Some years ago South Africa's police chief sent a frission of of anxiety through the country when he was accused of referring to a sergeant under his command as a "chimp". South Africa takes racial abuse extremely seriously and it is a criminal offence to refer to people as "baboons", a common form of racial abuse.

But fears of a racial incident in this case subsided and the incident was quickly forgotten after it emerged the two were of the same melanin collective and therefore presumably incapable of racially abusing one-another. As Rwanda reminds us - with the use of the term "cockroaches" to describe the Tutsi minority and encourage their extermination - the representation of a group of humans as non-humans, particularly vermin (which baboons are sometimes considered), can be said to be genocidal and as such worthy of criminalization.

But the greatest racial insult available to South Africa's racists is one with numerous variations of meaning: the "K" word. Like the "N" word, the "K" word is unspeakable in non-racist society and virtually unprintable - with the striking exception of the Oxford English dictionary which, in its two volumes on South African English, devotes five pages to the word "kaffir" and its variants.

While it records the unacceptability of the term in modern South Africa, the origins of the racial insult are not clear among such terms as "kaffir-sheeting" (a near-white material commomly used as a form of curtaining) and "kaffir-circus" (a group of mining magnates based in London).

The most familiar usage of the "K" word is in "Kaffir Wars" - a reference to the border conflicts of the 19th Century - usage of which is so shameful now that church authorities have taken to blocking it out on tombstones. Considering that the graves they ornament offer mute testimony to the capability of the Xhosa and Zulus as warriors - who were neither out-manned in terms of courage, nor out-mastered in terms of tactics, but simply out-gunned - one would have thought their descendents would have taken great pride in the original description of these conflicts.

With majority rule in South Africa it would perhaps be opportune to collectively rescue the word from the dustbin of more recent history by assertion - declare an official "K" day, perhaps, for all South Africans to celebrate the brotherhood of man by pronouncing themselves, regardless of race, or tribe, a... sshhh, you know what.

Considering the country's history it is hardly surprising that racial insults abound in South Africa. In the apartheid era the use of a word by the authorities to characterize a racial grouping could be enough to put it beyond the pale so far as the majority population was concerned. The words "Bantu" and "native" both of which seem to have lost their racial connotations since majority rule - come to mind.

Which brings to mind the case during the apartheid years, of the driver of a Pretoria "whites only" bus, who was fired by the municipality for failing to pick up a Japanese passenger. The Japanese were considered by the authorities to be whites by virtue of some lucrative steel contracts signed between the two countries at the time.

The driver appealed, on the grounds he could not distinguish between a "white" Japanese man and a "non-white" Chinese man. He was promptly reinstated. What does it say? Why, welcome to the monkey house.