The first residents in the region surrounding Johannesburg lived in the neighbourhood three million years ago. Some of the oldest human fossil remains in the world have been discovered in the Sterkfontein caves in the Sterkfontein valley, also called the Cradle of Humankind, just 30 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. The discoveries at the Sterkfontein limestone caves place Gauteng at the forefront of international palaeontological research.
Just over 100 years ago the Johannesburg area was an endless untouched savannah plateau.
Discovery of Gold
The discovery of Gold to the east of present-day Johannesburg by George Harrison, an Australian prospector, in March 1886 in current-day Barberton, and the even richer gold reefs of the Witwatersrand (meaning "ridge of white waters" in Afrikaans), was the reason for the birth of the city.
Historians cannot come to consesus of where Johannesburg got its name. One explanation has it that two Boer government deputies, Johan Rissik, the Surveyor General sent to select a site for the village, and Johannes Joubert, the mining commissioner sent to investigate the claims, shared the first name "Johannes" and founded the little settlement of Johannesburg. But Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, who governed Transvaal from 1883 to 1900, may be an alternative source of the name.
People from all over the world flocked to Johannesburg seeking their fortunes in an unprecedented gold rush, as the word spread like wildfire. Many were miners from the diamond shafts at Kimberley, 500 kilometres to the southwest. Soon a tented town sprawled across the dusty reef.
Johannesburg started out rough and raw, with miners huddled in makeshift shacks, colourful markets supplying food and bustle and bawdy taverns to liven up the evenings. Among the town¹s buildings were banks, boarding houses, churches, a post office, and a crude hospital. The Rand Club was established in 1887, and catered to the influential. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange was born in 1887, then just a jumble of miners' tents. The Chamber of Mines was only established two years later. The Globe theatre, Johannesburg's first, was built in 1889 and promptly burnt down. It was doggedly resurrected again two years later.
At the beginning of the 19th century the Witwatersrand gold mines attracted large numbers of black labourers from all over Africa, who were housed in compounds on the mines. Migrant workers for other industries in Johannesburg were housed in company, and municipal hostels, while domestic workers, resided at their places of work.
The Witwatersrand's spectacular gold deposits supplied over a quarter of the world's gold by 1900. These gold deposits were inconveniently tucked away deep below the earth, only surfacing in rare folds in the reef. Mining the Johannesburg gold reef required expensive machines, including ore-crushing stamp mills. A handful of large mining houses sprang up to provide the necessary investment, which came to dominate Johannesburg's economy.
Anglo Boer War
The many "uitlanders" or foreigners in Johannesburg, which generally meant British but included people from all nationalities, resented their limited voting rights, since the Boer Government controlled the territory while most investors were English. This was one of the reasons for the outbreak of the war between the British imperialists and Afrikaner nationalists.
The Second Anglo-Boer War was fought mainly over control of the valuable goldfields of the Witwatersrand, following British envy of the Transvaal Republic's stunning new riches. Cecil Rhodes, a diamond magnate and prime minister of the Cape Colony, decided to snatch Transvaal by force, with the support of the uitlanders in Johannesburg. The Boers, who controlled the region during the nineteenth century, lost the war and control of the area to the British. In the Peace of Vereeniging (1902), the Transvaal and Orange Free State were engulfed by the British Empire and blacks were disenfranchised.
Post War Life
Sir Alfred Milner, a former governor of the Cape Colony, was appointed Britain's post-war administrator for the new colonies. Milner sought to suppress Afrikaner nationalism and promote British interests. He devised a series of measures to encourage immigration from Britain and to dispirit the Afrikaners. Afrikaners' found Milner's imposition of English as the official language, to be taught in all schools, most intolerable.
Sir Alfred Milner was even harsher towards the blacks. Milner wrote in 1897, "You have only to sacrifice the nigger absolutely and the game is easy." As the governor of Transvaal, he lowered the black mineworkers' wages, at most 10% of the average white wage, even further. When the black miners resisted, Milner encouraged the immigration of thousands of Chinese, who would work at the basement-level wages the mining bosses demanded.
Milner got Sir Herbert Baker, an architect from Kent, to design a number of grand mansions in Parktown in an effort to encourage British immigrations.
Union of South Africa
When the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910, a more organised mining structure was instituted. A string of mineworkers' strikes and scattered walkouts by railway workers in the 1910s slowed production in the mines. A harsh racial system practically forced blacks and Indians to work as migrant labour on Johannesburg's gold mines, separated from their wives and children, living in hostels. To stay emotionally in contact with their home and their culture, many of the men started to practise their traditional dances, and so "Gumboot-dancing" had its origin.
In 1920, some 70,000 black mineworkers walked off the job to protest increasingly restrictive pass laws. The army forced them back to work.
White mineworkers also went on strike in 1922, but for different reasons. The Chamber of Mines decided to cut costs by replacing some white semi-skilled workers with cheaper blacks, because of post-war inflation and a falling gold price. White workers marched under the slogan, "Workers of the World Unite, and Fight for a White South Africa". Troops were again called in to subdue the "Rand revolt", and mine-bosses triumphed, but not before 200 people died in the struggle.
The South African government then moved the non-European populations into specified areas. This system created the sprawling shantytown of Soweto (South Western Townships), one of the areas where blacks were forced to live during the apartheid era. Nelson Mandela spent many years living in Soweto and his Soweto home in Orlando is currently a major tourist attraction.
During the Second World War, thousands of South African men were dispatched to fight the Germans, leaving a void in Johannesburg's urban area. Blacks flocked to jobs in the country's new manufacturing and service industries. Between 1939 and 1946, the city's black population swelled by some 70%.
Apartheid Johannesburg
The National Party Government under DF Malan passed The Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, which forbade interracial marriage, while the Immorality Act (1950) banned interracial sex. The Group Areas Act of 1950 restricted non-whites to live in the townships, leaving the choicest real estate for whites.
Despite the hardships of the institutionalisation of the long-standing segregation policy in South Africa, or "Apartheid" in Afrikaans, black culture thrived in Johannesburg. It found expression in music such as mbaqanga (a township jive) and vibrant magazines, such as Drum.
In 1955, at a conference in Kliptown near Johannesburg, the ANC's Freedom Charter was signed and ratified by the Congress of the People.
The Soweto Students' Representative Council organised protests against the use of Afrikaans in black schools, ordered by Prime Minister John Vorster, because they considered Afrikaans to be the language of their oppressors. Large-scale violence broke out when Police tried to suppress the student uprising in Soweto in 1976 by shooting into a student march. The most famous of the twenty protester and bystander victims, Hector Pieterson, is commemorated with a memorial in Soweto named in his honour.
Johannesburg Today
The regulations of apartheid were abandoned in February 1990, following economic sanctions introduced in 1985 by Britain and America.
Today black townships have been integrated into the municipal government system, and the suburbs of Johannesburg have become multiracial. Johannesburg today reflects the new South African order, and a society of which the people are justly proud.
Many businesses and commerce have migrated away from the Central Business District and southern suburbs of Johannesburg, mainly due to a rise in the crime in these areas, in favour of the northern suburbs. Serious traffic congestion and inadequate public transport, and a more favourable tax environment for landlords in the northern suburbs prior to the integration of the city are some of the other reasons for the abandonment of the centre of Johannesburg.
Recent tax incentives for real estate developers, and a rejuvenation program, aims to attract investors back to the Central Business District of Johannesburg and other South African cities.
