What’s in a Word? Historicising the Term ‘Caffre’ in European Discourses about Southern Africa between 1500 and 1800

In the 19th and 20th centuries, southern Africa’s white colonists used the word ‘Caffre’ to characterise the region’s black majority as an inferior race of African origins. While this historical context explains why the term ‘Caffre’ is considered hate speech in post-apartheid South Africa, the word’s history dates back to the beginning of Europe’s engagement with the region in c. 1500. Based on primary sources in multiple languages, this article explores this deeper history and shows that Europeans imbued the word ‘Caffre’ with racialising ideas from the start. The Portuguese first racialised the term by linking it explicitly to black skin colour in the 16th century. In the 17th century, Cape Colony officials reinforced its racialisation by creating a ‘Hottentot–Caffre’ race dichotomy, a racial divide of long-term significance in southern African history. By the end of the 18th century, most European naturalists argued that ‘Caffre’ identified a people racially distinct from ‘Hottentots’ and ‘true Negroes’, an idea that shaped missionary approaches to Bible translation in the region until the mid 19th century. Moreover, naturalists rationalised these alleged racial differences by placing the origins of the ‘Caffres’ outside the African continent, thereby effectively defining them as a superior race of non-African provenance. The word’s deeper history, therefore, exposes a major transformation in meaning over the course of the 19th century: whereas the word ‘Caffre’ represented a superior race of non-African origin in 1800, it described an inferior race of African origin in 1900. Because the radical change in meaning parallels the process of black political and economic disempowerment in southern Africa, the article suggests that the term became directly implicated in and transformed by this process and, for this reason, should be viewed as a valuable historical record of the establishment of white supremacist rule in the region.