Tag: kaffir

This is a very amusing story that was published recently in South Africa. A local black comedian who calls himself  TolA$$Mo (Mongezi Ngcobondwane) claimed that an Afro-American called him a “kaffir” and there is a court case on which you could read about here.

The usually anti-white columunist on the Daily Maverick, Sisonke Msimang, writes:

The wrinkle in the story is that the man Ngcobondwane allegedly shot his weapon at, and whom he claims called him kaffir – is black. And while it is theoretically plausible in an abstract sense, that a black person (even one from America where the South African term kaffir is not in use) might call another black person by a racial epithet, the reality is that the particular person in question seems unlikely to have done that. I happen to know French (although he is a relatively new acquaintance) so I may be biased – but I would be surprised if someone who was raised by civil rights activists would use a word like kaffir against another Black person.”

Ngcobondwane then goes on to suggest, “If one more white man calls me a kaffir, I’m going to moer him.”

This is a sentiment with which many black people in South Africa can identify. There is nothing quite like being called a kaffir. It takes the air out of your lungs, hits you in the solar plexus; stings your eyes and dries your mouth. You are at once ashamed and enraged – understanding that the word should have no power and yet feeling its force and weight in your pelvis and your knees and in the soles of your feet. Kaffir has the density of centuries; it is the color of blood and tastes like metal.

The argument elsewhere in the same column seems to be that the “race card” should not be played among blacks or “brothers” in American parlance. The race card should be reserved for whites only, i.e. you should only call whites racist, not your fellow blacks or “people of colour”. Although somewhere in this story lurks the somewhat politically incorrect fact that the American, James Albert French, might have been light-skinned, a kind of inverse reaction to the normal one whereby South African blacks kill their darker skinned “brothers” from other African countries, also calling them makwerekwere or “Kiwi’s” after the shoe-polish brand.

The other problem for cultural-Marxist race theory in SA is that whites and especially Afrikaners, are politically powerless and may therefore by definition not be racist, even if they use the word “kaffir”. Race being a social construct, or so the theory goes, “racism” is but the expression of power relations between a majority with political power and a minority without it. As we do not even rule a single municipality in South Africa and are both culturally and politically dominated by Afro-Saxon blacks, we cannot be racist, unlike Mr. French here who hails from the American Empire.

“Kaffir” is also an Arab word, originally, so one should think that it should be acceptable, not being of European or “eurocentric” origin. It means “heathen” and given the many belief systems proliferating today, including anti-racism which has all the hallmarks of a religion, like blasphemy, excommunication, etc., we are perhaps all “kaffirs” to someone somewhere. Or as the Koos Kombuis song goes in Afrikaans: “Ons is almal kaffers in ons harte.” Or maybe Koos Kombuis should be banned? Placed on the index, censored? Read my latest essay, Raiders of the lost Empire, if only because I also quote Karl Marx in there somewhere: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”