page_title: White Africans of European ancestry
section_title: Historical population
hierarchical_section_title: White Africans of European ancestry / Demographics / Historical population
caption_attribution_description: John Maxwell Coetzee
context_page_description: White Africans of European ancestry are descendants of any of the white ethnic groups originating on the European continent. In 1989, there were an estimated 4.6 million white people with European ancestry on the African continent. Most are of Dutch, British, Portuguese, German, and French descent; and to a lesser extent there are also those who descended from Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks. The majority once lived along the Mediterranean coast or in Southern Africa.
  The earliest permanent European communities in Africa were formed at the Cape of Good Hope; Luanda, in Angola; São Tomé Island; and Santiago, Cape Verde through the introduction of Portuguese and Dutch traders or military personnel. Other groups of settlers appeared when France and Great Britain colonized Africa. Before regional decolonization, white Africans may have numbered up to 6 million persons and were represented in every part of the continent.
  A voluntary exodus of colonials accompanied independence in most African nations. Portuguese Mozambicans, who numbered about 200,000 in 1975, departed en masse because of economic policies directed against their wealth; they now number 82,000.
context_section_description: European percentage peaks from total population during the colonial era:
  South Africa: 21%
  South-West Africa (current Namibia): 14%
  French Algeria: 15%
  Italian Libya: 13%
  Southern Rhodesia (current Zimbabwe): 7%
  Spanish Morocco: 5–10%
  Tunisia Protectorate: 10%
  Portuguese Angola: 4%
  French Morocco: 1–5%
  Swaziland Protectorate: 1–5%
  Spanish Sahara (current Western Sahara): 1–5%
  Northern Rhodesia (current Zambia): 2%
  Rest of Africa: <1%
  In most of colonial Africa, Europeans accounted for under 1% of the population, except for the colonies in Northern and Southern Africa, which had the highest proportion of European settlers.
caption: Nobel and Booker prize-winning South African author J. M. Coetzee.
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