Kiziwi, kipofu na kilema: ubaguzi au heshima?

‘The deaf, the blind and the lame: discrimination or respect?’ In this article we investigate what the assignment of these (and other) words to the KI-class means. We depart from the common explanation which says that the KI-class here signals contempt since it is not the typical class for human beings in Swahili. We then analyse the surprisingly large corpus of nouns referring to people in the KI-class and show how they got assigned to this class. This leads us to a more general statement about the meaning of a noun class. The final section is a case study of one particular word, kigego, and what it formerly stood for in Vuaso (Upare) and other societies bordering the Swahili world