How Arabic Words for 'Unbeliever' and 'Slave' Became Racial Slurs

Two Arabic words with entirely religious origins ended up, over the course of many centuries and several continents, as two of the most loaded racial epithets applied to Black Africans. Neither word started out that way. “Kafir” derives from the Arabic root for “to cover” or “to conceal,” and in Islamic religious usage means simply “unbeliever,” a term applicable in principle to anyone outside the faith regardless of ethnicity. “Abeed” is the Arabic plural for “slaves,” a literal description of legal status rather than an ethnic label at the point the word entered common usage.

Both words acquired a racialized meaning through the same long historical channel: centuries of Arab and Swahili trading contact along East Africa’s coast, contact that included a substantial and sustained slave trade moving enslaved East and Central Africans northward into the Arab world. As that trade continued across generations, “kafir,” originally a religious category with no ethnic content, increasingly attached itself in everyday usage to the specific pagan Bantu-speaking peoples (“zanj” in Arabic sources) that Arab traders encountered and enslaved along that coast, since those populations were disproportionately non-Muslim at the time of contact. “Abeed” followed a more direct path: because so many of the enslaved people Arab society encountered over centuries were Black Africans, the word for “slaves” itself gradually came to function, in parts of the Arabic-speaking world, as a de facto ethnic label for Black people regardless of whether the specific person addressed had ever been enslaved.

European colonizers picked up “kafir” from Arab and Swahili usage during the Age of Exploration, when Portuguese sailors reaching the East African coast in 1498 found the term already in wide circulation among coastal Arab traders. Dutch, and later Afrikaans-speaking, settlers in southern Africa adopted a version of the word, “kaffer,” applying it as a general-purpose racial label for Black South Africans from the 17th century onward, according to research into the term’s South African provenance conducted at the University of Cape Town. What had begun as an Islamic religious classification, imported through centuries of Indian Ocean trade contact, ended up as the primary racial slur of a settler-colonial and later apartheid state thousands of miles from and centuries removed from its original context.

The word’s trajectory in South Africa specifically hardened during the apartheid era, when “kaffer” and its English rendering “kaffir” became so closely and specifically associated with racist abuse that the term is now widely regarded as the single most offensive word in South African English, its public use criminalized as hate speech under post-apartheid law. “Abeed” has followed a somewhat different but related path, remaining in active, largely unregulated use as a slur for Black people, including Black citizens of Arab countries and Black migrant laborers across parts of North Africa and the Middle East, a linguistic afterlife of the historical slave trade that both words trace back to, still audible in everyday speech in places where formal legal reckoning with that history hasn’t caught up to the language it left behind.