The Afrikaans form kaffer was applied pejoratively to any black person, and the variant Kaffir-boetie, meaning "Kaffir brother", was used as a label for white people who fraternised with or sympathised with the black community. The slur penetrated violent contexts as well. During the early 1980s, Butana Almond Nofomela, an assassin working for the Security Branch, stabbed a white farmer named Johannes Lourens to death in Brits, North West Province. Nofomela stated that he had intended to rob Lourens, but that when Lourens called him kaffir while confronting him with a gun, the enraged Nofomela killed him with a knife. In Namibia, a 2003 report by the Namibian Labour Resource and Research Institute documented that the term had served there to mark black workers as people who "do not have any rights and who should also not expect any benefits except favours which bosses could show at their own discretion".

• 5. Law, Conviction, and the K-Word

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  In 2000, the Parliament of South Africa enacted the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act. A press statement from the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, published on the 27th of November 2004, listed the prevention of hate speech as one of the act's primary objectives and named kaffir explicitly alongside koelies and hotnot as examples of prohibited language. In 2012, a woman was jailed overnight and fined after pleading guilty to crimen injuria for using the word at a gym. In July 2014, the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld a 2012 conviction for crimen injuria and assault arising from an argument about parking, with the judgement declaring that the word "was used to hurt, humiliate, denigrate and dehumanise Africans" and that "its use is not only prohibited but is actionable as well". In March 2018, Vicki Momberg was convicted of racist language for using the term over 40 times in reference to two South African police officers. A statement from the sitting of the South African Parliament on the 5th of March 2008 framed the stakes plainly: these words "were used to degrade, undermine and strip South Africans of their humanity and dignity".

• 6. Cultural Uses and Reclamation

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  In 1995, the black Johannesburg Kwaito artist Arthur Mafokate released a hit song simply titled "Kaffir". Its lyrics carried the direct message: "don't call me a kaffir". The song is considered one of the first major hits of the Kwaito genre and is credited with setting a precedent for post-apartheid artistic expression, combining dance music with what observers described as the new phenomenon of freedom of expression in South Africa. Mark Mathabane, who grew up in the township of Alexandra and later travelled to the United States on a tennis scholarship, titled his autobiography Kaffir Boy. Irvin Khoza, then chairperson of the 2010 FIFA World Cup organising committee, caused controversy in February 2008 when he used the term during a press briefing in reference to a journalist. During a December 2005 Test match between South Africa and Australia held in Perth, the black South African player Makhaya Ntini was taunted with the word from the stands, while white South African players including Shaun Pollock, Justin Kemp, and Garnett Kruger were subjected to shouts of kaffirboetie. In June 2009, Australian tennis player Brydan Klein was fined $16,000 for unsportsmanlike conduct at the Eastbourne International, after allegedly directing the slur at his South African opponent, Raven Klaasen.

• 7. The Kaffir Lime and Botanical Naming

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  Not every use of the word traces back to Southern African history. The kaffir lime is a citrus fruit native to tropical countries in South and Southeast Asia. Its name most likely derives from Muslim usage referring to the regions populated by non-Muslims, such as Hindus and Buddhists, where the plant grew. Under that interpretation, the fruit name and the South African slur share the same ultimate Arabic root, though the plant name never carried offensive connotations in the contexts where it was applied. In July 2024, the International Botanical Congress voted to change more than 300 scientific names of plants, algae, and fungi that contained kaffir-related terms such as caffer, caffra, and caffrum, replacing them with afer, afra, and afrum respectively. Erythrina caffra, for instance, became Erythrina afra. The Oxford Companion to Food had already recommended favouring the alternative name "makrut lime", derived from the Thai name of the plant, มะกรูด, to sidestep the word's present associations.