Word.ws English Dictionary

kwerekwere

kwerekwere noun: a foreign visitor to a township.

Noun

kwerekwere (plural amakwerekwere)

  1. (South Africa) A foreign visitor to a township.
    • We came here just like every other nation. Just like Indians, Asians, Europeans. But we are the only people they call ‘kwerekwere’. They call the blacks ‘kwerekwere’, they don’t call the whites ‘kwerekwere’.2000, Nigerian man, interviewed by Zaa Nkweta for Carte Blanche, “Fighting a stereotype”
    • If they see you are foreigner, you are “kwerekwere”. [They] give the name for all foreigners, “kwerekwere”.2003, a refugee in Cape Town named Hélène, quoted in “Living with prejudice - xenophobia and race”

Forms of kwerekwere

pluralamakwerekwere
alternative formkwiri-kwiri

Origin of kwerekwere

Onomatopoeic. Foreigners who came to the townships could not speak the local languages. One theory on the origin of this term is that their own languages sounded like kwirikwirikwiri to the locals. A more plausible theory is that this term was a corruption of the word "korekore". The Korekore are a sub-group of the Shona people in neighboring Zimbabwe.

Questions about kwerekwere

What does kwerekwere mean?
Kwerekwere means a foreign visitor to a township.
What part of speech is kwerekwere?
Kwerekwere is a noun.
What is the plural of kwerekwere?
The plural of kwerekwere is amakwerekwere.

Words near kwerekwere in the dictionary

  1. kwenged
  2. kwengs
  3. Kweni
  4. Kwentoh
  5. Kwere
  6. kwerekwere
  7. KWF
  8. KWH
  9. Kwiakah
  10. Kwiatek
  11. Kwiateks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kwerekwere (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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