Johannesburg
South Africa's largest city, the gold-built economic capital
Johannesburg rose in a single generation out of bare highveld grassland after prospectors struck the world's richest goldfield beneath it in 1886. Within decades a mining camp had become the largest and wealthiest city in sub-Saharan Africa, a place locals call Jozi or eGoli, the place of gold. Today its metropolitan area holds well over six million people and generates a sizable share of South Africa's economic output, a sprawling, fast-talking commercial capital ringed by the pale yellow mine-dumps that are the leftover spoil of the reef that made it.
The city sits high on the Witwatersrand, a ridge of the interior plateau more than seventeen hundred meters above sea level, which gives it a crisp, sunny climate and dramatic summer thunderstorms. There is no river or harbor to explain its location — only the gold-bearing reef running east to west beneath the surface. Johannesburg grew in a rough grid that fragmented under apartheid into a patchwork of segregated suburbs and townships, most famously Soweto to the southwest, a geography of separation whose legacy still shapes the metropolis.
Johannesburg was the crucible of South Africa's twentieth-century struggle. Soweto's 1976 student uprising and the courtroom and prison ordeals of the anti-apartheid movement unfolded in and around the city, and the Constitutional Court now sits on the site of a former prison at Constitution Hill. Stripped of much of its deep-level mining, the modern economy turns on finance, services and trade, with the continent's leading stock exchange headquartered in the northern node of Sandton. It remains a magnet for migrants from across the region, a restless, unequal and inventive city at the heart of southern Africa.