Johannesburg

I

Introduction

Johannesburg, city in north-eastern South Africa, capital of Gauteng Province. It was founded in 1886 to service the Witwatersrand goldfields, then the world’s largest known gold deposits and the “richest spot on Earth”, as a British government minister of the time called it. It is now the centre of one of the largest urban complexes in sub-Saharan Africa, a cluster of cities stretching from Pretoria south to Vereeniging and from Springs west to Krugersdorp. Population 3,225,796 (2001).

II

Economy

Nearly all gold-mining today occurs elsewhere on the Witwatersrand, although corporate headquarters remain in Johannesburg, as do the great yellow slag heaps that are perhaps the city’s most striking feature. Its manufactured goods include chemicals, paper, textiles, printed materials, electrical equipment, and processed food. Many people are employed in commerce and in service industries, and the city is also a major financial centre. The important Johannesburg Stock Exchange was founded in 1887. The city is served by several airports, principally Jan Smuts International Airport, and is a major railway junction.

III

Places of Interest

Immediately north of the gold-bearing tracts lies the centre of Johannesburg, situated at an elevation of about 1,750 m (5,740 ft). This section was laid out as a grid in the 1880s to maximize the number of lots, particularly corner ones, so that the government could obtain the greatest possible rent. The land was initially rented rather than sold because it was expected that the mining community would be abandoned as soon as the gold was worked out. Events proved otherwise, however, and Johannesburg is now a city of skyscrapers. In the city centre some of the small blocks (approximately 60 m/200 ft square) and narrow streets, which now cause traffic congestion, have become the heart of the commercial area around Commissioner Street. Other important buildings are on and near Eloff Street, the main shopping area, running south of the city’s railway station. To the north of the station is the Hillbrow section, which is a cosmopolitan, formerly whites-only area where high-rise apartments have been built since the 1950s. (Until the South African government dismantled the system of apartheid in the early 1990s, people generally lived in communities segregated by a system of racial classification.) Further north are fashionable, largely white suburbs such as Houghton.

South of the old mine lands, which effectively split the city, are some less affluent white residential developments. More notably, to the south-west lies the black township of Soweto. Beyond Soweto are much smaller, ethnically segregated Indian and Coloured (mixed-race) townships.

Among the important features of Johannesburg are the City Hall, the Public Library, the Stock Exchange, Rissik Street Post Office, and the Civic Theatre complex. Conspicuous are two telecommunications towers 232 m (760 ft) high, both taller than the lofty Carlton Centre office building.

The principal institutions of higher education in Johannesburg are the University of the Witwatersrand (1922) and the University of Johannesburg (2005). Museums in the metropolitan area include the Johannesburg Art Gallery; the Africana Museum, with displays on the history and ethnology of southern Africa; the Museum of South African Rock Art; the Geological Museum; and the James Hall Museum of Transport. The Library of the South African Institute of Race Relations is an important research facility. Gold Reef City, a cultural centre designed to recreate the atmosphere of a Victorian-era mining town, is a popular attraction. Among the city’s performing-arts facilities is the Market Theatre, a complex that includes several theatres as well as art galleries.

IV

History

Within a year of its foundation in 1886 the population of the freebooting mining camp reached 10,000, half of whom were immigrant whites (mainly from Great Britain) and half non-whites from the surrounding country. Soon the new city took on a more settled ambience—by 1889 it had horse-drawn trams, by 1890 electric lights, and in 1892 a railway linking Johannesburg to Cape Town was built; as a result, by 1895 Johannesburg had a population of 100,000. The mines emerged largely unscathed from the South African War (1899-1902), and the city continued to grow rapidly, although not without conflict. Union unrest reached a high point in the 1922 Rand Revolt, in which armed white workers, fearful of being replaced in the mines by lower-paid non-white workers, staged a bloody strike that was ended only by the intervention of government troops. In 1928 Johannesburg was chartered as a city. During and after World War II economic growth brought rapid black immigration, giving rise to extensive shanty towns such as Vrededorp (Sophiatown). Beginning in the late 1950s these communities were demolished, and many blacks were moved to Soweto. After apartheid had shaped life in Johannesburg for nearly half a century, the abolition of the last of the apartheid laws in 1991 prompted increased housing and education opportunities for blacks in the city.