Post-apartheid South Africa has experienced exponential growth in its black middle class with a new study showing the birth of a powerful consumer market.
According to the most comprehensive study to date on the emerging black middle class in South Africa, the group is responsible for nearly a quarter of the annual cash buying power of 600 billion rand (US$96 million).
"There were huge surprises for the average marketer in this study," said John Simpson, director of the Unilever Institute at the University of Cape Town which conducted the research.
"The one is the sheer size of the group and then it also accounts for 23 percent of total consumer power in this country, which has been achieved in a very, very short period and continues to grow very rapidly indeed," he added.
The so-called "Black Diamond" marketing survey found the new black middle class to be about 2-million-strong, or about 10 percent of the black adult population.
"It's taken off in a space of 10 or 15 years," said Simpson, referring to the end of apartheid in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became the first democratically-elected president.
"We've had political intervention which has suddenly unleashed opportunities for a group of people who normally would have been part of a vibrant middle class," he told reporters.
The report said that under apartheid, "black society was a single, monolithic, classless society with limited, menial jobs, no home ownership and under-educated."
But the end of apartheid caused a "dramatic disruption" with "enormous and immediate effects -- access to jobs, finance, credit, homes, education," he said.
The research was compiled from 750 face-to-face countrywide interviews lasting about 50 minutes in November and December last year.
Research project leader Refiloe Mataboge said the black middle class was a very complex group to understand because they lived in two worlds -- modern and traditional.
"What makes South Africa's scenario more intricate is the cultural paradox," she said.
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