On 29 February 1908, Gandhi wrote: "The British rulers take us to be so lowly and ignorant that they assume that, like the
Kaffirs who can be pleased with toys and pins, we can also be fobbed off with trinkets." (Vol.
And that whites can not get it in to there heads that it is illegal to call a black individual "
Kaffir".
"Is it permissible to drop bombs on a
kaffir nation, even if Muslims live there?
He screams: "By fighting in the cause of Allah, we are trying to reduce all these
kaffirs from the whole world."
The success translated to a practice popularly known as "
Kaffir farming", in which a resident or absentee white landlord skimmed off a healthy portion of what the African peasant produced in either cash or kind.
At the centre of Atkins' analysis lies the "
kaffir labour question" about which white settlers crowed incessantly in the nineteenth century.
The area was as complex and volatile as it was violent, chock full of imagined and invented categories: "Hottentots" or, for that matter, "the Khoikhoi"; "
Kaffirs" or, for that matter, "the Xhosa"; "the Boers," or, for that matter, "Afrikaners"; "blacks" (who range from yellowish to dark brown) and "whites" (who are really swine-pink).
