Whites are projected to be just 2% of South Africa’s population by 2066 due to low fertility, an ageing population and emigration.
According to a new analysis by The Common Sense, the White share of the population will fall five points from 7% over the next 40 years, while the black share will increase from 82% to 88%, and the coloured and Indian population shares will stay about the same.
The publication used Statistics South Africa’s latest population estimates of current age structure, along with fertility rates, mortality rates, and migration trends to create population pyramids showing how the composition of each racial group is likely to change by 2066.
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A comparison of the White population pyramids shows that by 2066 those aged 80 and above will be by far the largest group, whereas in 2025 the population was evenly distributed and the largest group was those in their early 50s.
The reason for the projected decline has been attributed to low White fertility of about 1.5 children per woman, compared to 2.3 for the black population, and emigration by younger and more skilled South Africans whose children go with them.
The analysts noted that the demographic changes have major implications for the South African government’s Black Economic Empowerment policy, a form of affirmative action-style racial discrimination against White people which is based on a population breakdown of 93% black and 7% White.
“As the workforce becomes increasingly concentrated within one overwhelming majority, empowerment targets would in theory move in the same direction,” the report noted.
“Should that approach to empowerment be maintained through the next two generations, South Africa’s demographic future will eventually force increasingly extreme manifestations of empowerment policy.”
White South Africans have been fleeing the country in large numbers due to the decline in living standards and rising crime since the end of Apartheid, and in February last year US president Donald Trump launched a refugee program in response to an antiwhite land seizure law and the murder of White farmers.
Header image: Residents of the Afrikaner town of Orania (Facebook).
