South Africa’s population
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.
Infographic: Life expectancy in South Africa from 1960 to 2015
Charting South Africans’ life expectancy is to track the country’s modern history. In 1960, when the state was grimly implementing apartheid laws, an average newborn child was expected to have a lifespan of only 52 years – 50 years for boys. In 2015, life expectancy was 62 years.
Infographic: HIV and Aids in South Africa 1990 to 2016
In the West the peak of the Aids epidemic was in 1985. But HIV and Aids hit South Africa only in the 1990s, just as we were starting to build a new society out of the ruins of apartheid. Here, the epidemic peaked in 2006.
Still no cure for HIV and Aids – not even ‘gene therapy’
22 April 2024 – Any claim to “cure” HIV is false. A new social media scam targeting HIV-positive people in Zambia latches onto Crispr gene editing technology, used in an exciting experiment in the search for a possible cure – but not the actual cure.
HIV and Aids in South Africa
South Africa’s story of HIV and Aids starts with tragic arrogance in a new democracy suddenly threatened from an unexpected direction. Then came activism and tenacity by ordinary citizens. Today, the country has one of the world’s biggest treatment programmes.
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