Kaffir (racial term)

Kaffir ('kæfər) is an exonym and an ethnic slur the use of it in reference to black people being particularly common in South Africa. In Arabic, the word kāfir ("unbeliever") was originally applied to non Muslims before becoming predominantly focused on pagan zanj (black African) who were increasingly used as slaves. During the Age of Exploration in early modern Europe, variants of the Latin term cafer (pl. cafri) were adopted in reference to non-Muslim Bantu peoples even when they were monotheistic. It was eventually used, particularly in Afrikaans (kaffer), for any black person during the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid eras, closely associated with South African racism, it became a pejorative by the mid-20th century and is now considered extremely offensive hate speech. Punishing continuing use of the term was one of the concerns of the Promotion of Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act enacted by the South African parliament in the year 2000 and it is now euphemistically addressed as the K-word in South African English. Kafir The term has its etymological roots in the Arabic word kāfir (كافر), usually translated as "disbeliever" or "non-believer". The word is primarily used without racial connection, although in some contexts it was particularly used for the pagan zanj along the Swahili coast who were an early focus of the Arab slave trade. Portuguese explorers who arrived on the East African coast in 1498 en route to India found it in common use by coastal Arabs, although the Muslim Swahili locals preferred to use washenzi ("uncivilized") for the pagan people of the interior. The poet Camões used the lusitanized plural form cafres in the fifth canto of his famous 1572 epic The Lusiads. Portuguese use passed the term to several non-Muslim areas including khapri in Sinhalese and kaapiri in Malayalam, which are used without offense in Western India and Sri Lanka to describe polytheists. Variations of the word were used in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and later Afrikaans as a general term for several different ethnic groups in Southern Africa from the 17th century to the early 20th century.