Post by Dirty Santa PaulsLaugh on Apr 4, 2020 14:41:20 GMT
He was using Kaffir in the ironic sense to make a point. You have to factor in culture and time period. Silly goose.
As for the Gandhi comments. The context of the quotes should be read before passing judgment on whether they are meant as derogatory comments or there’s a point behind speaking as such.
Just a quick look at wikipedia denotes “kaffir” (an Arab word meaning non-believer) was adopted when the Dutch and British colonialists moved into South Africa. They did not necessarily consider it a racial slur at the time. So Gandhi probably did not mean it the way the OP thinks.
From Wikipedia
The word was used to describe all black people in the region, excluding the San and Khoi Khoi, at the time of Europeans' first contact with them. This included many ethnic groups, such as the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana and others. The term was also used by early Boer trek farmers to describe a person not converted to Christianity, similar to the Arabic meaning.[citation needed]
The word was used officially in this way, without derogatory connotations, during the Dutch and British colonial periods until the early twentieth century. It appears in many historical accounts by anthropologists, missionaries and other observers, as well as in academic writings. For example, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford originally labeled many African artifacts as "Kaffir" in origin. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica made frequent use of the term, to the extent of having an article of that title.[13]
The late nineteenth–early twentieth century novelist, H. Rider Haggard, frequently used the term "kaffir" in his novels of dark Africa, especially those of the great white hunter, Allan Quatermain, as a then inoffensive term for black people in the region[citation needed].
Similar non-derogatory usage can be found in the John Buchan novel Prester John from 1910.
The word was used officially in this way, without derogatory connotations, during the Dutch and British colonial periods until the early twentieth century. It appears in many historical accounts by anthropologists, missionaries and other observers, as well as in academic writings. For example, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford originally labeled many African artifacts as "Kaffir" in origin. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica made frequent use of the term, to the extent of having an article of that title.[13]
The late nineteenth–early twentieth century novelist, H. Rider Haggard, frequently used the term "kaffir" in his novels of dark Africa, especially those of the great white hunter, Allan Quatermain, as a then inoffensive term for black people in the region[citation needed].
Similar non-derogatory usage can be found in the John Buchan novel Prester John from 1910.