JOHANNESBURG

city, Gauteng province, South Africa. It is the country's chief industrial and financial metropolis. One of the youngest of the world's major cities, Johannesburg was founded in 1886, following the discovery of gold. The city was initially part of the Transvaal, an independent Afrikaner, or Boer, republic that later became one of the four provinces of South Africa. Today the city is a part of Gauteng (a Sotho word meaning Place of Gold), one of the nine provinces of South Africa. The geography of Johannesburg reflects nearly a century of racially driven social engineering that reached a climax under apartheid (literally apartness), the system of racial segregation that obtained in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The result is a city of extraordinary contrasts, of glass and steel skyscrapers and fetid shantytowns, of internationally recognized universities and widespread illiteracy, of glittering abundance and desperate poverty. city, Gauteng province, South Africa. Founded in 1886 after the discovery of gold, Johannesburg was for nearly a century the centre of South Africa's gold-mining industry. It is now the country's chief industrial and financial metropolis. The Greater Johannesburg area forms the largest urban complex in the country and one of the largest on the African continent. Johannesburg lies on the southern slopes of the Witwatersrandcommonly called the Randa rocky watershed of east-west ridges surrounded by the broad interior plateau known as the Highveld. The city's general elevation ranges from 5,700 to 5,900 feet (1,740 to 1,800 m). The area's climate is semiarid and subtropical, with a mean temperature of 55 F (13 C) in July and 75 F (24 C) in December. The city receives about 28 inches (700 mm) of rainfall annually. Johannesburg is the chief centre of South African mining, manufacturing, and finance. Gold mines lie to the south and southwest of the city. Many industries are located in the city, including plants that produce specialty steels and textiles. The city is also a centre for domestic and international banking and is the home of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Johannesburg lies in the most thickly populated part of South Africa. Until 1991 the city's population was legally segregated by colour according to South Africa's apartheid policies, so that the nonwhite groups were each restricted to residence in certain areas called townships. The largest of these was Soweto (South-Western Townships), a sprawling urban complex for Africans (blacks). Johannesburg's Indian population was restricted to the Asiatic township of Lenasia. Despite the South African government's recent abandonment of apartheid, most Africans still live in townships, and the city remains racially segregated. Johannesburg is governed by the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Board, an elective body created under the country's new constitution (199394). The board has representatives from all across the metropolitan area of Greater Johannesburg, which extends over more than 200 square miles (500 square km) and includes more than 500 suburbs and townships. The major administrative and commercial area of the city is in the vicinity of Eloff and Commissioner streets. Architectural styles are derived chiefly from Cape, European (English, Dutch, Renaissance Italian), and American models. The city's cultural institutions include the Johannesburg Art Gallery and museums with collections on South African history, military history, medicine, and archaeology. The Civic Theatre is the home of Johannesburg's opera, ballet, music, and drama. Higher education is offered by the University of Witwatersrand (1922; mainly for English-speaking students) and Rand Afrikaans University (1966). A branch of Vista University opened in Soweto in 1982. Advanced technical education is offered at Technikon Witwatersrand. Teacher-training courses are available at several different colleges of education. Local public transport is provided by an expanding system of motorways and, in the suburbs and other areas, by bus services and commuter railways. Johannesburg is the meeting place of roads from major towns in South Africa. The city's large railway station constitutes the heart of the nation's rail system. Johannesburg International Airport is located 14 miles (22 km) northeast of the city. Pop. (1985) city, 632,369; (1991) metropolitan area, 1,916,063. Additional reading Digby Ricci (compiler and ed.), Reef of Time: Johannesburg in Writing (1986), contains a wide-ranging collection of recent and historical writings about the city. An illustrated discussion of the history, institutions, and culture of the city (though from a decidedly white perspective) can be found in Johannesburg: One Hundred Years (1986). A.P. Cartwright, The Corner House: The Early History of Johannesburg (1965), discusses history from the perspective of the great mining houses. Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 18861914, 2 vol. (1982), a classic work, charts the social struggles unleashed by the opening of the Witwatersrand goldfields. Ellen Hellmann, Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard (1948, reissued 1969), vividly describes the squalid, overcrowded conditions that prevailed among blacks in Johannesburg during and after World War II. Can Themba, The Will to Die (1972, reissued 1982), collects writings from black Johannesburg in the 1950s by the era's leading black journalist. Peter Kallaway and Patrick Pearson (eds.), Johannesburg: Images and Continuities: A History of Working Class Life Through Pictures, 18851935 (1986), is the finest collection of old Johannesburg photographs. Arnold Benjamin, Lost Johannesburg (1979), pays photographic tribute to Johannesburg's disappearing architectural landmarks. James T. Campbell History The early period, 18531930 Boomtown Johannesburg's early history is the story of gold. In 1853 Pieter Jacob Marais, a South African prospector, recovered alluvial gold from the Jukskei River, north of what would become Johannesburg. The years that followed brought several modest strikes, but the Witwatersrand Main Reef eluded searchers until 1886, when George Harrison, an Australian prospector, chanced upon an outcropping on a farm called Langlaagte. Ironically, Harrison failed to appreciate the significance of his find: he sold his claim for 10 and embarked for the goldfields of the eastern Transvaal region. Others were more farsighted. By mid-1886 an army of diggers had descended on the Witwatersrand, hacking away with picks and shovels along a line that soon stretched 40 miles west to east. In response to this influx, the government of the Transvaal, the small Boer republic under whose jurisdiction the Witwatersrand fell, dispatched two men, Vice President Christiaan Johannes Joubert and Deputy Surveyor-General Johann Rissik, to inspect the goldfields and identify a suitable city site. The new city was called Johannesburg, apparently in their honour. As the scale of the gold deposits became apparent, Johannesburg became the 19th century's last great boomtown. Fortune hunters from as far afield as Australia and California joined skilled Cornish and Welsh miners, who brought to South Africa a strong trade-union tradition. Destitute Afrikaners, driven from their rural homes by debt and drought, clustered in slums such as Brickfields and Vrededorp. Africans from every corner of the southern African subcontinent migrated to the city, often in large ethnic cohorts, adding a dozen more voices to the cultural and linguistic babel. Most Africans worked on the mines, completing six- and nine-month contracts before returning to their rural homes. Others settled permanently in the swelling city, carving out niches as rickshaw drivers, domestic workers, and washermen. By 1896 Johannesburg had become a city of 100,000 people. Conceived in avarice, the young city nurtured every species of vice. Banks and boardinghouses jostled for space with more than 500 saloons. Criminal syndicates with roots in New York City and London found fertile soil in Johannesburg. The predominantly male population provided a robust market for prostitution. Ancient Ninevah and Babylon have been revived, a visiting journalist wrote in 1913. Johannesburg is their twentieth century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squalor and unfathomable squander. Consolidation of the gold industry The gold deposits of the Main Reef, for all their uncanny dependability, were also extremely low-grade. Tons of the pebbly conglomerate had to be mined, crushed, amalgamated with mercury (later cyanide), and retorted in order to produce even an ounce or two of gold. This fact, combined with gold's internationally fixed price, produced a perennial problem of profitability, which increased exponentially as the reef dipped away to the south to depths of hundreds, and ultimately thousands, of feet. (South African gold mines would eventually reach depths of over two miles, making them far and away the deepest mines in the world.) All these factors promoted a rapid consolidation of the industry. By the mid-1890s control of the entire Witwatersrand gold industry rested in the hands of a half-dozen massive mining houses, each of which commanded thousands of workers and millions of dollars in capital, most of it raised from investors in Europe and the United States. Control of these companies lay with a small number of so-called Randlords, men such as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, and J.B. Robinson, who had made their fortunes on the Kimberley diamond fields and well understood the exigencies of large-scale industrial mining. Working under the auspices of the newly formed Chamber of Mines, the Randlords strove to establish the profitability of their industry by rationalizing production and relentlessly squeezing down costs, especially the cost of labour.