White Africans of European ancestry refers to citizens or residents in Africa who can trace full or partial ancestry to Europe. They are distinguished from Arabs, Berbers, and Copts in North Africa, who are sometimes identified as white, but not European. In 1989, there were an estimated 4.6 million white people with European ancestry on the African continent.

Most are of Anglo-Celtic, Dutch, French, German, and Portuguese origin; to a lesser extent, there are also those who descended from Belgians, Greeks, Italians, Scandinavians, and Spaniards. The majority once lived along the Mediterranean coast or in Southern Africa.

The earliest permanent European communities in Africa during the Age of Discovery were formed at the Cape of Good Hope; Luanda, in Angola; São Tomé Island; and Santiago, Cape Verde through the introduction of Portuguese and Dutch traders or military personnel. Other groups of white settlers arrived in newly established French, German, Belgian, and British settlements in Africa over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before regional decolonisation, whites of European ancestry may have numbered up to 6 million persons at their peak and were represented in every part of the continent.

An exodus of colonists accompanied independence in most African nations. Over half the Portuguese Mozambican population, which numbered about 200,000 in 1975, departed en masse because of discriminatory economic policies directed against them. In Zimbabwe, recent white exodus was spurred by an aggressive land reform programme introduced by late President Robert Mugabe in 2000 and the parallel collapse of that country's economy. In Burundi, the local white population was blatantly expelled via a decree issued by the post-colonial government upon independence.

The African country with the largest population of European descendants both numerically and proportionally is South Africa, where white South Africans number 4,504,252 people, making up 7.3% of South Africa's population, according to the 2022 South African census. Smaller European-descended populations exist in Namibia, Angola, Madagascar, Morocco, Kenya, Senegal, Tunisia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Although white minorities no longer hold exclusive political power, some continued to retain key positions in industry and commercial agriculture in several African states after the introduction of majority rule.

During the Colonisation of Africa, European settlement patterns generally favoured territories with a substantial amount of land at least 910 metres (3,000 ft) above sea level, an annual rainfall of over 510 millimetres (20 in) but not exceeding 1,020 millimetres (40 in), and relative freedom from the Tsetse fly. In contrast to Western and Central Africa, the milder, drier climates of Northern, Eastern, and Southern Africa thus attracted substantial numbers of permanent European immigrants. A modest annual rainfall of under 1020 mm was considered especially suitable for the temperate farming activities to which many were accustomed. Therefore, the first parts of Africa to be populated by Europeans were located at the northern and southern extremities of the continent; between these two extremes, disease and the tropical climate precluded most permanent European settlement until the late nineteenth century. The discovery of valuable resources in Africa's interior and the introduction of quinine as a cure for malaria altered this longstanding trend, and a new wave of European colonists arrived on the continent between 1890 and 1918.

Most European colonists granted land in African colonies cultivated cereal crops or raised cattle, which were far more popular among the immigrants rather than managing the tropical plantations aimed at producing export-oriented crops such as rubber and palm oil. A direct consequence of this preference was that the territories with a rainfall exceeding 1020 mm developed strong plantation-based economies but produced almost no food beyond what was cultivated by small-scale indigenous producers; drier territories with large white farming communities became more self-sufficient in food production. The latter often resulted in sharp friction between European colonists and black African tribes as they competed for land. By 1960, at least seven British, French, and Belgian colonies—in addition to the Union of South Africa—had passed legislation reserving a fixed percentage of land for white ownership. This allowed colonists to legitimise their land seizures and began a process that had the ultimate consequence of commodifying land in colonial Africa. Land distribution thus emerged as an extremely contentious issue in those territories with large numbers of permanent European colonists. During the 1950s, black Africans owned about 13.7% of the land in South Africa and a little under 33% of the land in Southern Rhodesia. An inevitable trend of this factor, exacerbated by high rates of population growth, was that large numbers of black farmers as well as their livestock began to be concentrated in increasingly overcrowded areas.

Before 1914, colonial governments encouraged European settlement on a grand scale, based on the assumption that this was a prerequisite to long-term development and economic growth. The concept lost popularity when it became clear that multinational corporations financed by overseas capital, coupled with cheap African labour, were far more productive and efficient at building export-oriented economies for the benefit of the metropolitan powers. During the Great Depression, locally owned, small-scale businesses managed by individual whites suffered immense losses attempting to compete with large commercial enterprises and the lower costs of black labour (South Africa being the sole exception to the rule, as its white businesses and labour were heavily subsidised by the state).