As English kaffir and Afrikaans , the term became a pejorative slur for Bantus and other black groups, including Cape Coloureds during the Apartheid era of South African history to the point that it is regarded as hate speech under current South African law. Historical usage Early English The 16th century explorer Leo Africanus described the Cafri as non-Islamic "negroes", and one of five principal population groups in Africa. According to him, they were "as blacke as pitch, and of a mightie stature, and (as some thinke) descended of the Jews; but now they are idolators." Leo Africanus identified the Cafri's geographical heartland as being located in remote southern Africa, an area which he designated as Cafraria. Following Leo Africanus, the works of Richard Hakluyt designate this population as "Cafars and Gawars, which is, infidels or misbeleeuers". Hakluyt refers to slaves ("slaues called Cafari") and certain inhabitants of Ethiopia ("and they vse to goe in small shippes, and trade with the Cafars") by two different but similar names. The word is also used in allusion to a portion of the coast of Africa ("land of Cafraria"). On early European maps of the 16th and 17th centuries, Southern Africa northwest of the "Hottentots" (Khoikhoi) was likewise called by cartographers Cafreria. Colonial period The word was used to describe monotheistic peoples (Nguni ethnic groups in particular) of South Africa, who were not of a Christian or of an Islamic religious background, without derogatory connotations, during the Dutch and British colonial periods until the early twentieth century. It appears in many historical accounts by anthropologists, missionaries and other observers, as well as in academic writings. For example, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford originally labeled many African artifacts as "Kaffir" in origin. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica made frequent use of the term, to the extent of having an article of that title. The late nineteenth–early twentieth century novelist, H. Rider Haggard, frequently used the term "kaffir" in his novels of dark Africa, especially those of the great white hunter, Allan Quatermain, as a then inoffensive term for black people in the region. Similar non-derogatory usage can be found in the John Buchan novel Prester John from 1910. Apartheid-era South Africa During the South African general election in 1948, those who supported the establishment of an apartheid regime campaigned under the openly racist slogan "" ("The kaffir in his place"). In the case of