5 December—Nelson Mandela died on this day in 2013. He was 95. He was a lawyer and anti-Apartheid activist in the shamefully undemocratic Union of South Africa, which in 1961 became the shamefully undemocratic Republic of South Africa. For doing the right thing, which was clearly offensive to the white-minority-only Apartheid government, Mandela served 27 years in prison. In 1994 he was elected first President of the newly democratized and fully representative (i.e., you didn’t have to be white to vote) Republic of South Africa.

Bigots in the United States would have called Nelson Mandela a nigger—if, indeed, the morons even knew he existed. Since he was black, in South Africa bigots would have called him a kaffir. Etymologically derived from the Arabic “kāfir,” meaning “non-believer,” it’s come to be a pejorative slur for black people in South Africa, rather like nigger among speakers of English, including those in South Africa.

These days, it’s almost as unacceptable—make that forbidden—among the politically correct in South Africa to utter the actual “K-word,” as it is to utter the actual “N-word” everywhere that political correctness reigns. (Seldom does the “K-word” refer to “kike,” however, as a Jew may be called every now and then.)

“Nigger” in South Africa has been widely used to insult any person of a darker-than-white complexion, and has usually been applied to a person of Asian Indian extraction, since blacks are obviously “kaffirs.” (As a result of reprehensible old Apartheid rules, South Africans still tend to identify themselves—and informally classify each other—as “blacks,” “whites,” “Coloureds” [mixed-race], and “Indians.” Kind of like Americans being asked to indicate their race in surveys?)

And don’t forget that Walt Disney was born 122 years ago and made Nazi rocket engineer Wernher von Braun an American icon; and that Little Richard was born 91 years ago and gave us “Tutti Frutti.”

Oh rootie!