13 African Countries with the Largest White Population in 2018

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Since the fact that out of 1.3 billion people who are living on the black continent, less than one percent is of white European descent is somewhat expected, we decided to go a step further and find out which are the African countries with the largest white population in 2018.

So, the long-term projections suggest the population of Africa will double in 2050. This doesn’t come as a surprise given the fact that African countries (and its population) are growing pretty fast – over the period between 2010 and 2015 its growth rate was 2.55% annually. The main reasons are a substantial percentage of young people on the continent, with 41% of them being under the age of 15, and poverty that’s causing women not to have access to family planning methods.

Speaking of a vast population — did you know that in all of Africa, there are more than 2100 different languages spoken among more than 3000 distinct ethnic groups? The similar can be said for their belief systems, with people of Africa practicing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism alongside a number of traditional religions. The fact it’s the second largest and the second most populous continent on the Earth, somehow explains this diversity. But what about white people, how did they end up on this continent?

African Countries with the Largest White Population in 2018

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Africa has been known for harboring Europeans for centuries. Starting with Portuguese “discoveries” in the XV century and Bartolomeu Dias sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, the European imperialism peaked a bit less than two centuries ago, when Europeans expanded their holdings all across the globe. The first “white settlements” date to XVI-XVI centuries, like Luanda in Angola, Cape Verde, and São Tomé Island, as well as the Dutch East India Company’s station at Cape of Good Hope in South Africa from XVII century. By 1985, only one-tenth of the African continent was independent. In the rise of the twentieth century, French held west and north Africa alongside Equatorial Africa, while Nile Valley, parts of west Africa, and vast territories of east and south Africa were under the British rule. Besides these two “giants”, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, etc., had their fair share as well. The motives for this expansion were various, with economics being among the major ones, especially the quest for new markets and free labor. Unfortunately, Africa’s population suffered the most, experiencing an increase of wars and revolutions, slavery, shortages of natural resources and death due to diseases brought by European imperialists. During the four centuries of Western colonialism, the face of Earth was changed for good. The ideology of white racial supremacy brought white people to all four corners of the Earth. As a result, some of the countries with the highest white population are not even on the European continent.

When it comes to the white people in today’s Africa, most of them are descendants of the European colonists known as white Africans of European ancestry, even though there are also (white) people who decided to move here in the last two decades, finding Africa a beautiful place for living. In addition, there are white missionaries, also called White Fathers, who are born in Africa and are committed to solving problems of black Africans. One such example is the white population in Malawi, mainly consisted of missionaries who are collaborating with the Malawian State. But, are they acknowledged Africans by native black Africans? This seems to be a bit of a touchy issue, for both sides. And while some black Africans fully embraced their white brothers, arguing they settled there centuries back, the others didn’t forget that whites living there are not indigenous to Africa pinpointing they kept living according to their European culture practices, with very few of them who actually speak Africans languages. However, the situation is a bit different when it comes to the northern parts of the continent, due to migrations of the human population during history and black and Arab mixing. Speaking of migration, take a look at our article on countries with the highest black population outside Africa, and check out are there some overlaps with the list of countries that colonized Africa during history.

So, how we come up with the list of African countries with highest white percentage? Since we couldn’t retrieve any comprehensive report we can rely on, we put in use the Google engine and come up with a number of articles dealing with this topic. Afrikanza’s piece on where white Africans live, as well as Africa Ranking’s and Moguldom’s lists of the African countries with the largest white population, provided us with necessary information. However, since data used in these articles were a bit outdated, being from 2016, we checked the latest data for each country utilizing World Population Review’s and IndexMundi’s 2018 updates. In cases when data for 2018 weren’t available we relied on the previously mentioned sources. And now, let’s scroll through African countries with the largest white population in 2018.

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