Kaffer

The word kaffir (or alternatively kaffer) is a term used in Southern Africa to refer to a black person. Now considered an offensive ethnic slur, it was formerly considered by whites to be a neutral term for black South Africans.

The term is also used to refer to an ethnic group in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lanka Kaffirs, who are partially descended from 16th century Portuguese traders and the African slaves who were brought by them to work as labourers and soldiers. Unlike in South Africa, the Sri Lankan Kaffirs do not consider the term offensive.

There is a Non-Islamic ethnic group in the Hindu Kush mountains of Northern Pakistan who are called the Kalash Kafir by their neighbors. Their land was known as Kafiristan in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The word kāfir is the active participle of the Semitic root K-F-R "to cover". As a pre-Islamic term, it described farmers burying seeds in the ground, covering them with soil while planting. Thus, the word kāfir implies the meaning "a person who hides or covers". In Islamic parlance, a kāfir is a person who rejects Islamic faith, i.e. "hides or covers [viz., the truth]".

"Kaffir" is derived from the Arabic word (Arabic: كافر kāfir) that is usually translated into English as "non-believer", i.e. a non-Muslim. The word was originally applied to non-Muslims in general, and therefore to non Muslim black peoples encountered along the Swahili coast by Arab traders. The Portuguese nation who arrived on the East African coast in 1498, encountered the usage of the term by the coastal Arabs (but not the Swahili who used the term Washenzi (meaning "uncivilized") to the describe the non-Islamic people of the African interior. The poet Camões used the plural form of the term (cafres) in the fifth canto of his 1572 poem Os Lusíadas. This interpretation was probably passed on to other Europeans in succession, the Spanish, English, Dutch and French. From the Portuguese the termed was passed onto their Asian possessions and exists in several Asian languages including Konkani in India as "Khapri" and in Sinhalese as "Kaffir". The terms are descriptive of people of African descent, but are not considered offensive in either Western India or in Sri Lanka.

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