Sri Lanka Kaffirs
The Sri Lankan Kaffirs are an ethnic group in Sri Lanka who are partially descended from 16th-century Portuguese traders and Bantu slaves who were brought by them to work as labourers and soldiers to fight against the Sinhala kings. They are very similar to the Zanj-descended populations in Iraq and Kuwait, and are known in Pakistan as Sheedis and in India as Siddis. The Kaffirs spoke a distinctive creole based on Portuguese, and the "Sri Lankan Kaffir language". Their cultural heritage includes the dance styles Kaffringna and Manja and their popular form of dance music Baila.
Etymology
The word Kaffir is an obsolete English term once used to designate natives from the African Great Lakes and Southern Africa coasts. In South Africa, it became a slur. "Kaffir" derives in turn from the Arabic kafir, "unbeliever".History
Kaffirs have an oral history maintained by families that are descended from slaves from Africa. While Arabs were the original slave traders in the African Great Lakes slave trade via the Indian Ocean slave trade, Portuguese colonialists later brought Bantu slaves to the Indian subcontinent. However fragmented official documentation may be, the recent public promotion of their music and dance forms allows the broader Sri Lankan society to acknowledge and better understand Kaffir history.Historical records indicate that Portuguese traders brought Siddis to the Indian subcontinent between 300 and 500 years ago. The Kaffirs were brought to Sri Lanka as a source of labour between the ninth and nineteenth centuries by Arab merchants.
The Portuguese, Dutch, and the British used the Kaffirs as a part of their naval forces and for domestic labor. When Dutch colonialists arrived around 1600, the Kaffirs worked on cinnamon plantations along the southern coast and some had settled in the Kandyan kingdom. Some research suggests that Kaffir slaves were employed as soldiers to fight against Sri Lankan kings, most likely in the Sinhalese–Portuguese War.