Who ruled Johannesburg?

Johannesburg sits on the Witwatersrand, a long rocky ridge on the high plateau of north-eastern South Africa, about 1,750 metres above sea level. There is no river, harbour or crossroads to explain it. The city exists because of a single geological fact: the richest gold reef ever found runs beneath it, and the rush to mine that gold turned a stretch of highveld farmland into the economic heart of southern Africa within a generation.

The wider area is ancient ground for human history. The limestone caves of Sterkfontein and its neighbours, some 40 kilometres to the north-west, have yielded some of the most important hominin fossils in the world, which is why the region is called the Cradle of Humankind. Much later, Stone Age hunter-gatherers lived on the ridge, and farming communities settled the valleys to the north by the 500s CE. In the following centuries Sotho and Tswana speakers built stone-walled towns across the region and smelted iron; the remains of a furnace survive at Melville Koppies inside the modern city. In the 1830s and 1840s Afrikaner farmers of the Great Trek moved onto the highveld, and the land became part of the South African Republic, often called the Transvaal, with its capital at Pretoria.

Gold had been noticed on the ridge before, but in 1886 a prospector named George Harrison found an outcrop of the Main Reef on the farm Langlaagte. In September that year the Transvaal government under Paul Kruger declared the farms open to public digging, and a town was surveyed on a triangle of leftover state land. Its name is usually traced to two officials with the shared name Johannes. Within ten years it had about 100,000 people. It was a raw place of tents, canteens and mine headgear filled with newcomers from Britain, continental Europe, America and across Africa. Black migrant workers, recruited from across the subcontinent, did most of the underground labour under harsh contracts.

Tension between the Transvaal state and the mainly British mining interests fed the Jameson Raid of 1895 and then the South African War. British troops marched into Johannesburg on 31 May 1900, and the Transvaal was annexed. In 1910 it became part of the Union of South Africa within the British Empire. The young Mahatma Gandhi practised law in the city in the 1900s and organised Indian protests against discriminatory laws there.

The 20th-century city was shaped by racial planning. Black residents were pushed into "locations" and then, under apartheid after 1948, into distant townships south-west of the centre, later grouped as Soweto. In the 1950s the multiracial suburb of Sophiatown was bulldozed and its people moved out under the Group Areas Act. Johannesburg was also the centre of opposition: Nelson Mandela opened a law practice there with Oliver Tambo in 1952, and on 16 June 1976 schoolchildren in Soweto marched against compulsory teaching in Afrikaans. Police opened fire, and the uprising spread across the country.

After the first democratic elections in 1994, Johannesburg became the capital of the new Gauteng province, and the old court and prison on Constitution Hill became the seat of the Constitutional Court. The city's municipality has close to five million people and the wider Gauteng urban region about three times that, making it the financial and commercial centre of South Africa and one of the largest economies on the continent.