Witwatersrand Gold & the Creation of South Africa (opens in new tab)

The colonial authorities responded to the news of the gold find at Witwatersrand by sending surveyors to choose a suitable nearby site where the inevitable influx of gold prospectors from all over the world could live. The site chosen would eventually become the great city of Johannesburg. Within a decade, the young town boasted 100,000 inhabitants, and by 1900, this figure had risen to 166,000. Johannesburg became the largest African city south of the Sahara. It was a wild place in the early...