South Africa has 12 official languages and a multilingual population fluent in at least two. IsiZulu and isiXhosa are the largest languages. English is spoken at home by under 9% of the population, two-thirds of them not white.
South Africa is home to 63 million people. About 81.7% of them are black, 8.5% coloured, 2.6% Indian/Asian and 7.2% white. Find out more about birth, death, age, HIV, migration and other population trends.
It took one day for young South Africans to change the course of the country’s history. The day was 16 June 1976. Here is an hour-by-hour account of the 1976 Soweto students’ uprising.
Before South Africa’s 1996 constitution, the country was divided into four provinces set aside for white people, and 10 “homelands”, tiny states designated for black people.
The distribution of South Africa’s population groups reveals the country’s history. Find out more with these maps of where black, coloured, Indian and white South Africans live today, according to the 2011 census.
This is an animation to break your heart. In any unequal society, the privileged live long lives and everyone else much shorter lives.
Key facts on South Africa’s currency, time, geography, population, languages, provinces, government and education.
Nearly a third of black South Africans speak isiZulu as a first language, and 20% speak isiXhosa. Three-quarters of coloured people speak Afrikaans, and 86% of Indian South Africans speak English. Sixty percent of white people speak Afrikaans, and 30% speak English.
South Africa has held three official censuses in its recent democratic history: in 1996, 2001 and 2011. The censuses have revealed both a growing population – from 41 million to 52 million – and a significant shift in the country’s racial profile.
Black men have the shortest lives, and white women the longest. Find out more about the country’s population structure with this infographic charting the realities of age, race and sex in South Africa.
In 2024 South Africa had a population of 63 million. Black people were the majority at 51.5 million – 81.7% of the total. There were 5.3 million coloured people (8.5%), 4.5-million white people (7.2%) and 1.6-million Indian/Asian people (2.6%).
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