White Africans of European ancestry

[9] In Zimbabwe, recent white exodus was spurred by an aggressive land reform programme introduced by late President Robert Mugabe in 2000 and the parallel collapse of that country's economy.

Although white minorities no longer hold exclusive political power, some continue to retain key positions in industry and commercial agriculture in a number of African states.

[16] The discovery of valuable resources in Africa's interior and the introduction of quinine as a cure for malaria altered this longstanding trend, and a new wave of European colonists arrived on the continent between 1890 and 1918.

[18] An inevitable trend of this factor, exacerbated by high rates of population growth, was that large numbers of black farmers as well as their livestock began to be concentrated in increasingly overcrowded areas.

[19] The concept lost popularity when it became clear that multinational corporations financed by overseas capital, coupled with cheap African labour, were far more productive and efficient at building export-oriented economies for the benefit of the metropolitan powers.

[19] Unlike other former colonies such as those in the Americas and Australia, Europeans and their descendants on the African continent never outnumbered the indigenous people; nevertheless, they found ways to consolidate power and exert a disproportionate influence on the administrative policies of their respective metropolitan countries.

[13] Due to the relative poverty of most black Africans, whites of European ancestry also controlled the capital for development and dominated the import and export trade as well as commercial agriculture.

[23] Attitudes towards rapid decolonisation among individual white African communities were hardened by fears of irresponsible or incompetent postcolonial governments, coupled to a parallel decline in public infrastructure, service delivery, and consequently, their own standards of living.

[29] A considerable reverse exodus of former colonials returning to Western Europe occurred; because they had controlled key sectors of many African economies prior to independence, their abrupt departure often resulted in devastating economic repercussions for the emerging states.

[42] In the late sixteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (known more formally as the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) began routinely searching for sites on the African continent where its trading fleets could obtain fresh water and other supplies while en route to the Orient.

[43][44] Dutch ships began calling at the Cape of Good Hope as early as 1595, since the shoreline was not treacherous and fresh water could be easily obtained by landing parties without venturing too far inland.

[46] Since the primary purpose of the Cape colony at the time was to stock provisions for passing Dutch ships, the VOC offered grants of farmland to the vrijburgers on the condition they would cultivate crops for company warehouses.

The heterogeneous European community included large numbers of German military recruits in the service of the VOC, as well as French Huguenot refugees driven into overseas exile by the Edict of Fontainebleau.

[citation needed] The South-West became a German colony during the late 19th century, and with the onset of the First World War a number of local Boers volunteered to serve with the imperial authorities against invading Allied troops.

[63] After that conflict left the territory under South African occupation, thousands of fresh Afrikaner migrants poured into the region to occupy available plots of prime stock-farming land and exploit untapped resources.

[12] From 1898 until the early 1900s, a small but steady stream of Boers began trekking towards Lake Ngami from South Africa, with the vast majority concentrating around the previously established Afrikaans-speaking community at Ghanzi.

[68] During World War I, the Maritz Rebellion in South Africa caused consternation among Rhodesian authorities, prompting them to conclude that their colony's Afrikaner inhabitants could not be relied upon against the German Empire.

They were also considered to be Rhodesia's single most conservative white community, almost unanimously opposing a multiracial school system and any concessions to black Africans regarding land apportionment.

[76] With the retreat of European colonialism, Afrikaner communities outside South Africa and its immediate neighbours generally diminished in size and a significant number of colonists returned to their countries of origin during the decades which followed the Second World War.

[citation needed] In keeping with the general trend toward non-European rule evident throughout most of the globe during the Cold War and the abandonment of colonial possessions in the face of American and Soviet pressure, the vestigial remnants of Cecil Rhodes' vision was abruptly ended, leaving British colonists in an exposed, isolated, and weak position.

Black Nationalist guerrilla forces aided by Soviet expertise and weapons soon drove the colonists into a fortress mentality which led to the break-off of ties with perceived collaborationist governments in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.

Due to the subsequent deterioration of conditions under Amin (Including the constant threat of forced expulsion), most of the local British diaspora emigrated to the United Kingdom and South Africa.

Unlike Algeria, permanent European colonisation in most of France's tropical African colonies was not especially successful; during World War II the entire white population of French West Africa numbered only about 22,000.

[96] Nevertheless, French West Africa's white population remained subject to a high turnover rate; in 1951 78% of this group had been born in France, and the number of European families which had lived in Dakar for more than a generation was described as "negligible".

[96] The postwar influx also introduced the phenomenon of unemployed whites in French West Africa, who were mostly unskilled workers that secured only temporary jobs or were not engaged in any specific profession, and found themselves having to compete with a growing skilled black workforce.

The new government was slow to react, allowing a state of panic to develop among the 120,000 colonists still resident in the territory as roving bands of mutineers attacked numerous European targets, assaulting and killing with impunity.

[175] In 1952, the Serbian community that left Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II founded a local Saint Sava church and school municipality in Johannesburg.

Several Sub-Saharan African countries are having more than one million inhabitants with at least one Eurasian ancestor, like Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Mauritania, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa and Sudan, according to DNA studies.

Outside of South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, British White Africans make up a large minority in Zambia, Kenya, Botswana, and Swaziland, therefore growing the presence of English in these countries.

Spanish is also spoken in some areas of Morocco, Western Sahara, Equatorial Guinea, as well as in those territories that form part of Spain such as the Canary Islands and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla.