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Kaffir   Listen
Kaffir

noun
1.
Important for human and animal food; growth habit and stem form similar to Indian corn but having sawtooth-edged leaves.  Synonyms: great millet, kaffir corn, kafir corn, Sorghum bicolor.
2.
An offensive and insulting term for any Black African.  Synonyms: caffer, caffre, kafir.



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"Kaffir" Quotes from Famous Books



... to be in a tree and out of reach—for the ratel is not a climber—the animal vents his chagrin by tearing at the trunk with his teeth, as if he had hopes of felling the tree. The scratches thus made on the bark serve as a guide to certain other creatures, who are also fond of honey, viz., the Kaffir ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid

... further south it became rough and stony, affording very good cover. In our present situation we were thus almost completely exposed to the enemy's fire. The English, on the other hand, had excellent positions. There were a number of ruined Kaffir kraals scattered about from the middle of the mountain to its southern end, and these the enemy had occupied, thus ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet

... hand, anticipated that the movement could only end in disaster, the people being too few to make a successful stand against the numerous hostile Kaffir tribes. The Government, therefore, refrained from preventive measures, and confined its efforts to discouraging the emigration and to reconcile the malcontents. Those efforts, however, proved fruitless; the people held ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... the affairs of South Africa, and the history of Christian missions there, will not need to be told what an interesting people the Basutos are. But for others, it may be as well to say that this branch of the Kaffir race are not only among the most civilised of all the African races, but a large proportion of them are Christian in something more than name. The old chieftain Moshesh, who reigned some fifty years ago, was a man of marked ability, and, though a great soldier, he hated war. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... bardos]] and the Seers [[Greek: manteis]]. The former present the familiar features of the cosmopolitan minstrel. They sing to harps [[Greek: organon tais lurais homoion]], both fame and disfame. The latter seem to have corresponded with the witch-doctors of the Kaffir tribes, deriving auguries from the dying struggles of their victims (frequently human), just as the Basuto medicine-men tortured oxen to death to prognosticate the issue of the war between Great Britain and the Boers in South Africa. Strabo, in the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... and accomplishing an expedition into the Bush, the result being a book of some 320 pages, in which not one is dull or unreadable. Of her lightness and firmness of touch we can give but one specimen, a sketch of a Kaffir bride:— ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... listening the better to the womankind, because they had paid due honour to the amiable ancestral Tigearnach and all his guttural posterity, whose savage exploits and bloody catastrophes acted as such a sedative, that by the time he had come down to Uncle Bryan of the Kaffir war, he actually owned that as to the mighty 'O,' Mr. Goldsmith might have erred ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... would have been put to death. A hut was assigned to him, a sort of beehive of grass and mud, with a hole to enter by. His own lines, strung together in his many unoccupied moments for his children's benefit, are so good a description of the Kaffir huts that form a kraal or village, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... has come! On her wings and on her feet, Signs of her wanderings are shown, Dust gold-loaded and distant; And she brings aloes blossoming, first-seen, From the land that feeds the Kaffir's flocks. ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas

... is the winner of over fifty prizes and many specials. To enumerate all the first-class blacks during the last thirty years would be impossible, but those which stand out first and foremost have been Black Boy, King Pippin, Kaffir Boy, Bayswater Swell, Kensington King, Marland King, Black Prince, Hatcham Nip, Walkley Queenie, Viva, Gateacre Zulu, Glympton King Edward, and ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... there one can see as far as Ingagane Nek, four miles this side of Newcastle, the place I sketched. Just as I looked over the top of the hill I saw two men on ponies with guns. They were talking to a Kaffir. I at once put them down as Boers, and thought of firing at them, but decided not to disclose my position and watch them. This was lucky for them, as I caught them later, and found them to be refugees flying from the Boers, who I discovered were in occupation of Ingagane and Newcastle, and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... detailed, but apparently the most serious of them was the removal of a portion of the black mud which masked the German's face, so as to leave a diamond-shaped patch, of staring cleanness over one eye, after the style of a music-hall star known to fame as the White-eyed Kaffir; the ripping of a small portion of that garment which permitted of the extraction of a dangling shirt into a ridiculous wagging tail about a foot and a half long, and a pressing invitation, accompanied by a hint from the bayonet point, ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... him to the station, where, unobserved, he listens at the ticket office to the voice of That-which-was-James. "One first London," it says and Gerald, waiting till That and the Ugly-Wugly have strolled on to the platform, politely conversing of politics and the Kaffir market, takes a third return to London. The train strides in, squeaking and puffing. The watched take their seats in a carriage blue-lined. The watcher springs into a yellow wooden compartment. A whistle sounds, ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit

... night in the cool of the year, three men sat out in the Veldt in South Africa, talking and laughing over their camp fire. A few Kaffir drivers and huntsmen were similarly engaged at a second fire at some little distance. The light of the burning wood revealed fitfully the shape of the great waggon in the background, and the sound of munching ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... Human Analysis reads the disposition and nature of every individual with ease regardless of whether that individual be an American, a Frenchman, a Kaffir or a Chinaman, because Human Analysis explains those fundamental traits which run through every race, color and nationality, according to the externals which ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict

... unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which they were buying for six million pounds? The inventory would have been a mixed one of good and of evil: nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we fought with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace and prosperity, with equal ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Sanoghar, I think. Borradaile looks very like Diogenes in his tub. I also took some Kafirs who strolled into camp. We used to buy their daggers, but they got to asking as much as twenty rupees for a good one after a time. Every Kaffir has a dagger, some of them very ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon

... miles of a South African wilderness, through an utterly unfamiliar, unfriendly, and sparsely settled country into Portuguese territory and the coast, they left to chance. But with luck they hoped to cover the distance in a fortnight, begging corn at the Kaffir kraals, sleeping by day, and marching under ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... even every culvert, is watched by a Kaffir with a flag, so that the train runs no risk of coming on unexpected demolitions. On the road to De Aar we passed the second half of the Brigade Division of Artillery, which sailed so long ago from the Mersey in the notorious transports 'Zibengla' ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... and the country remained for three or four years under British rule. Afterwards it was resolved to abandon it, during the administration of the Duke of Newcastle, as a result of the general revision of our affairs which took place at the conclusion of the Kaffir War. The Orange River Territory was recognised as a separate Republic ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... under a peculiar tree, so that he might find it when business was done; then he went to work with his revolver. As he rode forward he came upon an open stretch of ground, and the first object that struck his attention was a well-knit Kaffir on one knee covering his body with a Martini-Henry. The distance was about eighty yards, and Baden-Powell, telling the story, says that he felt so indignant at the fellow's rudeness that he rode at him as hard as he could gallop, calling ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie



Words linked to "Kaffir" :   derogation, sorghum, disparagement, depreciation, kaffir boom, caffer, South Africa, Republic of South Africa, Black African



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