Gold rush city that hit 100,000 in a decade
Johannesburg—Jozi, Joburg, the City of Gold—is Gauteng's capital and South Africa's largest city. The 2022 census gave the metro municipality about 4.8 million people and the wider metro about 15.1 million. Founded in 1886 after Witwatersrand gold finds, it became Africa's richest city by GDP and home to the continent's biggest stock exchange.
San hunter-gatherers used the region centuries earlier; mid-eighteenth-century Sotho-Tswana towns left stone ruins before mfecane wars cleared many settlements. Jan Gerritse Bantjes struck the main reef in June 1884 at Vogelstruisfontein; the name Johannesburg first appears on 3 October 1886, though which Johannes it honours—Joubert, Rissik, Meyer, or others—is lost. Ferreira's tented camp held some 3,000 by 1887; by the mid-1890s the boomtown topped 100,000, among history's fastest urban surges. Some mines plunge about 4,000 metres.
Mining wealth drew global migrants and sharpened Boer-British rivalry, from the failed Jameson Raid at Doornkop in January 1896 to British occupation on 30 May 1900 in the Second Boer War. Chinese labour briefly filled wartime shortages, seeding a lasting Chinese community later classed Coloured under apartheid. Anglo-American, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, headquartered here and dominated gold and diamonds. Apartheid geography fused separate cities: Soweto (South-Western Townships) as a designated Black city until 1994, epicentre of the 1976 student uprising; Sandton marketed as Africa's richest square-mile.
Zulu and Xhosa speakers call it eGoli or iGoli—place of gold. The Constitutional Court sits here even though Pretoria remains the national administrative capital. Freeways after mid-century pushed sprawl north; Hillbrow went high-rise in the late 1940s and 1950s, and Carlton Centre towers later marked the CBD. Lenasia became a major Indo-South African area under segregation. The city's story is still the story of that Witwatersrand geology. San stone-tool users left traces in the region ages before Sotho–Tswana towns rose; mfecane wars later emptied many settlements. Name origins remain disputed among several early Johannes figures, including Rissik and Joubert of the mining-rights delegation.
Source: Johannesburg
