Portrait of two Xhosa youths ('Kaffers'), 1820

Samuel Daniell (1775 - 1811)

RA Collection: Art

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This image depicts two young men from the Xhosa nation, a sub-group of the Bantu cultural and language group in South Africa. This etching is an illustration for a book titled Sketches representing the Native Tribes, Animals and Scenery of Southern Africa (1820), originally drawn by Samuel Daniell and published by his brother William Daniell RA. The book was part of a British colonial tradition of ethnographic research. It demonstrates deep inherent racial prejudices and seeks to categorise indigenous groups into a Western-imposed knowledge structure. Samuel Daniell based this drawing on his encounters with indigenous people when he travelled to what is now South Africa between 1799 and 1802. This expedition was only possible due to colonisation of the land and peoples by Dutch and British forces.

The illustration has the caption ‘Caffres’ which is a version of ‘Kaffers’, an offensive term in English today. When this image was published in the early 19th century, the word was a colonial term used to describe Black people of southern Africa, who had their own distinct religious customs, specifically from the Xhosa nation. The term became increasingly pejorative from the mid-20th century, used as an offensive racial slur against Black Africans living in South Africa.