Mint colored Mosque in Cape Town.
South Africa has a wide mix of religions. Many religions are represented in the ethnic and regional diversity of South Africa's population. The traditional spiritualities of the Khoisan and Bantu speakers were succeeded in predominance by the Christianity introduced by the Dutch and, later, British settlers. Islam was introduced by the Cape Malay slaves of the Dutch settlers, Hinduism was introduced by the indentured servants imported from the Indian subcontinent, and Buddhism was introduced by both Indians and Chinese immigrants. The Bahá'í Faith was introduced in 1911 grew after Bahá'ís from Canada, the United States and Germany settled in the country.[1] Judaism in South Africa came about some time before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, by the participation of Jewish astronomers and cartographers in the Portuguese discovery of the sea-route to India. They assisted Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama who first sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and 1497. However, Jews only began to arrive in numbers from the 1820s.
Demographics
A 2007 report gave the following religious demographics for the country:[2]
St. Mark's Anglican Cathedral, George, South Africa
- Christianity: 29,684,861 adherents (73.52%)
- Traditional ethnic religion: 6,056,487 adherents (15%)
- Non-religious/other: 3,262,428 adherents (8.08%)
- Islam: 585,460 adherents (1.45%)
- Hinduism: 504,707 adherents (1.25%)
- Bahá'í Faith: 201,883 adherents (0.5%)
- Judaism: 68,640 adherents (0.17%)
- Buddhism/Chinese folk religion: 12,113 adherents (0.03%)
See also
References
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