Kaffir lily. A beautiful plant with a derogatory name.

[Baitball Blogger]

Had no idea that Kaffir was derogatory.

"The quest for a name other than "Kaffir" is strongest in South Africa itself, where the word has been used in a derogatory manner by white Afrikaaners against aboriginal peoples, but in Great Britain & North America the word has no such meaning."

http://www.paghat.com/kaffir3.html

[intaglio]

1. It is (originally) the Islamic term for unbeliever

It implied people who could be taken as slaves. It was taken up by the European invaders of South and Eastern Africa. In the UK and Canada it was equally nasty, an shown by John Buchan's use of the word in "Prester John" and other works.

How do I know? Because my Grandmother had nothing but contempt for the way the Boers treated their Kaffirs and did not disguise it to her family. It took me many years to realise but she was an extraordinary woman and bothered to find out origins.

BTW it was also the name of a lingua franca used in Southern Africa, "Kitchen Kaffir"

[Baitball Blogger]

3. I'm confused.

Why would your grandmother refer to them as "their Kaffirs" if Kaffir was derogatory?

[intaglio]

5. She was quoting a Boer family she was with at the time

Until she found the kitchen "boy" on the concrete base of his hovel shivering with a high fever and what looked like smallpox. She asked the family to use their pony and cart to take him to a Jo'berg hospital. They refused, she said because they said he was lazy and faking illness. She eventually managed to get him to the (second) hospital - the one that would take "house boys". I gathered she left the house that night and did not return. Date was early 1930's.

Sorry, I should have used quotes.

[Baitball Blogger]

6. And I feel like I'm living ahead of my times.

I would have liked to have met your grandmother.

[geardaddy]

2. There's also a Kaffir lime.

[marzipanni]

4. Kaffir lilies are pretty. There's a small flower

of that shape that I noticed last month in an empty lot down the street, growing with white johnny jump up violets in a patch of lawn of an old house that was torn down. I wanted to dig up a few before the lot owner bulldozes the area to build a house, but now the flowers have faded and the plants' leaves look so much like grass I'm not sure I could find them.

[Baitball Blogger]

7. Shame you couldn't cultivate it.

It couldn't be a Kaffir, however. The leaves are very solid.