Different uses of 'kaffir' by white South Africans and Muslims

Question

Back in apartheid-era South Africa and, in camera, probably even today, the word 'kaffir' is used in much the same way 'nigger' is used in the western world, ie. as a racist epithet directed at black people.

Recently I realised that Muslims use the word to indicate non-muslims or non-believers. Is there any connection between these two usages?

Answer 1

It (the pejorative usage from South Africa) comes from the Arabic word, see http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=kaffir

Answer 2

In Kipling's story 'A Sahib's War', a Sikh is caught up in the Boer War, and says

Kurban Sahib appointed me to the command (what a command for me!) of certain woolly ones--Hubshis--whose touch and shadow are pollution. They were enormous eaters; sleeping on their bellies; laughing without cause; wholly like animals. Some were called Fingoes, and some, I think, Red Kaffirs, but they were all Kaffirs --filth unspeakable.

(Elsewhere he says "Do not let him herd me with these black Kaffirs"; Hubshis are a tribe of Black Indians, presumably used here where a European would say Black.)

So evidently by the turn of the century Kaffir was used in South Africa as a term for non-believers, as a specific term ('Red Kaffirs') for tribes who were non-Muslim among Muslim neighbours (compare Kafiristan, the only Afghan province which was non-Muslim), and as a term of abuse; the descending slope is obvious.

PS Yes, he is fictional, but I have considerably more faith in Kipling's research into Indian use of language than in most historians'.

Answer 3

The Arabic/Islamic kafir has more pejorative overtones than merely "non-believer". It's not just "someone who doesn't share our religious belief"; at least some of the time it's "someone with a different and inferior racial and cultural background to us".

Hence it's not difficult to imagine how white South Africans might have picked up the word and adopted it for their own purpose.

Note that there has been a sizeable Muslim presence in South Africa for as long as there has been a European presence. People of Indian and Middle Eastern origin were less segregated than blacks in Apartheid-era South Africa. Particularly in Cape Town, whites and Arab Muslims lived side by side.