Authors
Francisco José Marco-Gracia, Maria del Carmen Pérez-Artés and Amy Rommelspacher
Abstract
South Africa represents a paradigmatic case in international literature on racial discrimination, illustrating a deeply institutionalised system that affected all aspects of daily life. Black, Coloured, and Asian populations were systematically relegated to a subordinate status compared to the dominant White minority. Drawing on direct statistical sources such as censuses and national budgets—despite certain limitations—this study explores long-term disparities through the lens of numeracy, a proxy for basic arithmetic skills. We analyse numeracy levels by race across cohorts born between the 1850s and the 1980s, with a particular focus on the Black population, given its demographic predominance. A key contribution of this research is the inclusion of province of residence as a control variable, alongside gender, birth decade, and literacy. Our results show clear and persistent gaps in numeracy by race and gender, with Black individuals and women consistently disadvantaged. Notably, numeracy levels indicative of full numerical literacy were not attained by the Black population until the 1960s cohort, more than a century after White individuals had reached that threshold. Strikingly, we also find unexpectedly high numeracy levels in the “homelands”, suggesting a strong valuation of education by Black communities in these self-governed areas, a dynamic we refer to as “African Agency”.