A different kind of police force

A force of slaves called ‘Caffers’ acted as the executive arm of the Fiscal, or state prosecutor. In his work on Cape slavery, Children of Bondage, Robert Shell explains the word’s curious etymology. Originally it was an Arabic noun meaning ‘ungrateful’; by association, those who did not believe in Allah were ungrateful. All non-Jews, non-Christians, and non-Muslims – people ‘not of the book’ – were thus considered ‘Caffers’.
 

It was from the Dutch possessions in the Indonesian Archipelago that the word was re-exported to Cape Town. In most documents of 1682 through 1786, ‘Caffers of the Justice Department’, as they were actually called, were Asian full-breed men. In the nineteenth century, the British – probably picking up the word (and the original derivation) from the Arabs on the east coast of Africa – reintroduced the term, this time applying it to all Africans on the Eastern frontier.

A "Caffer" hangman

Although the Caffers occupied a despised echelon of the slave hierarchy, the Company issued them superior clothing – special police uniforms with waist coats. They were the only slaves allowed to bear arms. According to an account, they ‘are armed with a sword with iron hilt, carry . . . a palang or heavy club, wear a grey uniform consisting of a short coat with blue lapels, a waistcoat and trousers, and receive some petty perquisites as well’.

Unlike other slaves, Company and privately owned, who were subject to various curfews, the Caffers were permitted – actually required – to roam around the Cape day and night, enforcing the curfews. This they did, executing rough justice on all – also Europeans who were guilty of the smallest infringement of Cape law.

It fell to the Caffers to carry out the ghoulish sentences the Court of Justice concocted. In February 1724, the court sentenced a slave for murder and arson, and ordered the Caffers to ‘cut off his right hand’ (the murder weapon), after which he was to be ‘half-strangled and killed on a slow fire’ (the punishment for starting a fire). For even minor crimes – such as smoking a pipe in the street – the Caffers were instructed to inflict severe floggings. Because of the fire hazard in Cape Town, any person, ‘without distinction’, found smoking a pipe in the street was to be ‘soundly’ beaten by the Caffers.

A high proportion of the sentences handed down by the Court of Justice ended with the words ‘to be handed over to the executioner and be beaten by the Caffers’. When the British took over from the Dutch they entrenched the use of the term and extended it to apply to all Africans (and not just to those of the Eastern frontier). In the minds of its users, it took on new connotations of all kinds of inferiority, primitiveness and backwardness.

Thus what had started as a descriptive and ‘innocent’ term gradually became a derogatory and insulting one in the minds of both Europeans and Africans. It is this latter meaning of the term ‘Kaffir’ that has stuck in the minds of all, black and white, to this day. In present-day South Africa the word remains the gravest slur. (In this book ‘Caffer’ is used only to refer to slaves from Indonesia who served as a police force in the Company period.)

From: New history of South Africa, compiled by Hermann Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga. Published in 2007 by Tafelberg Publishers, Cape Town.