Appropriately dubbed the Rainbow Nation, South Africa is home to an incredible ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity. Blacks 1 form the majority and account for 79.5 percent of the population, while whites, coloreds, and Asians make up 9 percent, 9 percent, and 2.5 percent, respectively (Statistics South Africa 2011a, 3). Each of these groups also contains multitudes of even narrower ethnic identities. Although South Africa has the biggest economy in Africa, it is one of the most unequal countries worldwide—this is one legacy of apartheid. By the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa’s black population ranked one hundred and twenty-third in the world according to the Human Development Index, while whites ranked twenty-fourth (United Nations Development Programme 1994, 98). These extreme inequalities deepened the divides among South Africans and threatened to tear the nation apart. Outbursts of political violence, which killed an estimated 14,000 people, accompanied the 46-month process of negotiations leading to the end of apartheid (South African Press Association 1997).