Johannesburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Johannesburg was born not from a river, a harbor, or a strategic military post, but from a single geological accident: the discovery of gold. In June 1884, a man named Jan Gerritse Bantjes found the main Witwatersrand gold reef on the farm Vogelstruisfontein, and within two years a city had sprung from what had been farmland. Within a decade, more than 100,000 people had poured in from every continent on earth. Today, Johannesburg is the most populous city in South Africa, with a metropolitan population of over six million, and it holds the title of the richest city in Africa by GDP and private wealth. Its colloquial names tell you everything: Jozi, Joburg, eGoli, iGoli. The City of Gold. But gold alone does not explain what Johannesburg became. This is a city shaped by the violent contradictions of a mining boomtown, a laboratory of racial segregation that affected every street and suburb, and an unlikely crucible for some of the most consequential political resistance of the twentieth century. How did a tented miners' camp become the continent's financial capital? Why did the city that produced Nelson Mandela also imprison him? And what does it mean that, even decades after apartheid's end, Johannesburg remains one of the most unequal cities in the world?

• 2. Gold and the Rush to Build a City

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  Jan Gerritse Bantjes was not the only prospector working the Witwatersrand in those early years. In September 1884, the Struben brothers discovered the Confidence Reef on the farm Wilgespruit near present-day Roodepoort, and the first gold to be crushed on the Witwatersrand came from the Bantjes mine, processed using the Struben brothers' stamp machine. News spread fast. Cecil Rhodes and Sir Joseph Robinson rode up from Kimberley to investigate the rumors themselves, were guided to the Bantjes camp with its tents strung out over several kilometers, and stayed two nights. In 1884, they purchased the first pure refined gold from Bantjes for three thousand pounds.

  The 3rd of October 1886 was when the name Johannesburg was first officially used. The precise origin of that name is disputed, and the records were lost. Several men named Johannes were involved: the surveyor-general's principal clerk Christiaan Johannes Joubert, who also sat on the Volksraad and ran the Republic's mining operations; Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, better known as Paul Kruger, president of the South African Republic from 1883 to 1900; and Johannes Meyer, the first government official on the ground. Johannes Rissik and Johannes Joubert were sent together to England to secure mining rights; Joubert later had a park named after him, and Rissik gave his name to one of the city's main streets.

  Surveyor Jos de Villiers laid out Johannesburg's first neighborhood, Randjeslaagte, between the 19th of October and the 3rd of November 1886. The original miners' camp was established under the informal leadership of Colonel Ignatius Ferreira in the Fordsburg dip, likely because water was nearby and the site sat close to the diggings. The government took over, surveyed it, and renamed it Ferreira's Township, now the suburb of Ferreirasdorp. By 1887 the camp had already reached a population of 3,000. By 1896, Johannesburg held over 100,000 inhabitants, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in recorded history. The mines beneath that growth were extraordinary: some reached depths of 4,000 meters, among the deepest in the world. At the industry's height, the Witwatersrand gold fields produced forty percent of all the gold on the planet.

• 3. Boomtown, Boer War, and Foreign Labor

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  Late nineteenth-century Johannesburg was a rough and disorganized place. White miners arrived from every continent; African tribesmen were recruited for unskilled mine work; African women cooked and brewed beer for the migrant workforce; a large number of European prostitutes, gangsters, impoverished Afrikaners, and tradesmen crowded the streets. One of the more surprising social facts: Zulu men, known as the AmaWasha, dominated the laundry trade.

  As the value of the land grew, so did the tension between the Boer-dominated Transvaal government in Pretoria and the British. That tension broke open in the Jameson Raid, which ended in fiasco at Doornkop in January 1896. Then came the Second Boer War, fought from 1899 to 1902. Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, led British forces into Johannesburg on the 30th of May 1900, after a series of battles to the south-west of the city's then-limits near present-day Krugersdorp. Fighting had taken place at the Gatsrand Pass on the 27th of May and at the waterworks ridge in what is now Chiawelo and Senaoane on the 29th.

  The war created an unexpected demographic shift. Many African mineworkers left Johannesburg during the fighting, creating a severe labor shortage. The mines brought in workers from China, particularly southern China, to fill the gap. After the war, black workers returned, but many Chinese workers stayed, forming Johannesburg's Chinese community. During the apartheid era that followed, this community was legally classified not as "Asian" but as "Coloured," a designation that illustrated the arbitrary and shifting logic of racial categorization that would define the city for decades. The 1904 population count recorded 155,642 residents, of whom 83,363 were white.

• 4. Apartheid's Architecture

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  In 1917, Johannesburg became the headquarters of the Anglo-American Corporation, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer, which grew into one of the world's largest corporations and came to dominate both gold and diamond mining across South Africa. The city's economy depended on two parallel workforces: hundreds of thousands of skilled white workers imported from Europe, and semi-skilled or unskilled black workers drawn from across southern Africa. They worked side by side; the government required them to live apart. Work was formally exempted from apartheid's rules in order to keep Johannesburg functioning as an economic engine.

  The formal system of apartheid was imposed starting in 1948. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the government built the massive agglomeration of townships that became known collectively as Soweto, which stands for South-Western Townships. Intended to house 50,000 people, Soweto quickly became home to ten times that number as unemployed rural black South Africans arrived in search of work and income to send back to their villages. By 1989, Soweto's population was estimated to be equal to or greater than that of Johannesburg itself. The township was officially designated a "blacks only" city until 1994. Sandton, in stark contrast, became known as Africa's richest square mile.

  The spatial logic of apartheid also created Lenasia, predominantly populated by English-speaking Indo-South Africans of Indian and South Asian descent, while formerly white-only areas included Randburg and Roodeport. Modern Johannesburg is an amalgamation of these formerly separate cities, townships, and settlements, each layer a physical record of the policies that divided them. Even after the administrative unification of the city and surrounding townships into the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality following the end of apartheid, that spatial legacy proved deeply resistant to change.

• 5. Resistance and the Rivonia Trial

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  On the 11th of July 1963, South African Police raided a house in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia. Nine members of the banned African National Congress were arrested on charges of planning sabotage. Among them was one Indo-South African, one coloured person, two whites, and five blacks, including the future president Nelson Mandela. At the trial, the accused freely admitted planning to destroy Johannesburg's hydroelectric system to shut down the gold mines. Mandela argued to the court that the ANC had exhausted non-violent resistance and had been left with no other option. The Rivonia Trial made Mandela a national figure and a symbol of opposition to apartheid.

  Soweto, the township built to house the city's black workforce, became the epicenter of a different kind of confrontation thirteen years later. On the 16th of June 1976, students took to the streets to protest a government decree that black schoolchildren be educated in Afrikaans rather than English. Police fired on the demonstrations. Rioting spread from Soweto into greater Johannesburg. About 575 people were killed in the uprising, the majority of them black. Soweto was also home to two of the ANC's most prominent figures: Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both of whom had lived in the township.

  In March 1960, Johannesburg had already witnessed widespread demonstrations following the Sharpeville massacre. Between 1984 and 1986, the black townships around Johannesburg became scenes of some of the fiercest confrontations between police and anti-apartheid protesters in a period of nationwide strikes, protests, and riots. The Albert Street Methodist Church in central Johannesburg served as a refuge for activists including Albertina Sisulu, a detail that captures how resistance was woven into the city's everyday fabric, not only its famous landmarks. The University of the Witwatersrand similarly built a reputation as a center of resistance during those years.

• 6. The City After Apartheid

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  When the Group Areas Act was scrapped in 1991, thousands of black South Africans who had been legally barred from living in the city proper moved in from surrounding townships. Migrants from economically beleaguered and war-torn African nations flooded into South Africa as well. Landlords abandoned buildings, particularly in high-density areas such as Hillbrow. Corporations and institutions, including the Johannesburg Stock Exchange itself, relocated their headquarters to suburbs like Sandton. The central business district entered a prolonged decline, driven by high crime and a shift of investment capital toward suburban shopping malls and office parks.

  Between 2001 and 2006, approximately nine billion rand, equivalent to around 1.2 billion US dollars at the time, was invested in the city centre. Former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani was enlisted to advise on crime reduction as the city prepared for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants stood at 43 in 2007 according to the South African Medical Research Council, fell to 29.4 in 2016, but had climbed again to 49.02 by 2024. In 2025, Johannesburg was ranked the world's fifth most dangerous city by crime rate. On the 31st of August 2023, at least 76 people died when a hijacked building caught fire in the Hillbrow district. In March 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa launched a rescue plan for the city's "rapidly declining infrastructure."

  Xenophobic violence has been another recurring feature of post-apartheid Johannesburg. On the 12th of May 2008, riots broke out in Alexandra township when locals attacked migrants from Mozambique, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, killing two people and injuring 40 others. Those riots ignited the nationwide xenophobic attacks of 2008, which produced 60 additional killings and widespread destruction of immigrant properties. Similar outbreaks occurred in 2015 and 2019. The 2010 FIFA World Cup final was held at FNB Stadium, the largest stadium in Africa, and its closing ceremony marked the final public appearance of Nelson Mandela. The 2025 G20 Johannesburg Summit was the first G20 Presidency held by an African country, drawing heads of state and government to the same city whose name means, in the languages spoken by millions of its residents, simply: the City of Gold.