Are you a k-word? iLIVE

My 13 year old daughter asked me what is a k-word? As a responsible parent I did not want to give her my personal opinion and impression with regards to the word, and suggested we look it up on Wikipedia as I might be biased politically or otherwise.

We also read a book on New South African History to get a simplified and current version of the word. This set of a chain reaction in my mind regarding words and terms we as South Africans have racialised and claimed to be our own.

I sat up looking at these terms and found that many are words which were bastardised by the various people who came across it in the 17th Century.

These words are Boer, K-word, Boesman and Coolie, which are now classified as racist or derogatory only in South Africa! We deny ourselves the right to use them in our daily conversations.

I won’t go into explaining what these terms meant but they were like fanakalo to the people who adopted them at the time, do we really have to constantly seek out a scapegoat for our own racist nature and deny ourselves the freedom to be creative with words.

We are heading to a situation where we will not be allowed by ourselves of course to identify ourselves as Africans because it would be racist as we are South Africans.

“Are you a k-word dad?” my answer was no! I asked her if she thought she  was a K-word, she laughed, and asked how does a K-word look like? I had my answer, as South Africans we don’t know how a K-word looks like, why identify with something we don’t even know how it looks like? 

why allow anyone to make us doubt our identity and being black and African as well, why get emotionally affected by a term that the person who is using against us has no clue what it really means or why it was created.

“Why did the white people call the black people by that term ?” initially it was an honest term used for any native the then European settlers came across. “So it means we should just ignore it?” honestly yes!! We are confusing our children with something we have ourselves don’t really understand.

Arthur Mafokate used it in a song we ignored it, in the movie White wedding it is used and we ignored it why make an issue when used in print or public platform?