This is an animation to break your heart. In any unequal society, the privileged live long lives and everyone else much shorter lives.

Click animation to view from the start.

READ MORE: South Africa’s population

Most black South Africans die young. Most white South Africans live long lives.

In between, coloured South Africans statistically live a bit longer than black people. Indian South Africans tend to have shorter lives than white people.

Inequality and social injustice don’t only limit how people live. They also limit how long people live.

South Africa isn’t unusual in the way wealth and privilege run with race. What is unusual is that, thanks to the old apartheid state’s attention to bureaucratic detail, we still have a system of recording life and death statistics by race.

Race isn’t a real thing. But the concept has a history in South Africa, and still affects people’s lives. We still need statistics on it.

Statistics South Africa uses “population group” as a better term for “race”. France stopped recording population statistics by race in 1978. According to the Guardian, this now has “the side-effect of making systemic racism in the labour market much harder to quantify”.

South African notions of race, made law as late as 1950, are maybe more absurd than most. Our “races” are weird.

We have black people. We have white people. We have “coloured” people. But – wait. Black people, and coloured people? We also have a population group known as “Indian or Asian”.

Black, coloured, white, Indian-or-Asian. The labels come from history. In biology they are meaningless. In culture they describe nothing.

But they still determine who will live a longer life, and who won’t.

READ MORE: Infographic: The people of South Africa by age, sex and race 

Researched, written and designed by Mary Alexander.
Updated 17 June 2019.