“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”
Lord Kelvin
Predicted South African Population for a Year
You'll get the total population, white population and percentage of the white population of the total population.
You can use the left and right keyboard arrows to make single year adjustments
About this site
In 1911, whites comprised 22.7% of the total population of South Africa. In 1985, this percentage was down to 17.5%. By the 2022 census, it had dropped precipitously to 7.3%. Of course, conditions from 1911 to 1985 were very different from those between 1985, when the writing was already on the wall, and 2022. For that reason, I use 1985 as the starting point to calulate population growth rates. As an aside, the 2022 census was criticised for getting white and Indian populations too high.
Under the hood
This site is backed by one database table with three columns: year, white population, and total population. The first row contains census statistics for 2022. The populations for 1985 won't change, so they are hard-coded into the Groovy code and are always used as the starting populations. Say you search for a certain year, first, the application looks to see if there's not already a census for that year in the database. If there is, the populations are returned, and the white population is divided by the total population. That fraction is multiplied by 100 and rounded to one decimal.
If there's not, the population figures for the last census in the database are obtained and the year distance from 1985 is calculated. That's the years during which the population grew/shrank from 1985 to the year of the latest census. The more years, the more representative the calculated rates are of the true growth/shrink rates for the two population groups used here. That's done by getting the natural log (based on Euler's number) of (the latest population divided by the 1985 population) all divided by the growth/shrink years. That rate is used to calculate the two group populations, white and total, for years not in the database. That's done by multiplying the relevant 1985 population by Euler's number raised to the power of (the relevant 1985 population times the relevant growth/shrink rate) rounded to an integer. That's not too complicated, is it? Just see how fast the computer does it. This application runs at one the Amazon Web Services locations in the USA. When you click "Search," your year selected is sent there, the server uses your year to get an answer and sends the response back to you where AJAX writes it to the page on your computer without reloading the page.
Carrying capacity (the number of people an area can support) is not taken into account as the carrying capacity of South Africa is anyone's guess. South Africa is 32% larger than Nigeria, and Nigeria's 2026 population is/was 240 million. That's a nearly four times larger population than South Africa for the same year.
After playing with this application for a while and getting a few population predictions, you'll soon see that to call the future of whites in South Africa bleak is overly optimistic. But lest they feel sorry for themselves and see themselves as victims, they should remember that, when all is said and done, this is what they voted for in 1992. To claim they were fooled into voting for what inevitably put the ANC in the driver's seat is not an excuse. Being misled is based on ignorance.