Kaffir (racial Term) - Examples of Use

Examples of Use

Some indicative examples:

• At the start of the 1946 Sherlock Holmes film Terror by Night, the narrator speaks of a famous diamond "First touched by the fingers of the humble kaffir..." while a black man is shown picking up a stone from the ground.
• Kaffir is the title of a 1995 hit song by the black Johannesburg Kwaito artist Arthur Mafokate. The lyrics say, "I don't come from the devil, don't call me a kaffir, you won't like it if I call you baboon". This song is considered one of the very first hits of the Kwaito genre, and is said to have set precedent for the post-apartheid generation struggle of combining dance music with the new phenomenon of freedom of expression in South Africa.
• Kaffir Boy is the title of Mark Mathabane's autobiography, who grew up in the township of Alexandra, travelled to the United States on a tennis scholarship, and became a successful author in his adoptive homeland.
• In the film Lethal Weapon 2, South African criminal Arjen Rudd (played by Joss Ackland), his colleague Pieter Vorstedt (played by Derrick O'Connor) and their followers frequently refer to Danny Glover's character Roger Murtaugh, who is African American, as a "kaffir". His partner Detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is referred to as a "kaffir-lover". At the end of the movie when Riggs and Murtaugh kill off the bad guys, Murtaugh says they were "de-kaffirnated."
• South African cricket players complained that they were racially abused by some spectators during a December 2005 Test match against host country Australia held in Perth. Makhaya Ntini, a black player in the team, was taunted with the word "kaffir". Other white and coloured players were subjected to shouts of kaffirboetie, an Afrikaans term which means "brother of a kaffir". Ntini said he could not tell whether the abuse was coming from Australians or South African emigres living in Perth.
• Australian tennis player Brydan Klein was fined $16,000 following a qualifying match at the Eastbourne International, June 2009, for unsportsmanlike conduct after allegedly calling his South African opponent, Raven Klaasen, a "kaffir."
• In the film The Wild Geese (1978), Peter Kotzee (played by Hardy Kruger) explains to his fellow officers, "We have blacks in South Africa. We call them Kaffirs which is just like you calling them niggers. I don't particularly like them but I don't like killing them."
• In the film Blood Diamond (2006), Leonardo DiCaprio's character Danny Archer refers to Djimon Hounsou's character Solomon Vandy as a Kaffir, which triggers the start of a vicious fistfight.