White South Africans
White South Africans are South Africans of European descent. In linguistic, cultural, and historical terms, they are generally divided into the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of the Dutch East India Company's original colonists, known as Afrikaners, and the Anglophone descendants of predominantly British colonists of South Africa. White South Africans are by far the largest population of White Africans. White was a legally defined racial classification during apartheid.
White settlement in South Africa began with Dutch colonisation in 1652, followed by British colonisation in the 19th century, which led to tensions and further expansion inland by Boer settlers. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, waves of immigrants from Europe and continued to grow the white population, which peaked in the mid-1990s. Under apartheid, strict racial classifications enforced a legal and economic order that privileged the white minority. Post-apartheid reforms such as Black Economic Empowerment had the goal of redistributing business opportunities and market access to previously disadvantaged groups, prompting reports of newfound economic vulnerability among some white South Africans as material advantages and disadvantages were beginning to be brought to light. Since the 1990s, a large number of white South Africans have emigrated, due to concerns over crime and employment prospects, with a number returning in subsequent years. The white population in South Africa peaked between 1989 and 1995 at around 5.2 to 5.6 million due to high birth rates and immigration, then declined until the mid-2000s before experiencing a modest increase from 2006 to 2013.
As of the 2022 census, white South Africans make up 7.3% of the population, predominantly speak Afrikaans or English, mostly identify as Christian, and are unevenly distributed with the highest concentrations in Western Cape and Gauteng provinces. Former South African leaders have made controversial statements about Afrikaners’ identity and race relations, while apartheid enforced white minority rule and granted “honorary white” status to certain Asian immigrants and some African Americans. In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid continues to shape racial and economic dynamics.
The majority of Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking White South Africans trace their ancestry to the 17th and 18th-century Dutch colonists or the 1820 British colonists. Other colonists included Huguenots who emigrated from France, and Walloons who emigrated from present-day Belgium. The remainder of the White South African population consists of later immigrants from Lebanon, and Europe such as Greeks and Norwegians. Portuguese immigrants arrived after the collapse of the Portuguese colonial administrations in Angola and Mozambique, although many also originate from Madeira.
History
Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was the first European to explore Southern Africa in 1488.File:Cape_Colony00.jpg|thumb|left|Map of the Cape Colony in 1809.
The history of white settlement in South Africa started in 1652 with the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company under Jan van Riebeeck. Despite the preponderance of officials and colonists from the Netherlands, there were also a number of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at home and German soldiers or sailors returning from service in Asia. The Cape Colony remained under Dutch rule for two more centuries, after which it was annexed by the United Kingdom around 1806. At that time, South Africa was home to about 26,000 people of European ancestry, a relative majority of whom were still of Dutch origin. However, the Dutch settlers grew into conflict with the British government over the abolition of the Cape Colony slave trade and limits on colonial expansion into African lands. In order to prevent a frontier war, the British Parliament decided to send British settlers to start farms on the eastern frontier. Beginning in 1818 thousands of British settlers arrived in the growing Cape Colony, intending to join the local workforce or settle directly on the frontier. Ironically most of the farms failed due to the difficult terrain, forcing the British settlers to encroach on African land in order to practise pastoralism. About a fifth of the Cape's original Dutch-speaking white population migrated eastwards during the Great Trek in the 1830s and established their own autonomous Boer republics further inland. Nevertheless, the population of white ancestry continued increasing in the Cape as a result of settlement, and by 1865 had reached 181,592 people. Between 1880 and 1910, there was an influx of Jews and immigrants from Lebanon and Syria arriving in South Africa. Recent immigrants from the Levant region of Western Asia were originally classified as Asian, and thus "non-white", but, in order to have the right to purchase land, they successfully argued that they were "white". The main reason being that they were Caucasian and from the lands in which Christianity and Judaism originated, and that the race laws did not target Jews, who were also a Semitic people. Therefore, arguing that if the laws targeted other people from the Levant, it should also affect the Jews.
File:Afrikaner Commandos2.JPG|thumb|upright|Boer guerrillas during the Second Boer War
The first nationwide census in South Africa was held in 1911 and indicated a white population of 1,276,242. By 1936, there were an estimated 2,003,857 white South Africans, and by 1946 the number had reached 2,372,690. The country began receiving tens of thousands of European immigrants, namely from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, and the territories of the Portuguese Empire during the mid- to late twentieth century. South Africa's white population increased to over 3,408,000 by 1965, reached 4,050,000 in 1973, and peaked at 5,244,000 in 1994–95.
The number of white South Africans resident in their home country began gradually declining between 1990 and the mid-2000s as a result of increased emigration.
Apartheid era
Under the Population Registration Act of 1950, each inhabitant of South Africa was classified into one of several different race groups, of which White was one. The Office for Race Classification defined a white person as one who "in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person." Many criteria, both physical and social were used when the board decided to classify someone as white or coloured. The Act was repealed on 17 June 1991.Post-apartheid era
legislation further empowers blacks as the government considers ownership, employment, training and social responsibility initiatives, which empower black South Africans, as important criteria when awarding tenders; private enterprises also must adhere to this legislation. Some reports indicate a growing number of whites in poverty compared to the pre-apartheid years and attribute this to such laws – a 2006 article in The Guardian stated that over 350,000 Afrikaners may be classified as poor, and alluded to research claiming that up to 150,000 were struggling for survival.As a consequence of Apartheid policies, Whites are still widely regarded as being one of 4 defined race groups in South Africa. These groups still tend to have strong racial identities, and to identify themselves, and others, as members of these race groups and the classification continues to persist in government policy due to attempts at redress like Black Economic Empowerment and Employment Equity.
Diaspora and emigration
Since the 1990s, there has been a significant emigration of whites from South Africa. Between 1995 and 2005, more than one million South Africans emigrated, citing violence as the main reason, as well as the lack of employment opportunities for whites.Current trends
In recent decades, there has been a steady proportional decline in South Africa's white community, due to higher birthrates among other South African ethnic groups, as well as a high rate of emigration. In 1977, there were 4.3 million whites, constituting 16.4% of the population at the time. As of 2008, it was estimated that at least 800,000 white South Africans had emigrated since 1995.Like many other communities strongly affiliated with the West and Europe's colonial legacy in Africa, white South Africans were in the past often economically better off than their black African neighbours and have surrendered political dominance to majority rule. There were also some white Africans in South Africa who lived in poverty—especially during the 1930s and increasingly since the end of minority rule. Current estimates of white poverty in South Africa run as high as 12%, though fact-checking website Africa Check described these figures as "grossly inflated" and suggested that a more accurate estimate was that "only a tiny fraction of the white population – as few as 7,754 households – are affected."
File:Cape Town anti-femicide demonstration 05.jpg|thumb|220px|White South Africans protest against gender based violence and femicide outside Houses of Parliament in Cape Town
The new phenomenon of white poverty is mostly blamed on the government's affirmative action employment legislation, which reserves 80% of new jobs for black people and favours companies owned by black people. In 2010, Reuters stated that 450,000 whites live below the poverty line according to Solidarity and civil organisations, with some research saying that up to 150,000 are struggling for survival. However, the proportion of white South Africans living in poverty is still much lower than for other groups in the country, since approximately 50% of the general population fall below the upper-bound poverty line.
A further concern has been crime. Some white South Africans living in affluent white suburbs, such as Sandton, have been affected by the 2008 13.5% rise in house robberies and associated crime. In a study, Johan Burger, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, said that criminals were specifically targeting wealthier suburbs. Burger explained that several affluent suburbs are surrounded by poorer residential areas and that inhabitants in the latter often target inhabitants in the former. The report also found that residents in wealthy suburbs in Gauteng were not only at more risk of being targeted but also faced an inflated chance of being murdered during the robbery.
The 2008 financial crisis slowed the high rates of white people emigrating overseas and has led to increasing numbers of white emigrants returning to live in South Africa. Charles Luyckx, CEO of Elliot International and a board member of the Professional Movers Association, stated in December 2008 that emigration numbers had dropped by 10% in the six months prior. Meanwhile, "people imports" had increased by 50%.
In May 2014, Homecoming Revolution estimated that around 340,000 white South Africans had returned to South Africa in the preceding decade.
Furthermore, immigration from Europe has also supplemented the white population. The 2011 census found that 63,479 white people living in South Africa were born in Europe; of these, 28,653 had moved to South Africa since 2001.
At the end of apartheid in 1994, 85% of South Africa's arable land was owned by whites. The land reform program introduced after the end of apartheid intended that, within 20 years, 30% of white-owned commercial farm land should be transferred to black owners. Thus, in 2011, the farmers' association, Agri South Africa, coordinated efforts to resettle farmers throughout the African continent. The initiative offered millions of hectares from 22 African countries that hoped to spur development of efficient commercial farming. The 30 percent target was not close to being met by the 2014 deadline. According to a 2017 government audit, 72% of the nation's private farmland is owned by white people. In February 2018, the Parliament of South Africa passed a motion to review the property ownership clause of the constitution, to allow for the expropriation of land, in the public interest, without compensation, which was supported within South Africa's ruling African National Congress on the grounds that the land was originally seized by whites without just compensation. In August 2018, the South African government began the process of taking two white-owned farmlands. Western Cape ANC secretary Faiez Jacobs referred to the property clause amendment as a "stick" to force dialogue about the transfer of land ownership, with the hope of accomplishing the transfer "in a way that is orderly and doesn't create a 'them' and 'us' ."
In 2025, 59 white South Africans arrived in the United States after U.S. president Donald Trump granted them refugee status.