State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2015 - South Africa

The year 2014 started as a year of mourning after the death of Nelson Mandela in December 2013. Politically, the first half of the year was dominated by the general election on 7 May. The African National Congress (ANC) remained in power with a 62.2 per cent share of the votes, down from 65.9 per cent, with the Democratic Alliance (DA) increasing its share to 22.2 per cent and the newly established Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) gaining 6.4 per cent of the votes.

According to an IPSOS survey conducted shortly before the election, less than half (47 per cent) of the population believe that the government has the country's interests at heart, with even lower levels among white (17 per cent) and coloured (23 per cent) citizens.

Land rights and distribution remain unresolved and contentious issues in South Africa. The large majority of the country's land is still owned by white South Africans, who make up less than 10 per cent of the population. The ANC, despite committing after the end of apartheid to ensuring a significant proportion of land would be redistributed, has so far failed to achieve this. The EFF's leader, Julius Malema – a controversial figure who has two convictions for hate speech and who was expelled from the ANC Youth League in 2012 – has strongly criticized the current system and called for the expropriation of farms owned by white South Africans without compensation.

In June, the ANC signed an amendment to the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Bill into law, allowing those who failed to file claims in 1998 to still do so now. The bill has received mixed responses, as many claims may contest existing claims filed pre-1998 and create a further backlog. A separate policy is also planned which could benefit the Khoi and San communities by allowing them, in some instances, to lodge claims for land dispossessed pre-1913. These changes are intended to also include heritage sites, which might benefit other ethnic groups, such as Zulu, who have made claims for certain areas which belonged to former Zulu kingdoms.

The land rights of women from the Muslim minority are also likely to improve following the legal recognition of Muslim marriages for the first time in South Africa in May 2014. Though issues remain about the lack of inclusion of women in the negotiations and the apparent absence of females among the more than 100 officially appointed marriage officers, the decision represents a milestone for the country's Muslim community. Previously, Muslim marriages had no status in South African law, meaning that women could have no legal rights in the event of divorce or the death of their spouses. In August, shortly after the change in law, a landmark case in South Africa reversed the eviction of a Muslim woman following her divorce. The eviction had originally been considered legal, as she had been married in a religious ceremony only and the title deed to her home was in her husband's name.

Twenty years after the abolition of apartheid in 1994, South Africa continues to struggle with its legacy of racial division. These issues came to the fore in July when South Africa's Human Rights Commission found a public school in Bloemfontein guilty of hate speech towards coloured and black pupils. The teachers were accused of racially abusing the students and telling them to go back to the black schools in their townships – the second such incident in Bloemfontein within a year.

Though South Africa has undergone significant transformation in the last two decades, including rapid urbanization, the country's history of racial segregation continues to shape its development. Despite the ANC's pledge in 1994 to provide adequate housing to its citizens, the government's housing programme has been outstripped by the pace of urban migration and reached a backlog in 2013 of 2.1 million planned free housing units for the poor. As a result, a significant proportion of urban residents still face poor living conditions, with around a third based in slums.

Since the end of apartheid, some of the old structures of white-dominated towns and black-dominated townships on the outskirts of those towns have somewhat broken up. Nonetheless, subsequent surveys suggest that a large proportion of the urban black population is still concentrated in these townships on the urban periphery, where issues such as unemployment, violence and sexual assault are still evident. Despite attempts to counter the ghettoization of these areas – for example, through government investment in public transport in townships – spatial segregation persists. While middle-class blacks have migrated in recent years to formerly white neighbourhoods, the majority of the country's black urban poor remain concentrated in the townships. Though explicit exclusion of blacks is rare and South Africa's social division is now in many ways informed by class, the disproportionate poverty levels among the black population mean that in practice this separation still has strong racial dimensions. In Cape Town, for example, reports suggest that many of the city's black population still feel excluded and unwelcome in the centre and other upmarket neighbourhoods.

The physical and social legacy of apartheid urban planning has contributed to ongoing problems of crime, delinquency and unemployment, particularly among urban youth. Issues such as housing, reinforced by xenophobia, have also led to growing frictions between South Africans and migrant communities from countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique. These tensions culminated in the violent outbreak in Alexandra township in Johannesburg in April 2015, killing seven people and injuring many others, making it the country's worst outbreak of xenophobic violence since 2008. The ongoing violence has caused the military to step in, while some migrant countries of origin have arranged for their citizens to return home. A speech by Zulu chief King Goodwill Zwelithini the previous month calling for foreigners to 'pack their bags and go home' was blamed for triggering the violence, though Zwelithini claimed that his comments had been taken out of context.