British Kaffraria

British Kaffraria
Colony of the British Empire
1835–1866
Capital	King William's Town[1]
Population
• 1858[2]	52,535
History
• Established	1835
• Disestablished	1866

British Kaffraria was a British colony/subordinate administrative entity in present-day South Africa, consisting of the districts now known as Qonce (King William's Town) and East London. It was also called Queen Adelaide's Province and, unofficially, British Kaffiria and Kaffirland.

The British Kaffraria was established in 1847 when the British colonial government in the Cape Colony annexed the Ciskei region between the Keiskamma and Great Kei rivers and declared it a Crown Colony. Just 17 years later, it was incorporated into the Cape Colony after the Xhosa people suffered from a great famine following the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of 1856–57 and required relief from the British colonial government in the Cape Colony.^[3]

The term Kaffraria stems from the derogative word "Kaffir" which was used as a term for the Black African inhabitants of southern Africa. The word is derived from the Arabic kafir that is usually translated into English as "disbeliever" or "non-believer", i.e. a non-Muslim or "one without religion".^[4] The word was originally applied to non Muslims in general, and therefore to non-Muslim black peoples encountered along the Swahili coast by Arab traders. The word "Kaffraria" came to refer specifically to the Xhosa lands in what is now the Eastern Cape. Later, the western Xhosa lands which fell under British rule came to be known as British Kaffraria, while the still independent Xhosa territory to the east in the Transkei region was known simply as Kaffraria proper and would be incorporated into the Cape Colony later.

A subsection of British Kaffraria was later reconstituted by the apartheid regime as the semi-independent homeland of Ciskei.