Johannesburg —Joburg, Jozi, eGoli ('the city of gold')— is South Africa's great metropolis: chaotic, energetic and full of contradictions, born of the 1886 gold rush and turned within a few decades into the economic heart of southern Africa. It doesn't have Cape Town's obvious beauty, but it has something harder to find: it's the place where you best understand the real South Africa, the South Africa of apartheid and the struggle for freedom, and of a country that keeps reinventing itself.
Many travellers use it only as a stopover on the way to Kruger or Cape Town, and miss the essentials. Joburg is home to the country's great places of memory —the Apartheid Museum, Constitution Hill and, just next door, Soweto— which turn a visit into a crash course in South African history told by the people who lived it. On top of that there's a vibrant creative scene in neighbourhoods like Maboneng and Braamfontein, with street art, weekend markets, galleries and a food scene that's buzzing.
It's also the natural base for two unmissable trips: Soweto, the township that became a symbol of resistance, and the Cradle of Humankind, the World Heritage cave complex where some of the world's most important hominid fossils were found. Joburg asks you to use common sense about safety —Uber, well-known areas, don't flash valuables— but it more than rewards anyone willing to take a closer look.
Johannesburg appeared almost overnight in 1886, when the world's largest gold deposit was discovered on the Witwatersrand: within a few years it went from mining camp to big city. Its history is one of gold, of African migrant labour and of the segregation that culminated in apartheid, but also of Soweto and the resistance that eventually brought it down. You can read the full story on the Johannesburg history page.
Read the full history ↓The gold province: the metropolis that sprang from the Witwatersrand reef, the township of Soweto where the struggle against apartheid was fought, and the administrative capital, Pretoria.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few of the world's great cities have such a precise date of birth. In 1886, a prospector named George Harrison found gold on a farm on the Witwatersrand ('the ridge of white waters'), a ridge on the inland plateau of the Boer South African Republic. This was no ordinary find: it was the largest gold deposit ever discovered, a reef stretching for dozens of kilometres underground. The news set off an instant rush. Within months, a tent camp had become a town, and the town a city.
Johannesburg, whose name is credited to officials called Johannes, grew at a dizzying pace. In barely a decade it went from not existing at all to being the largest city in southern Africa, a magnet for prospectors, financiers, engineers and workers from all over the world. Africans called it eGoli, 'the city of gold', a name that still defines it. Unlike Cape Town or the old cities of Europe, Joburg wasn't born from a port, a river or a cathedral: it was born from a seam of metal, and that logic of gold shaped everything that came after.
The Witwatersrand gold wasn't on the surface or in easy nuggets: it was deep-reef gold, locked in rock hundreds of metres underground, and getting it out took huge capital investment and a massive, cheap workforce. From that equation (concentrated capital above, cheap African labour below) came much of the social and racial structure that would dominate South Africa for the following century.
To feed the mines, the gold industry built a vast system of migrant labour: African men recruited from rural South Africa and neighbouring countries, housed far from their families in compounds (closed barracks next to the mines), on miserable wages and with no rights. That system was no accident: it was designed to guarantee a plentiful, controlled workforce, and it laid the foundations for the spatial and labour segregation the state would later formalise.
From early on, the city was organised unequally. White neighbourhoods grew with services and comforts, while the Black, Indian and mixed-race population was pushed to outlying areas with no infrastructure, subject to movement laws (the passes) that controlled where they could live and travel. The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), fought largely over control of this gold, ended with the Witwatersrand and the Transvaal in British hands and sped up Joburg's consolidation as the economic capital.
In 1910 the Union of South Africa was created, unifying the country under a white-minority government. Laws such as the Natives Land Act of 1913 stripped the African majority of their land and deepened their dependence on wage labour in the mines and cities. Johannesburg, the richest city on the continent, was built in this way on a deep inequality that was already written into its geography before the word 'apartheid' even existed.
In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the elections (in which only white people could vote) and introduced apartheid, a legal system of total racial segregation. What had until then been de facto discrimination became state policy, meticulous and brutal. The Group Areas Act assigned each 'racial group' separate areas to live in; entire Black and Indian neighbourhoods were declared 'white' and their residents forcibly removed.
The most emblematic case in Johannesburg was Sophiatown, a multiracial, culturally vibrant neighbourhood that was home to musicians and writers. From 1955 it was razed and its Black residents deported to the townships in the south-west. On the ruins, a white suburb was built and cynically named Triomf ('triumph'). At the same time, the Black population was concentrated in Soweto (South Western Townships), a huge cluster of neighbourhoods planned to supply the city with labour while keeping it separate and controlled.
Apartheid governed every part of life: separate benches, schools, hospitals, transport and toilets; the pass system that forced Africans to carry documents to enter white areas; the repression of any opposition. Johannesburg became the main stage for that system and, for that very reason, also for the struggle to bring it down. It's a story told today, without euphemism, at the Apartheid Museum and at Constitution Hill, the former prison that held figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
Johannesburg and its outskirts were the heart of the resistance to apartheid. In offices in the city centre, young lawyers Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo opened the first African-run law firm, and from here the African National Congress (ANC) organised much of its struggle. In 1955, in Kliptown, near Soweto, the Freedom Charter was proclaimed, declaring that 'South Africa belongs to all who live in it'. It would become the founding document of democratic South Africa.
The repression was fierce. The regime banned the ANC, jailed its leaders (Mandela was arrested and, after the Rivonia Trial in 1963-64, sentenced to life imprisonment) and met every protest with violence. On 16 June 1976, in Soweto, police opened fire on students peacefully protesting against Afrikaans being imposed in schools; the photographed death of young Hector Pieterson went around the world and marked a turning point. Far from snuffing out the protest, the repression spread it.
Through the 1980s, Johannesburg and its townships saw escalating mobilisation, strikes, states of emergency and repression, under growing pressure from international sanctions and the regime's isolation. The combination of internal struggle and outside pressure gradually pushed apartheid towards its end. In 1990, President F. W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and released Mandela after 27 years in prison, opening the negotiations that would bring the system to an end.
In 1994, South Africa held its first free elections with universal suffrage and Nelson Mandela became president. Johannesburg entered a new era, but it carried the scars of a century of inequality. In the years that followed, many businesses and white residents moved out of the historic centre to the north, to areas such as Sandton (today the financial district, nicknamed 'the richest square mile in Africa'), while the centre (the CBD) went through a period of decline and neglect.
Since then, the city has been going through a slow and uneven reinvention. Urban regeneration projects revived parts of the centre such as Maboneng and Braamfontein, now hubs of art, food and youth culture; the Gautrain modernised transport between the airport, Sandton and Pretoria; and a new generation of artists, chefs and entrepreneurs gave Joburg a creative energy that contrasts with its reputation as a tough city. At the same time, huge challenges remain: inequality, unemployment, crime and the spatial legacy of apartheid, which still separates the wealthy north of the city from the townships of the south.
Today Johannesburg is a metropolis of several million people, the largest and most diverse in South Africa, a crossroads of languages and cultures from across the continent. It doesn't win you over with beauty but with its intensity and its honesty: this is where you can feel South African history, with its horrors and its victories. For travellers willing to look it in the eye (to visit the Apartheid Museum, to walk through Soweto, to understand where it comes from), Joburg offers one of the richest and most necessary experiences in the whole country.
