A few days ago, after ET’s murder and Julius flew off the handle, at the height of South Africa’s recent racial tension, I arrived home from a long day and was looking forward to cooking a Thai green curry for supper. At my house, cooking usually involves emptying something ready-made into a saucepan and adding some veggies and meat.
This time it was the Woolies Thai green curry paste. I read the required ingredients on the back of the packet, which included something called kaffir lime, and in brackets, the packet reads (also known as makrut or Thai lime leaf).
My first instinct was to ask, why didn’t they use the other two names and leave the obviously offensive one out? My second was to tweet about it and I even took a picture as proof. The people (black and white) who responded to my tweet thought this was appalling and it somehow got on to the Woolworths Twitter page.
The response from Woolies was: “Click on this link, it’s in the food dictionary.” Fine, but would Woolworths be able to read that list of ingredients out loud? I was not deeply offended by the use of the word on the packaging, but it wasn’t meaningless to me. It’s like having a fruit called a Nazi and having an advert that says: “Get three Nazis for the price of one at your nearest greengrocer.”
This reminded me of when I was young, growing up in the Transkei, when we used to have to relax our hair. After a few weeks, and exposure to water, the sleek, run-your-fingers-through-it hair would turn into the kinky mound it was born to be. At that point my mother would grab the dry mop of hair and say: “You need to comb your hair, you can’t have kaffir hare”, the operative word said in a very Afrikaans accent, with seemingly no offence meant.
By 1994 my parents enrolled my siblings and me at a former model-C school where we could run wild and be the peppers among the salt at an illustrious girls’ school. We used to eat little black sweets we referred to as amagunqu back in the Transkei, but at this new school they were called niggerballs. “Can I have two niggerballs, please?” we’d say to the indifferent tuck-shop mom, never considering that this was akin to shooting black consciousness in the face.
It wasn’t until we got older and somebody stopped another girl from singing “Eeny meeny miney mo, catch a nigger by his toe” that the penny dropped.
Today the song has changed, those sweets are called black balls and I only hope no black parent refers to his or her child’s natural hair as kaffir hare. There was a time when this word’s linguistic context was not questioned, but if a popular kwaito song can be banned because black people used the word to empower themselves, then why is it printed on the back of my dinner?
It’s a murky subject, because in another context, the ancient meaning of the word is non-believer of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but it’s got a very specific and one-dimensional meaning in South Africa — with good reason. We don’t yet live in a society where it has no slurrish connotations and I think it is careless and insensitive of Woolworths to use the word when our culture has not evolved beyond its derogatory meaning.