Johannesburg is the largest city in South Africa and the chief industrial and financial metropolis of the country, located in Gauteng province on the Highveld. The city's origin differs from that of most large urban centres: it did not grow up beside a river or coast, but on the Witwatersrand ridge, where gold-bearing rock was discovered in 1886. Its name, nicknames and street pattern still reflect that origin, and its economy continues to rest on mining, banking and corporate headquarters. This entry follows the city from its geological basis and gold-rush founding through the migrant labour system, segregation and apartheid-era planning, and the anti-apartheid struggle, to its post-1994 municipal government, urban structure, economy, infrastructure, environment, culture and social challenges. It also covers the city's place in the wider region, linking it to Africa, South Africa, urbanization and economics.
The article treats Johannesburg both as a case study in how a resource discovery can produce a city within a few years and as a place where the long-term effects of that origin remain visible. Mine dumps, spatial divisions inherited from apartheid, dense townships beside wealthy business districts, and the management of water and electricity all bear on the city's current condition. Figures on population, economic output and land use vary between sources and between census years, and the entry relies on the most recent official statistics where they are available.
Name, nicknames and etymology
The city is known by several everyday names. It is colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "the City of Gold", and residents are commonly called Joburgers. Its African-language name is eGoli. eGoli is a Zulu name for Johannesburg that translates to "place of gold." The Zulu orthography is iGoli, and the Xhosa form is also eGoli (Xhosa: eGoli; Zulu: iGoli). The infobox of the main article also lists "Gauteng" with the same translation, which reflects the gold-based identity of the wider province rather than the city alone.
The short form Jozi has a documented history of its own. A 1948 study of Zulu usage recorded that "Goli," the place of gold, and "Jozi," short for Johannesburg, are the modern Zulu abbreviations. Dictionary entries describe Jozi as a colloquial nickname used especially among isiZulu speakers, while Jo'burg is the more common form in English-language usage.
The "City of Gold" epithet comes from the discoveries on the Witwatersrand. It earned the name after major gold deposits were discovered in the Witwatersrand in 1886. The nickname has remained in circulation because it links the city's identity to the mining economy that founded it. It appears in popular travel writing, and in reference works alongside labels such as "Africa's Manhattan". In more institutional settings, the nickname appears in industry publications. A Chamber of Mines–linked fact sheet on Main Street, for example, describes the city as Egoli, the City of Gold or Joburg.
The formal name dates from 1886. One source records that on 3 October 1886 the name Johannesburg was first used, while another states that in October, it was given a name: Johannesburg. The settlement was laid out on land known as Randjeslaagte, and its early development was closely tied to the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). The settlement is generally said to have been named after two officials of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), Christiaan Johannes Joubert and Johannes Rissik, who both worked in land surveying and mapping. The attribution is disputed. The official reply from Pretoria names Rissik and Joubert, but several men bearing the name Johann(es) occupied positions of authority in the republic at the time. Other candidates include President Paul Kruger and the first government official in the area, Jan Meyer. Because precise records for the choice of name were lost, the question remains open.
The name is a compound. Its first element is the common Dutch given name Johannes. The second element is the archaic Afrikaans word for 'fortified city', which gives the name a meaning of "Johannes' town" in Afrikaans. The English form keeps the same spelling and pronunciation rules are anglicised, with the stress on the first syllable. The name is also linked to the surrounding geography. The Afrikaans name of the ridge on which the gold was found is "white waters ridge", and the city's first mining district was centred on the ridge system known as the Witwatersrand. Those ridges, which are called the Witwatersrand, or "Rand", gave the gold field its name, and the city's identity is inseparable from them.
Street names record the city's mining origins. The first street laid out was named after a mining official. Jan Eloff was the first civilian commissioner and the second mining commissioner in Johannesburg, and in time, twelve streets in the Greater Johannesburg area were named after him. Other streets commemorate prospectors and promoters, such as Hans Sauer, after whom Sauer Street is named, and Colonel Ignatius Philip Ferreira, after whom a side street in Marshalltown is named. The main street of the mining district is the street occupied by the country's mining houses, which is called Main Street.
Setting and physical geography
Highveld plateau and elevation
Johannesburg lies on the Highveld, the broad, grassy plateau in the interior of South Africa. The city's elevation ranges from 5,700 to 5,930 feet (1,740 to 1,810 metres). The highest point within the city is Observatory Ridge, at 1,808 metres (5,932 ft) above sea level, in the suburb of Observatory. Because the Highveld as a whole sits at roughly 1,500 to 2,100 metres, the city's altitude places it in the cooler upper part of the South African interior.
The Witwatersrand ridge and drainage
The city is built on the Witwatersrand, a prominent ridge that traverses the city from east to west, effectively dividing it into northern and southern regions. The ridge's crest is a drainage divide. Sources describe it in two ways: some place it between the drainages into the Indian and Atlantic oceans, while others name the watershed between the Vaal and Limpopo rivers. These descriptions are consistent, because the Limpopo drains toward the Indian Ocean and the Vaal ultimately joins the Atlantic-bound system. Terrain falls away on either side, and the former Central Business District is located on the south side of the prominent ridge. The northern edge is a scarp: the scarp forms the northern edge of a 7-to-10-kilometre-wide plateau (or ridge) which rises about 200 m (660 ft) above the surrounding plains of the Highveld. Suburbs such as Observatory, Linksfield Ridge and Upper Houghton sit along this scarp. Passes such as Munro Drive cut through the Linksfield Ridge, which made the ridge a physical barrier that road and suburban links had to negotiate. Water was always scarce on this divide: being on the watershed of two river systems, the area was always short of water for the growing industry and community.
Gauteng and the capitals
Johannesburg is the capital of Gauteng, which is only 1.5% of the country's land area yet the most populous province in South Africa, with more than a quarter (26%) of the national population. The province's area is only about 17,000 km², and Gauteng is South Africa's smallest province, but also the most densely populated. Pretoria, by contrast, is in the same province but is South Africa's Administrative Capital, but it is not the Capital of the Province. Pretoria serves as the executive capital, while Cape Town is the legislative capital and Bloemfontein the judicial capital.
Climate and grassland
The city has a subtropical highland climate with mild, dry winters and warm, wet summers. Rain falls mainly in the warm half of the year: the city averages 713mm of rainfall annually, nearly all falling during the October-March summer thunderstorm season. Other sources give somewhat different totals, such as an annual rainfall of 760 millimetres, so the figure should be read as approximate. Summer storms are typically brief, while winters are dry and clear. Winter from May to August is the dry season. The days are mild and filled with brilliant sunshine but the nights can get quite chilly often dropping close to freezing. Altitude moderates the summer heat, and it also sharpens the temperature gap between day and night. The surrounding landscape is mostly open grassland, with a flat to gently rolling plateau covered by grasslands. In a climate with summer rain and dry winters, the grasses that cover the Highveld dry out in winter and green up quickly after the first storms, which shaped the open, treeless character of the early landscape.
Witwatersrand geology and gold deposits
The gold of the Witwatersrand is hosted in the Witwatersrand Supergroup, a thick sedimentary succession. The gold occurs in coarse-grained conglomerates in the upper portions of this sequence, which holds roughly 7,000 m of sediment. In these beds the metal is associated with uranium, quartz, carbon seams, phyllosilicates and pyrite. The principal gold-bearing layers, primarily the Main Reef and the Carbon Leader Reef, are conglomerate horizons of quartz pebbles cemented together, and this conglomerate rock contains most of the gold in the basin's sedimentary rocks. Early miners initially assumed the gold lay in an old riverbed. Later work showed that the conglomerate was part of a sedimentary succession, and it was traced east and west for a continuous distance of 50 km, becoming known as the Central Rand Gold Field. The reefs are generally tabular, with varying dips.
The basin itself is far larger than the Rand. Its elliptical outline stretches over an arc of roughly 400 km across the Free State, North West and Gauteng provinces. It lies on the Kaapvaal Craton, and it is covered by younger sedimentary and volcanic rocks, such as those of the Ventersdorp and Karoo Supergroups. Mining therefore follows the reefs down-dip, away from their outcrops. The strata are not uniform around the arc, and the sequence of gold-bearing sedimentary rocks occurs in a wide arc surrounding the Vredefort Dome.
The origin of the gold has been contested for more than a century. The placer model holds that gold was eroded from a pre-existing source and carried into the basin with other sediments that formed the conglomerate strata, and wind and wave action further concentrated it near an ancient shoreline. The hydrothermal model instead proposes that hot fluids from deep within the Earth's crust carried the gold along faults and fractures within the basin conglomerates long after they had consolidated into rock. Evidence cited by both sides includes the texture of the grains. Placer supporters point to rounded pyrite and gold, which they attribute to abrasion in streams, while hydrothermal supporters argue that dissolved sulfur could replace oxygen in rounded magnetite grains and so create rounded pyrite. Another line of argument is that detailed petrographic studies often show that the gold is late in the paragenetic sequence, which has supported hydrothermal interpretations. Many recent reviews favour a hybrid position: the modified placer model is generally preferred, with the hydrothermal model still in contention, and in this view gold was first deposited detrally and then remobilised. A 1990s study by contrast concluded that the gold and associated uranium mineralisation is hydrothermal in origin and postdates a regional high-temperature alteration event.
The so-called Golden Arc is a related but separate concept. Its best-known usage describes the gold-bearing belt running from Johannesburg toward Welkom, which scientific studies have linked to a former large inland lake, into which silt and alluvial gold settled. In the depositional model, braided rivers carried sediment from surrounding highlands to the edge of an inland sea or large lake, where clay, sand and gravel were deposited. Heavier sediments, such as large quartz pebbles and heavy minerals, settled first and built gravel-rich deltas near the shoreline, while sand and clay were carried farther out. The term has also been applied to a hinterland concept, in which the arc of gold-bearing rock lies north and west of the basin and could have supplied its gold.
Extracting the gold has been limited mainly by depth. Shallow, rich ground was worked first, and the rich, shallow parts of the Witwatersrand were found and mined long ago. As mines followed the reefs down-dip, the reefs dipped steeply and required deep shaft sinking, advanced pumping to handle water inflows, and new metallurgical processes, notably the cyanide leaching method developed in the 1880s. Working conditions worsened with depth. Special acclimatisation programmes were introduced in the mid-1960s, when the mines were around 2 km deep. Today some mines in the Witwatersrand are among the deepest in the world, with operations at 4 km below surface, and underground ambient temperatures well in excess of 50 °C. The world's deepest mine, the Mponeng gold mine, previously known as Western Deep Levels #1 Shaft, reaches depths of around 2.5–4 kilometres below the surface. Engineering responses have included stronger ground control, since rock mechanics defines the depth to which minerals may be extracted economically, and blasting methods such as the "burn cut", which opens a free face for the main blast. Some researchers argue that more than a billion ounces remain unmined due to low grades or technical challenges, such as the significant depths to which the reefs extend.
Pre-1886 landscape and settlement
The Witwatersrand ridge and the surrounding Highveld were occupied for centuries before European prospectors arrived. The area was first inhabited by San hunter-gatherers. From around the 13th century, Bantu-speaking groups moved south from central Africa and gradually encroached on San territory. By the mid-18th century the wider region was largely settled by Sotho–Tswana communities, whose villages, chiefdoms and towns extended across what is now the Transvaal. Archaeological work by Revil Mason of the University of the Witwatersrand dated Late Iron Age sites in the Johannesburg area to roughly the 12th to 18th centuries. Many of these sites contain the remains of iron-smelting furnaces and Sotho–Tswana mine workings, which indicates that the region's mineral resources were exploited before Europeans arrived. The settlement pattern was not static. Iron Age farming communities had moved onto the higher interior grasslands from the 11th century, and the people living there changed over time, so the later landscape reflects several successive phases of occupation rather than a single one. (See South Africa for the broader regional sequence.)
The farming settlement that preceded the city was a product of the Great Trek. After the Voortrekkers left the Cape Colony in the 1830s and 1840s, European pastoralists also began settling the Transvaal. Each burgher (citizen) was entitled to at least one farm of about 1,500 morgen, roughly 3,100 acres. Some of these holdings later became the sites of the city's core districts, among them Langlaagte, Turffontein, Doornfontein and Braamfontein. The Transvaal was organised as the South African Republic (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek, ZAR), one of two Boer republics alongside the Orange Free State. Its administrative centre was Pretoria, while towns such as Rustenburg served the surrounding farming districts. Before the gold discoveries the Witwatersrand was sparsely settled. One estimate puts the Transvaal's population at about 40,000 white, mainly Dutch-speaking immigrants and some 300,000 indigenous residents, of whom only about 600 white residents farmed the Witwatersrand region itself. The Transvaal's economy was largely rural, and its towns were small.
Gold had already been found in other parts of the Transvaal before 1886, and this shaped expectations among prospectors. A discovery at Stinkhoutboom farm in 1879 led to the first goldfields in South Africa, and further finds followed near Barberton and Pilgrim's Rest. These rushes produced boom towns that were often short-lived. Prospectors also searched the Witwatersrand in the early 1880s. The first recorded find there was made by Jan Gerrit Bantjes in June 1884 on the farm Vogelstruisfontein. The Struben brothers followed in September 1884 with the Confidence Reef on the farm Wilgespruit, which is the first site of payable gold on the Witwatersrand. These events are treated in detail in the next section, but they explain why the district's farms were already being prospected before the Main Reef was found in 1886.
Ferreira's Camp, the tent settlement that became the nucleus of early Johannesburg, was built on land that had been part of a Boer farm. The camp occupied the northern part of the farm Turffontein. On 14 July 1886 Colonel Ignatius Ferreira and J. P. Meyer leased this portion from the farm's owner. Ferreira, a former soldier and fortune-seeker of Portuguese descent, arrived on the Witwatersrand in June 1886 and erected a reed hut. As prospectors gathered, he laid out tents in orderly lines along the roadways, and he informally kept order in the camp before government officials arrived. The settlement grew quickly, reaching about 3,000 inhabitants by August 1886. Two other camps, Natal Camp near present-day Jeppestown and Paarl's (Afrikaner) Camp, also took in diggers. Ferreira's Camp was later absorbed into the new town. In 1986, during construction of a bank headquarters in Simmonds Street, workers uncovered a stope that was probably one of Ferreira's own early mine workings.
The Republic's government was closely involved in these developments. Its officials were concerned about the influx of mainly British prospectors, known as uitlanders, who by the end of the decade were thought to outnumber the Boer population of the Transvaal. Officials saw this as a threat to the Republic's independence. This tension between a Boer state and a fast-growing foreign mining population would shape the city's politics for the next decade.
Gold rush and founding of the city (1884–1899)
The earliest recorded gold find on the Witwatersrand is usually credited to Jan Gerrit Bantjes, who in June 1884 found gold on the farm Vogelstruisfontein. The first recorded discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand was made by Jan Gerrit Bantjes in June 1884, on the farm Vogelstruisfontein. The strike that set off the rush came two years later. Today the consensus credits George Harrison, an Australian prospector, with exposing the Main Reef at Langlaagte, but accounts differ on the month. Today the consensus holds that credit for the discovery of the main gold reef is attributed to George Harrison, whose findings on the farm Langlaagte were made in July 1886, either through accident or systematic prospecting. Other accounts give February 1886. Harrison is said to have sold his claim for £10. The site of his find is now George Harrison Park.
Prospectors quickly converged on the area. Ignatius Ferreira arrived on the Witwatersrand in June 1886, and erected a reed hut on land on the farm Turffontein, and around his position a tented settlement called Ferreira's Camp took shape. Diggers then petitioned the Transvaal government to proclaim the reef a goldfield, and the proclamation of the goldfields occurred on 9 September. President Paul Kruger declared the area, now known as Johannesburg, open for public diggings on September 20 1886.
The town itself was planned in the months that followed. The government sent two officials, Christiaan Joubert and Johann Rissik, to inspect the goldfields and identify a suitable city site. The settlement was laid out on a triangular wedge of "uitvalgrond" (area excluded when the farms were surveyed) named Randjeslaagte, situated between the farms Doornfontein to the east, Braamfontein to the west and Turffontein to the south. The name Johannesburg is recorded as having been given on 3 October 1886, and survey work on the plots followed in November of that year.
Growth in the first years was extremely fast. Within about 15 months of being named, the settlement had 14 producing mines and 93 stamp mills. The stamp batteries, which crushed ore so that gold could be recovered, were largely imported from British engineering works and carried inland by wagon from the coast. Early memoirs describe people unable to sleep because of the noise of the stamps, which ran day and night. Dust and noise pushed the wealthier residents northward, and the first residential townships beyond the mining area, Doornfontein among them, were laid out in 1887. Output rose quickly; the town's 1888 gold production reached 243,152 ounces.
Financial institutions appeared alongside the mines. Unregulated share trading had begun in the camp as early as 1886, and the first share exchange occurred in a miner's tent at Ferreira's Camp. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange was formally founded on 8 November 1887 by Benjamin Wollan. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange was created on 8 November 1887 to help mining companies raise capital. Mining companies depended on joint-stock companies, which became a significant vehicle for combining wealth and spreading risk in the young mining sector. The exchange opened for business in January 1888 with 122 members. Some sources date the opening of a Johannesburg stock exchange to 1893, which likely reflects a later formal institution.
By the late 1890s the settlement had become a large urban centre. Sources differ on the timing of the 100,000 population mark: one places it within a decade of the discovery of gold in Johannesburg, while another gives 1896. Migration from Britain was significant, and between 1885 and 1898, 8,600 people relocated from Britain to southern Africa, the majority of whom settled in Johannesburg. Early housing was makeshift. Initially, there was no corrugated iron for housing; instead, people lived in hartbeeshuise, mud-daubed reed homes or tents. Corrugated iron structures were then imported from England, and by the late 1890s brick and mortar buildings two to three storeys high had replaced most of them. Even early brick buildings were often demolished and rebuilt within the first decade as the town consolidated.
Mining labour and migrant workforce
The Witwatersrand mines depended on a labour force recruited from a wide area. The mines tried to extend their labour recruiting areas to West Africa, to India, Italy and Armenia, even to the West Indies, and the chronic labour shortage of this period resulted in the ill-fated scheme for the importation of Chinese labour.
Compounds and the migrant system
The compound was the central institution of this labour regime. The tightly controlled closed compound, where workers' ability to leave before their contracts expired was greatly restricted, originated on the Kimberley diamond mines from about 1885 and was later replicated on the gold mines. Recruitment was centralised through the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), more popularly Wenela, which was set up by the gold mines as a recruiting agency. Its depots had administrative and medical staff and a "barracks" to house recruits both before departure and on their return. Recruits were often taught Fanagalo, the lingua franca of Southern Africa, before learning the basics of mining. Contracts were usually six months, but many men spent their entire working lives as migrant workers.
Historians often describe the system as a way of reconciling two demands: the need for cheap labour in the mines and cities, and the ideology that workers should not reside there on a permanent basis. Scale grew quickly. One account states that by 1899, 13 years after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, the gold mines employed 100 000 black migrants. Another source gives a much higher figure, claiming there were over one million of them in the gold mines by 1899, so the estimates differ considerably. When the Anglo-Boer War disrupted operations in 1899, thousands of workers were left stranded; on 6 October 1899, approximately 7,000–8,000 African workers travelled on foot from Johannesburg to the Natal border in an organised march.
Chinese indentured labour, 1904–1910
After failing to find a satisfactory local alternative, the Chamber of Mines, the controlling mine body in the Witwatersrand, focused on China. Following agreements reached in May 1904, 63 695 Chinese indentured labourers were imported to work as unskilled labourers on the Witwatersrand from 1904 to 1910. They were recruited on 3-year contracts, and then repatriated. The ordinance governing them provided for return at the employer's cost; according to one 1904 parliamentary exchange, they were obliged to reside on the premises. The scheme was contested in Britain: in the House of Lords, critics questioned whether the arrangements differed in substance from earlier indenture systems, while defenders argued that the spirit and the object of these Ordinances were wholly different according to the critics' side of the debate. Repatriation began in 1907, and with the commencement of the repatriation of Chinese indentured labourers from 1907 to 1910, the scheme wound down.
Wage and racial hierarchies
Pay and job access followed racial lines. White miners, on average, received more than ten times the wage of a Black miner. The mine owners kept labour costs down partly because the Witwatersrand deposits were low-grade and labour/machine intensive. Unlike the White miners, Black miners were not permitted to form trade unions. White unions also ensured the mine owners did not employ cheaper African labour for skilled positions. These arrangements reinforced the segregated order that later shaped the city's residential and social geography.
Health and working conditions
Dust exposure was a central occupational hazard, with high levels of silica exposure on the Witwatersrand documented in medical studies. Silicosis, known as miners' phthisis, became a major cause of death. Historians note that the disease was ironically nick-named the "white death" when it appeared in an accelerated form among African mineworkers during and after the Anglo-Boer War. A medical argument held that the short contracts of African migrant workers safeguarded them from contracting accelerated silicosis, a claim later studies were used to test. In a 1997 autopsy series, the prevalence of silicosis was 18,8% of black and 17,6% of white gold miners. The gold mines were responsible for 93% of the cases of silicosis in this series.
Silicosis also raised the risk of tuberculosis. Gold miners with radiological silicosis are three to four times more likely to develop pulmonary tuberculosis than miners without it. Later HIV infection compounded the problem: combined with a high prevalence of HIV infection among miners (of the order of 20% to 30%), the pulmonary tuberculosis incidence rate has risen to extraordinary levels. A later study reported that the crude proportion of silicosis among black miners increased from 0.04 in 1975 to 0.40 in 2012.
Anglo-Boer War and early 20th-century politics
War and the change of control
The Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) was fought between the British Empire and the two Boer republics, the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Johannesburg was the Transvaal's most valuable city, and its mining economy had already caused friction before the war. Tensions over the political rights of foreign mining residents (Uitlanders) led to the failed Jameson Raid of 1895–96, which was halted at the Doornkop ridge on the city's western edge. The British offensive of May 1900 returned to the same ground. Boer forces made a stand at Doornkop from 28 to 30 May and were defeated. British troops entered Johannesburg on 31 May, and the Boers, who avoided pitched battles, abandoned the city without a major fight. Pretoria fell on 5 June. The Transvaal was annexed on 1 September 1900, and the British renamed the republic "the Transvaal." Boer resistance continued as a guerrilla campaign, and the war ended with the peace settlement of 31 May 1902. British military administration and the mining houses' demand for stable labour and capital then shaped the reconstruction of the Rand.
Union and the mining economy
The Union of South Africa was established on 31 May 1910, joining the Cape, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony under a single state. The constitutional settlement located the executive in Pretoria and the parliament in Cape Town, so Johannesburg held no national seat. Its political weight rested on finance rather than on office. Gold from the Witwatersrand supplied a large share of the new state's export earnings, and the Chamber of Mines, which represented the principal mining houses, was one of the most influential lobbies in the country. Mine owners' decisions on wages, recruitment and job categories therefore had consequences that extended beyond the city. The economic bargain between capital, the state and white labour became the central political question of the Union's early decades.
The 1922 Rand Revolt
The gold price fell from 130 shillings an ounce in 1919 to 95 shillings in December 1921. The Chamber of Mines responded by abandoning a 1918 agreement that had reserved certain semi-skilled positions for white workers. The Chamber proposed replacing about 2,000 white semi-skilled miners with lower-paid African labour, and it announced the change for 1 February 1922. Strikes began in January, and the Action Group, a faction within the white labour movement, took control of the protest, armed some miners and erected barricades. The strike became a general strike on 6 March and turned into an armed uprising in Johannesburg. Martial law was declared on 10 March, and the government of Jan Smuts used artillery, aircraft and cavalry, together with volunteer commando units, to crush the revolt. More than 200 people died. Smuts's handling of the crisis cost him support, and he lost the 1924 general election to a Nationalist–Labour coalition. The episode also reshaped policy. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 and later statutes entrenched the statutory colour bar, which reserved skilled work for whites, and the state moved toward a more systematic programme of segregation in employment and in the city.
Gandhi and Indian political organisation
Mahatma Gandhi, who had first arrived in South Africa in 1893, moved his practice to Johannesburg in 1903. He opened a law office on Rissik Street and was the first Indian to practise law in the city. In the same year, he helped found the Transvaal British Indian Association in Johannesburg, and the Indian community's political organisation in the Transvaal developed around that association and the Transvaal Indian Congress. The Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance of August 1906 required Indians, including children above eight, to register, submit fingerprints and carry certificates. On 11 September 1906, a mass meeting of roughly 3,000 Indians at the Empire Theatre resolved to defy the law by passive resistance. Gandhi named this method satyagraha there, and the campaign lasted about eight years. Gandhi was imprisoned in the Johannesburg Fort in January 1908. In January 1908, Transvaal Colonial Secretary Smuts accepted a compromise under which Indians would register voluntarily, but Smuts reversed course within a week. In August 1908, registration certificates were burned at the Hamidia Mosque in Johannesburg. In 1910, Gandhi established the Tolstoy Farm on the city's outskirts to train satyagrahis.
Apartheid-era segregation and spatial planning
The apartheid state built on a spatial order that Johannesburg had been developing since the early twentieth century. The municipal planning of the 1920s and 1930s already sought to place African residents on the outskirts. The Urban Areas Act of 1923 provided the legal basis for this, and it was used to push black residence into zones separated from white suburbs by features such as railway lines, rivers, industrial land or highways, a arrangement often called a cordon sanitaire. After 1948 this older practice was systematised under national policy, and the city's housing, work permits and land rules were made to serve a racially ordered economy.
Influx control was the mechanism that limited where Africans could legally live. Under the pass system, an African man or woman had to carry documents proving a right to be in an urban area, and officials used these documents to remove people who lacked permission to stay. Men were generally admitted as contract workers for a limited period, while their families were expected to remain in the rural reserves. Women faced particularly severe restrictions, because the law made it much harder for them to obtain urban residence rights, housing or work, and the pass system became a focus of protest. The statutes that formed this system were not removed until 1986, when the pass laws and the influx control laws were repealed.
The Group Areas Act of 1950 extended segregation from labour and movement to land itself. It divided urban areas into zones assigned to racial groups for residence and business, and it restricted the ownership and occupation of property to the group designated for each area. Sources give the Act's passage date variously as 27 April and 7 July 1950, and it took effect in stages from 1951. It was amended almost every year and re-enacted in 1957 and 1966, and the final version was repealed only in 1991. In practice, people who lived in areas designated for whites were relocated to zones set aside for their racial group, which were often overcrowded and lacked basic services. The Act also formed the legal foundation for the forced removals that reshaped the city.
Sophiatown, a freehold area west of the city centre, shows how these laws operated in practice. It had long been a mixed community in which Africans, Coloured residents and some Indian and Chinese families lived side by side, and it was known for its cultural and political life. The government regarded it as a threat to its plans, and it created the Native Resettlement Board in 1953 and passed the Native Resettlement Act in 1954. Removals began in February 1955, when police moved in, homes were bulldozed, and most residents were transported to Meadowlands in Soweto, roughly 10 km to the south. Estimates of those displaced range around 65,000 people. The African National Congress and other organisations protested, but the removals went ahead. The cleared site was rebuilt as the whites-only suburb of Triomf. Accounts differ on when the area regained the name Sophiatown: one source gives 1995 and another 2006.
Soweto, the South Western Townships, grew out of earlier precedents. In 1904, a plague outbreak in the Brickfields area led to the removal of brickmakers to Klipspruit, about 25 km south of the centre. In the 1930s the Johannesburg City Council bought farms including Klipspruit and Diepkloof to build a planned township, and Meadowlands and Diepkloof were developed in the 1950s, partly to receive Sophiatown residents. Housing demand always outran supply, and squatter camps grew up as people were moved from inner-city slums or from suburbs that white residents wanted. Soweto was built with small houses on confined plots, with few amenities. Its infrastructure was markedly inferior to that of white suburbs, which received better roads, services and access to jobs. Townships of this kind were designed mainly as dormitory settlements, with rudimentary public services, recreation, industry and transport. Soweto gained independent municipal status in 1983 under the Black Local Authorities system, but without adequate financial resources to address its housing and service backlogs.
Anti-apartheid resistance and memory sites
The Soweto uprising of 1976
The events of 1976 have roots in apartheid education policy, which introduced the Bantu Education Act in 1953. In 1974, Afrikaans, alongside English, was made compulsory as a medium of instruction in schools, and many Soweto students saw the rule as an imposition of the language of their oppressors. On 16 June 1976, students gathered for a march toward Orlando Stadium. Estimates of the crowd vary widely, from between 3000 and 10 000 students in one account to between 100,000 and 200,000 students in another. The march was organised by the Soweto Students' Representative Council's Action Committee. When heavily armed police fired teargas and later live ammunition at the marchers, the protest turned into a wider revolt.
Casualty figures are also disputed. One source puts the official count at 176 pupils, while another notes that numbers ranging from 100-700 people dead have been cited. The unrest did not remain in Soweto. The shootings sparked a massive uprising that soon spread to more than 100 urban and rural areas throughout South Africa. Images of the police response reached international audiences, and the uprising is widely described as a turning point in the resistance to apartheid. Students had been politicised in the preceding years by the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement and the South African Students Organisation. In the aftermath, the government responded with sharp crackdowns, further restrictions on civil liberties, the arrests of many leaders, and the banning of many organisations.
Labour and community organising
Johannesburg, as the country's largest industrial and commercial centre, was a major site of the township and workplace organising that followed. The city's townships, especially Soweto, linked student protest, residents' associations and workers' movements, which made the city a key arena for the wider liberation struggle. The fine-grained history of individual unions and civic groups in Johannesburg falls outside the scope of this summary and is treated in more detail elsewhere.
Constitution Hill
Constitution Hill is a former prison and military fort that bears testament to South Africa's turbulent past, and today it also houses the Constitutional Court. The Old Fort was built under the South African Republic, and between 1896 and 1899 Kruger oversaw the construction of an Old Fort, although other sources date the early prison to 1892 or 1893. The complex included Number Four, also called the "Native Prison", which was the section of the Old Fort complex reserved for black men. Prisoners held there included Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Robert Sobukwe and Albert Luthuli, and students of the 1976 Soweto uprising. Overcrowding was chronic: by 1983 the number of inmates had risen to over 2200 in a prison designed for fewer than 1,000, and the prison was closed that year. Some sources give 1987 as the closing date of the Old Fort's operations as a functioning prison.
After 1994 the site was reinterpreted. The prison complex, which had become rundown and neglected, was converted for the new Constitutional Court, which opened there in 2004. Most of the prison was demolished to make way for the new court, but the stairwells were kept and incorporated into the new building as a reminder of how South Africa has overcome the dark days of oppression. The precinct now operates as a living museum that tells the story of South Africa's journey to democracy, and its interpretation ties the protection of rights in the constitutional order to the history of detention on the same ground.
Apartheid Museum and other memorials
The Apartheid Museum, which opened in 2001 in the north of the city near Gold Reef City, takes a different approach. Its entrance is a central part of the experience: your ticket assigns you a race at random and sends you through one of two gates. Its exhibitions are arranged as a single route through twenty-two areas, designed to be walked in sequence. The museum includes film footage including the Sharpeville massacre and Soweto uprising, and a dedicated Nelson Mandela exhibition tracing his life from rural Transkei to the presidency. Its promoters describe it as the pre-eminent museum in the world that focuses on South Africa's Apartheid era, a claim that reflects the museum's own framing.
The Nelson Mandela Bridge, which links Braamfontein and Newtown across the rail lines in the inner city, is a more recent symbol of the post-apartheid city. Taken together, the prison-based precinct and the museum interpret the city's past in different ways: one anchors the story in the sites of detention and the constitutional order that followed, while the other frames segregation as a system experienced by visitors.
Post-1994 municipal government and administration
Johannesburg had no metropolitan government under apartheid. Its urban area was split among separate local authorities, including a council for Soweto that civic bodies regarded as a puppet institution. The present structure came out of negotiation rather than a single enactment. The Local Government Transition Act of 1993 set the framework. In September 1994 the Greater Johannesburg Negotiating Forum agreed on a Transitional Metropolitan Council and on regrouping the municipal boundaries into seven municipal substructures. In August 1995 these were reduced to four, and the transitional council became the supreme local authority after the first democratic local elections in November 1995. The new boundaries absorbed wealthy satellite towns such as Sandton and Randburg, townships such as Soweto and Alexandra, and informal settlements such as Orange Farm, so that areas once administered separately came under one authority. The 1996 constitution protected local government autonomy and allowed for integrated metropolitan governments. The current City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality was formally established in December 2000.
The municipality follows the three-arm pattern of national and provincial government. The council is the legislative body. It approves by-laws, policies, the Integrated Development Plan, tariffs and the budget, and it oversees the executive. The executive consists of the executive mayor and the mayoral committee, and the administration forms the third arm. The city's own description gives the council 270 councillors; an earlier public-finance assessment recorded 260 councillors and 130 wards, so the figure has changed over time. The council is chaired by a speaker, and each member of the mayoral committee chairs a portfolio committee drawn from all parties. The design is single-tier: the metropolitan council has exclusive legislative and executive authority over its territory, and executive power is concentrated in an elected executive mayor. Gauteng province, which is headed by an elected premier, is a separate sphere of government. Relations between the city and the province are shaped by the constitutional division of powers among national, provincial and local government, not by a reporting line within the city's administration.
Most day-to-day services are delivered through municipal entities rather than by the core administration alone. The Auditor-General's review of the 2024/25 audits identified eleven municipal entities, of which City Power (electricity), Johannesburg Water, the Johannesburg Roads Agency and Pikitup (waste) are the key service providers. The core administration uses shareholder compacts to judge whether these entities help it fulfil its service-delivery role. The administration was first decentralised into eleven numbered regions and later reorganised into seven lettered regions (A to G). Performance is reported against the IDP and the budget in an annual report, which the council reviews and which serves as the main public record of accountability.
Assessments of performance draw on the same official audit cycle but report different measures, and the figures should be read with that in mind. The city's draft annual report for 2023/24 stated that the Auditor-General had confirmed 64% achievement of service-delivery targets. At a 2025 parliamentary hearing, the Auditor-General's figures for 2024/25 were given as 40% for service delivery and 36% for infrastructure development. The city had earlier maintained unqualified audit opinions in 2021/22 and 2023/24. However, the Auditor-General's 2026 local government report, as summarised in press coverage, described the core municipality as having slipped to a qualified opinion, citing R2.38 billion of unauthorised expenditure, liquidity constraints, high debt, weak revenue collection and vacancies in finance and internal audit. A September 2026 review cited by the press reported that the city achieved 32 of 55 service-delivery indicators, resolved 45% of audit findings, and saw the number of findings rise to 527. Official oversight material also cautions that audits sample transactions and test whether evidence supports reported results; they do not verify that services were delivered in every case. The council approved the 2022/23 annual report with reservations. Leadership instability is a recurring theme in these reports: the Auditor-General links political and administrative turnover to weaker accountability, and the mayor elected in November 2021 was removed by a motion of no confidence in January 2023.
Urban form: CBD, suburbs and townships
The central business district (CBD) was the city's original core, but its office economy began to hollow out in the 1980s. Between 1982 and 1994, the inner city lost the head offices of seventeen of sixty-five large firms studied, more than a quarter of them, with most moving to decentralised locations across the metropolitan region. Former office blocks in the heart of the CBD were converted into residential accommodation as businesses left in the late 1980s and 1990s. A crime wave spread through the area, making it dangerous to walk around, and by the late 1990s the CBD had become a no-go zone and a near ghost town. Hillbrow, on the CBD's edge, followed a similar path from established residential area to a neighbourhood associated with decay, and its urban renewal has been slow.
The partial revival since the 2000s has been driven largely by private precincts and public-private partnerships rather than by the municipality alone. Maboneng, east of the CBD, was a block-by-block regeneration of a run-down piece of the city. Developer Divercity has reportedly invested more than R3 billion across Jewel City, Marshalltown and Maboneng, converting derelict buildings into mixed-income housing. Braamfontein has also attracted construction, and one firm acquired nearly 3,500 residential units in the CBD over three years. The revival remains fragile: the management company that ran Maboneng has since collapsed, and provincial, national and local government offices remain among the CBD's major tenants.
North of the centre, Sandton became the principal decentralised business node. It became the new financial district of South Africa and Johannesburg's premier business centre, and much of the city's financial focus shifted there from the CBD. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange moved its offices there in the late 1990s, yet three of South Africa's four largest banks kept their head offices in downtown Johannesburg. Rosebank, which lies between Sandton, Parktown and the CBD, has grown as a complementary node. Its office rentals rose by 9% in a single quarter, the strongest growth recorded in any Johannesburg office node, and many international corporations have recently moved their local head offices to Rosebank. Sandton, by contrast, remains the location of much of the city's top-grade office space, with a considerable amount of the city's A-grade office space concentrated there.
The townships south-west of the city carry the spatial legacy of apartheid. Under apartheid, townships were tightly controlled dormitory communities, often located at some distance from the "white city." In most places a large zone of uninhabited land separated the townships from the city, though Alexandra was an exception, lying close to white enclaves and divided only by walls and fences. Removals from the western freehold areas shaped the layout of Soweto. After the destruction of Sophiatown was completed in 1959, the Native Resettlement Board turned its attention to Alexandra Township, and hundreds, probably thousands, of Alexandra families were resettled in Diepkloof and Meadowlands between 1961 and 1966. In 1963, the name Soweto was officially adopted for the sprawling township, and the area was incorporated into the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality in 2002.
Soweto's size and population are disproportionate to its land area. It occupies only 10 percent of the land of metropolitan Johannesburg but contains 40 percent of its population. Its internal differences are also substantial. Soweto is a patchwork of different levels of deprivation, and entrenched divides separate middle-class and stable working-class areas from townships of unemployed and marginally employed workers. Later housing projects reinforced these divisions. Diepkloof Extensions were built as part of a package often described as a "divide and rule" strategy, splitting the black population along class lines.
Informal settlements developed where the formal system did not reach. Many economic migrants who did not settle in the slums in and around the CBD ended up on the city's periphery, in low-cost housing or squatter camps. Their growth is closely tied to poverty and to access to land and housing, which continue to shape the city's spatial divisions.
Population, languages and social composition
The 2022 census counted 4,803,262 people in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, while the wider metropolitan area is put at about 15.1 million. The city's census totals rose from roughly 2.6 million in 1996 to 4.4 million in 2011 and then to 4.8 million in 2022 (City of Johannesburg, 1996: 2,638,683; 2001: 3,225,119; 2011: 4,434,631; 2022: 4,803,262). The city/metropolitan distinction matters for comparison: figures for "Johannesburg" in older or non-government sources may refer to the city proper, the metropolitan municipality, or the urban agglomeration, which includes the East Rand and other adjoining towns.
Growth slowed sharply in the most recent count. Johannesburg's annual rate of about 0.8% trails the 2.0% recorded for Gauteng as a whole (Gauteng grew at an annual rate of 2.0%, while the city's figure was only 0.8%). Analysts have disputed whether this reflects a real stagnation or a flaw in the count, with some opinion pieces citing an undercount of about 31% (an exceptionally high undercount of some 31%). Official revisions of earlier census figures after first release are a known feature of South African census practice, so the final picture may change (previous census figures have been restated following the first official release). Cape Town's count of 4,772,846 stood close behind the city's total, which raised the possibility that it might overtake Johannesburg as the country's largest city.
The 2022 census recorded a population that is overwhelmingly Black African, with 4,053,803 people in that group, followed by 229,528 coloured residents, 167,363 Asian residents and 333,651 white residents (Black African 4,053,803; White 333,651; Asian 167,363; Coloured 229,528). The sex ratio is close to parity, and the age structure is young: about 21.9% of residents are under 15, 73.1% are aged 15 to 64, and 5.0% are 65 or older (Population under 15 · 21.9% · 25.7% · 23.2%). The average household in 2022 had 2.6 members, down from 3.1 in 2011, across roughly 1.84 million households. An earlier profile based on older data gave a much smaller household count, so household totals should be read with care.
Language use in the city is multilingual, with English playing a distinctive role. Nationally, isiZulu remained the most spoken language in the country, constituting almost a quarter (24,4%), followed by isiXhosa (16,3%) and Afrikaans (10,6%), while English is the home language of 8.7% of the population. English is the dominant first language mainly in the big cities, and in Johannesburg it is widely used in business, education and the media, even where it is not a household's first language (English is the dominant first language only in the cities – Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban – while it is widely used as a second language across the country). The city-level first-language breakdown most often cited is from 2011, when isiZulu (23.4%) and English (20.1%) led, followed by Sesotho (9.6%) and Setswana (7.7%) (Zulu 23.4%; English 20.1%; Sotho 9.6%; Tswana 7.7%). Household-level surveys of Gauteng show a strong spatial pattern: the more affluent wards in the northern suburbs tend to be homogenous, with English as the dominant household language, while isiZulu predominates in Soweto and Sesotho in Alexandra (isiZulu in Soweto, and Sesotho in Sebokeng, Khutsong, and Alexandra).
Johannesburg has long been shaped by migration. Its population has been described as a city of migrants, with a highly diverse population comprising the multi-ethnic indigenous South African population and a growing component of people from other countries in Africa, the Indian sub-continent, eastern Europe and elsewhere. Surveys of migrant business owners in the city's informal economy show that most came from elsewhere in southern Africa, with the majority born in SADC countries (65%), particularly Zimbabwe and Mozambique (30% and 14% respectively). Among the longest-established communities, the Chinese population is concentrated in the city: South Africa has the largest population of ethnic Chinese people in Africa, and most of them live in Johannesburg. Estimates vary, from 300,000 – 400,000 (2015, est.) to a wider range of 350,000 to 500,000 Chinese in South Africa. The community has two Chinatowns that reflect different waves of settlement: the older one on Commissioner Street, which dates to the 1880s, and a newer Mandarin-speaking one in Cyrildene, which later became the main Chinatown.
Indian South Africans are concentrated mainly in KwaZulu-Natal (Most Indian South Africans live in KwaZulu-Natal, particularly in the cities of Durban, Pietermaritzburg and their surrounding areas), so Johannesburg's Indian community is a smaller share of its population. Comparing censuses, the white population of the city fell by about 211,000 between 2011 and 2022, while the Black African population rose by about 665,000 (the white population of Johannesburg reduced by some 211,000 between 2011 and 2022, the Indian population by 49,000 and the coloured population by 18,000; a 665 000 rise in the number of black Africans). Economic indicators give some context to these social patterns: a 2014 estimate put GDP per capita at purchasing power parity at US$16,370, and the city's human development index was reported as 0.75 (high) for 2012 (GDP per capita (PPP): US$16 370 (2014)).
Economy: finance, mining houses and manufacturing
Finance is the largest part of Johannesburg's economy. The city's GDP share is usually reported at roughly 15% of South Africa's total, with 44% of Gauteng's output, according to the city's own 2025 economic review. In 2024 the Finance sector was Johannesburg's largest economic sector, accounting for 39% of total GVA, followed by the Community services sector at 20%, and the Manufacturing sector at 13.5%. Other estimates put the city's national share at about 16%, so the exact figure depends on the method used.
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is the centre of this financial role. Founded on 8 November 1887, the JSE is Africa's largest stock exchange by market capitalisation. It first operated from the corner of Commissioner and Simmonds streets in the CBD and later settled in Sandton. In its early years, the JSE focused primarily on trading gold stocks, and its open-outcry floor was replaced by electronic trading in 1996. Banks cluster in the same area. Offices of FNB, ABSA and Standard Bank line Main Street, and when Standard Bank built its new offices in the 1980s, the bank unearthed the entrance to one of the city's historic mines and this shaft can be visited within the building. Johannesburg also serves as the South African base for many financial and corporate actors: it hosts the South African headquarters for many multinational corporations.
Mining houses have long been headquartered in the city. The major gold and diamond mining houses all have their headquarters in Johannesburg, the biggest being Anglo American and De Beers. Mining output in the surrounding province remains concentrated in gold. There are 159 mines - 44 of them gold mines - in Gauteng that together produce a quarter of South Africa's total mineral production. Most of the mining is for gold - 80% of Gauteng's output. Physical extraction has moved away from the city centre, with most mining activity in the Gauteng region based in the west (gold and other minerals) and in the north (Cullinan diamond mine). Corporate offices have followed a similar path. In 2020 Anglo American was moving its offices to Rosebank, Gold Fields had long decamped to Sandton from central Johannesburg, and AngloGold Ashanti was described as the last mining company still to operate out of central Johannesburg.
Manufacturing, logistics and services make up the rest of the formal economy, and manufacturing has lost ground. During the low-growth period (2010–2024), Manufacturing was the hardest hit, losing 3.72 percentage points of its share in Johannesburg's GVA. Large firms headquartered in the city span several sectors. Listings for Johannesburg-based companies include Gold Fields (Mining), WBHO (Construction) and Transnet Freight Rail (Transport), while retail and wholesale groups such as Massmart are based in Sandton. The service economy, particularly banking, professional services and ICT, is the main source of the city's output.
Unemployment and the informal economy sit outside this formal base. One commentary on the city's economy describes a high unemployment rate, which, while variable, remains a national concern. Small-scale trade, informal services and small enterprises absorb many workers who cannot find places in the formal labour market, although the city's official data on the informal sector is limited in scope and comparability.
Infrastructure: water, electricity and transport
Water supply and losses
Johannesburg Water is the entity responsible for delivering water to its residents, while Rand Water is a bulk water service provider that supplies municipalities. The volume that can be drawn is fixed upstream. Abstraction from the Integrated Vaal River System is regulated: the national Department of Water and Sanitation sets a limit on the raw water Rand Water may abstract annually, and the current limit is 1,802 million cubic metres per annum. The utility is already abstracting water from the IVRS at the limit set by DWS, and officials have said that no additional supply to Gauteng municipalities is possible before additional water arrives from the second phase of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, expected from 2028. Peak demand therefore sits close to the available supply, so the system is vulnerable to disturbances caused by electro-mechanical breakdowns or spikes in demand caused by heatwaves.
Losses after treatment are the second constraint. The 2023 No Drop report issued by DWS found that water losses in Johannesburg were 35%, compared to the international norm of 15%. The figure has since risen: by the end of March, Johannesburg Water was losing 49% of the water it bought from Rand Water, exceeding its target by four percentage points. Over the same period, the water infrastructure failure rate increased to an average of 4,108 bursts per month, compared to the average of 2,960 per month for the 2024/25 financial year. The city has identified leaking pipes and illegal connections as the main sources of loss. Repairs are constrained by money: Johannesburg Water owes its contractors R265 million and owes Rand Water R377 million, and fixing the 43 structurally leaking reservoirs in the city is estimated to cost more than R1.3 billion. In 2026 the city also moved to hold back most of the entity's revenue for its own purposes, a step that left Johannesburg Water unable to continue with projects and operational contracts, with most suspended.
Electricity and load shedding
Electricity reaches residents through two channels. City Power, the municipal utility, is the distributor for most of the city, while a few areas in Johannesburg will remain supplied by Eskom due to the configuration of the network and technical complexities. When the national utility schedules load shedding, City Power carries it out. City Power took over control of load shedding operations for most of the areas it supplies from 6 November 2023. Areas on its network remain on a two-hour schedule even during Stages 5 and above of load shedding.
The network itself is a major weakness. City Power has said that rampant load shedding, especially at the higher stages, is exposing the aged network, especially the substation batteries. When batteries fail, substations do not restart remotely and crews must go out to restore supply by hand, and extended blackouts can last up to 12 hours. The maintenance backlog is long-standing: a city statement from 2019 put it at R170 billion. Payment disputes have also affected supply. In November 2024, Eskom announced this drastic action on 7 November after Joburg's City Power had allowed its account to fall into arrears to the tune of R6.3 billion.
Rail, bus rapid transit and public transport
The Gautrain is the city's rapid rail service. Its Johannesburg stations include Park Station (next to Braamfontein), Rosebank, Sandton, Marlboro (close to Alexandra township) and Midrand. The link to O.R. Tambo airport is 15 minutes from Sandton station. A network of feeder buses extends its reach beyond the stations. A 2026 transport guide, citing Engineering News, reports that Sihamba Sonke Mobility was appointed on 1 October 2026 to operate Gautrain under a 15-year concession (2026–2041), covering the trains and the integrated feeder buses.
Rea Vaya is the city's bus rapid transit system. Its design separates trunk and feeder services: the trunk and complementary routes run on their own lanes, while the feeder routes run on roads like normal buses. The system was built partly to offer an alternative to the minibus taxi industry, and it aims to make the entire city accessible to at least 80% of residents. In practice it links the inner-city with Soweto and western suburbs such as Auckland Park. Expansion has continued, and the mayor has announced a new phase of Rea Vaya in Alexandra. Minibus taxis still operate what a guide describes as an extensive informal network, and they carry a large share of commuters outside the rail and BRT corridors. In October 2025 the two systems launched a joint campaign, aimed at reducing congestion and promoting sustainable mobility across the city, and Gautrain announced a 50% discount on fares for those who might not otherwise be able to use the system.
Roads and traffic
Road transport remains dominant. Johannesburg is known in South Africa and Africa for having bumper-to-bumper traffic. The freeway and arterial network radiates from the central city toward Sandton, Midrand and the east, and many routes follow the ridge, which forces steep gradients and sharp alignment changes. As an inland city, Johannesburg depends on road and rail links to coastal ports for freight, so long-distance trucks and commuter vehicles share the same corridors. Heavy use and the age of much of the network make maintenance a continuing demand on the municipal budget, which must also cover water and electricity.
Environment: mine dumps, drainage and ecology
Mine dumps are among the most visible features of the Witwatersrand. Waste from gold processing was piled into tailings heaps as the city expanded, and one dump within the urban core is remembered for its height and for the views it offered over the central business district. Around Johannesburg, environmental estimates put the number of tailings deposits at about 270, most of them unlined, holding roughly 6 billion tonnes of material. Because the heaps were built as mining proceeded and then left largely unmanaged, they are now both landmarks and sources of long-term hazard.
The most immediate hazard is airborne dust. Dry, windy seasons carry fine particles from unvegetated tailings into surrounding neighbourhoods; one district west of the city was recorded releasing about 42 tonnes of tailings dust a day. The Witwatersrand ores also carry uranium, reported to be present in roughly ten times the quantity of gold, so the dust and residues can be radioactive as well as chemically toxic. Advocacy reporting has estimated that about 1.6 million people live in informal settlements close to radioactive mine residue areas, and a 2012 report described dust blowing from dumps into neighbouring communities as a century-old problem. Under public health and settlement conditions, these exposures fall heavily on the poorest residents, many of whom live on or beside former mining land.
Water is the second major problem. When sulphide minerals such as pyrite in the tailings are exposed to oxygen and rainwater, they oxidise and produce acidic, metal-rich seepage known as acid mine drainage. Research in the mining district found that oxidation had penetrated about 5 metres into older sand dumps and about 2 metres into slimes dumps, and that the resulting acidic groundwater was discharging into streams, where it contributed up to 20 per cent of flow in one drainage system. Reported contaminants include uranium, arsenic, copper, cobalt, nickel, lead and zinc, and pollution can reach land and water up to 20 kilometres from a mine. Estimates of the number of dumps and abandoned mines vary between sources, so precise totals should be treated with caution. Mining also altered the groundwater regime itself: pumping from underground workings lowered water tables, and water pumped from the mines now fills lakes and valleys on the ridge. Groundwater beneath the Rand was tapped for supply as early as 1898, drawing on dolomite beneath a large wetland.
Mining-related drainage changes have also produced new wetlands. Sediment from waste heaps has blocked natural watercourses, creating marshes that are rich in birdlife, even though this is a secondary effect of degradation rather than a planned outcome. The Klip River wetland south of the city shows both the value and the fragility of these systems: its upper reaches, which receive polluted mine water, have been shown to attenuate arsenic, yet parts of the wetland have been severely degraded by peat mining. Before 1886 the area was an open grassland system on the Highveld, with few naturally occurring trees. Early farmers planted trees, and rapid urban growth later turned large areas into wooded suburbs. Some estimates indicate that around 16 per cent of the city is covered by non-native trees such as jacaranda, mixed with indigenous species and open grassland. Official figures cite over a million trees in parks and along pavements and millions more in private gardens, although the popular claim that Johannesburg is the world's largest man-made forest is not supported by credible rankings. The shift from grassland to planted woodland has changed habitats and favoured some bird species while reducing grassland specialists, and some planted species are invasive in natural areas.
Remediation has proceeded slowly and unevenly. A 2011 expert assessment of acid mine drainage on the Witwatersrand urged action, and options discussed by the government included fencing radioactive hotspots, rehabilitating dumps, and re-mining them into licensed consolidated facilities, a process that could take decades. Financial provision is a persistent constraint: one analysis of a West Wits operator found that its rehabilitation liability far exceeded the funds it held. Some proposals present tailings as a resource, since sulphide-bound gold left in the dumps could be recovered in a way that would also reduce acid drainage. Conservation planning for the city now prioritises rehabilitating and protecting wetlands upstream of informal settlements and townships, though it remains to be seen how far these measures will reduce the legacy of the dumps in the city.
Culture, arts and public events
Theatres, galleries and museums
The Market Theatre in Newtown occupies a former municipal produce market. It opened in June 1976 in Johannesburg's former Indian fruit and vegetable market, only days after the Soweto Uprising. The market building dated from 1913, and the theatre was founded by Mannie Manim and Barney Simon. During apartheid it became one of the country's few racially integrated theatres, and its plays, including Woza Albert, Asinamali and Sophiatown, earned it the nickname "Theatre of the Struggle." Its main stage was renamed the John Kani Theatre in 2014. Its programme now emphasises contemporary theatre, including work in local languages and new voices, alongside renditions of classic plays.
The Maboneng Precinct is a more recent cultural quarter on the eastern edge of the central business district, centred on Fox and Kruger streets. Its name is a Sesotho phrase meaning "place of light." Arts on Main was the first building to be redeveloped there, by the company Propertuity, in 2009. The precinct's activity is concentrated in converted warehouses that house private art studios, including that of the artist William Kentridge, and several galleries. The weekly Market on Main takes over Arts on Main every Sunday, and the independent cinema The Bioscope is located on the ground floor of a neighbouring building.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) in Joubert Park is the city's principal public art museum. Its origins lie in the efforts of Florence Phillips, the wife of a mining magnate, who wanted an arts and culture centre in the British colony and was behind the founding of a municipal collection. The collection was first shown in November 1910, when South African artists barely featured. Today it has a collection of more than 9,000 works, of which only a fraction is shown at any time. Sources differ on its standing: one describes it as the largest art collection in Africa, while Wikipedia notes that it was once the largest gallery on the continent. The gallery is also notable for acquiring Yellow Houses by Gerard Sekoto in 1940, the first work by a black artist it purchased. Its African holdings include the Brenthurst Collection of traditional southern African art.
Music and performance
Johannesburg's music history is closely tied to its townships and inner-city venues. Jazz flourished in the city's clubs and townships during the 1950s, particularly in Sophiatown before its forced removal. Kwaito, which emerged in the 1990s by combining house-influenced beats with township slang and styles, became the sound of young Soweto and other townships. Artists such as Arthur Mafokate are regarded as among its pioneers. Theatre, jazz and kwaito all carry the city's social history: they reflect life under segregation and its aftermath, and they remain part of everyday cultural life in the townships.
Major events
The city has hosted several large international events. The final of the 2010 FIFA World Cup was held at Soccer City (FNB Stadium) in Soweto, where Spain beat the Netherlands 1–0 after extra time. In 2025, South Africa held the G20 presidency, and the G20 Leaders' Summit took place in Johannesburg in November, the first time the forum had met on the African continent. These events have been used to showcase the city's infrastructure and tourism sector, though their long-term economic benefits are debated.
Literature and film
Johannesburg has been a frequent setting for South African writing. Sophiatown writer Can Themba depicted the city's township life in short fiction, and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who lived in Johannesburg, wrote extensively about its political and social divisions. Film has also used the city as a backdrop. The 2005 film Tsotsi, adapted from Athol Fugard's novel and set in a Johannesburg township, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The science-fiction film District 9 (2009), directed by Neill Blomkamp, is set in Johannesburg and draws on its apartheid-era spatial history.
Education, research and palaeoanthropology
Johannesburg's universities trace their origins to the city's mining economy. The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) began in 1896 as the South African School of Mines, and it became a university in 1922, when the university was established on 1 March 1922. The school's early mission of training engineers and geologists for the gold industry explains its long-standing strength in the earth sciences, mining engineering and related fields. Wits now has about 40,000 students and describes its research strength in natural science, medical and health science, social science, humanities and engineering. Its health sciences research has concentrated on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and Malaria, alongside diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.
The University of Johannesburg (UJ) is a younger institution. It was established on 1 January 2005 as the result of a merger between the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), the Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) and the Soweto and East Rand campuses of Vista University. It now has more than 50,000 students and 9 faculties driving teaching, research, and innovation. UJ's research profile is oriented toward applied fields, including artificial intelligence, process automation and smart cities; to developing nanotechnology capable of removing pollutants from water, and it has also sought to investigate the sustainability of global resources through earth sciences. Both universities have a substantial number of nationally rated researchers, and UJ's own profile reports 133 rated researchers, six of whom are A-rated, and has seven National Research Foundation Chairs, a figure that reflects the date of its source rather than a current census.
Research on the geology and mining history of the Witwatersrand Basin is largely carried out within the university geoscience and mining departments, particularly at Wits. Its work covers the stratigraphy of the gold-bearing reefs, the sedimentology of the conglomerates, the debates over how the gold was deposited, and the environmental legacy of mining, including mine dumps and acid drainage. These studies draw on the same archives and boreholes that mining companies generated over more than a century, and they connect directly to the city's geological identity. Local institutions therefore act as custodians of both the scientific record and the industrial history that produced the city.
The most internationally prominent scientific activity linked to the city lies just outside it, in the UNESCO-listed Cradle of Humankind. The site was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, and it is home to the largest known concentration of human ancestral remains anywhere in the world. It lies about 50km north-west of Johannesburg and consists of limestone landscapes with cave systems. The best-known locality is the Sterkfontein Caves. Mining also shaped the site's discovery: fossils were first unearthed here in the 1890s when the caves were blasted open for lime needed for the extraction of gold. The famous adult Australopithecus africanus skull was recovered in 1947, and the complete hominid skeleton called 'Little Foot' was introduced in 1997. Excavation has been continuous for decades: the longest archaeological dig in the area started in 1966 and is still continuing, led by Wits-affiliated researchers such as Philip Tobias and Ron Clarke. The caves came under university management through a donation, since the Stegmann family donated the caves to the University of the Witwatersrand, and in 2025 the site was reopened under the full management of the University of the Witwatersrand. This arrangement ties the palaeoanthropological research of the region to the same university that trains the city's geologists and mining engineers, and the site's scientific work contributes to wider debates on human evolution and the African origin of early hominins.
Access to higher education in Johannesburg reflects the wider divisions of the city. Entry to university depends on school-leaving results, and the quality of schooling has historically differed sharply between former white suburban schools and the schools of townships and informal settlements, a legacy of apartheid-era education policy. Universities have responded with financial and academic support for students from poorer communities. UJ, for example, reports that it provides access to almost 2,000 first-year students who come from the poorest communities, providing them, where needed, with top-up NSFAS funding, bursaries and two healthy meals a day. Literacy, numeracy and the readiness of students for higher education therefore remain closely tied to family income and neighbourhood, and the balance between the research universities' international profiles and the needs of local schools remains an ongoing question in education policy.
Health and social challenges
Johannesburg carries a heavy burden of HIV and tuberculosis (TB). Although rural provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape tend to report the highest overall TB incidence, urban centres like Johannesburg experience a disproportionate burden of TB-HIV co-infection, compounded by high levels of migration, housing shortages, population density, and health service bottlenecks. The city's own HIV profile, prepared with UNAIDS under the Fast-Track Cities approach, records a 5.8% growth in the number of people living with HIV, from a base of roughly 715,000. The city presents prevention programmes, HIV testing, medical male circumcision and condom distribution as measures that have reduced new infections. Tuberculosis control in the city is organised around a network of community clinics dispensing rifampicin-based TB treatment under a 100% directly observed treatment short course strategy (DOTS). Epidemiological studies of the city's TB notifications have found very high rates among people with HIV. One analysis based on 2009 data reported an HIV-positive notification rate of 6,567/100,000 (HIV-associated TB rate ratio = 17). Service use itself has been volatile: a later study found that the number of individuals accessing TB services fell substantially during the peri-COVID-19 period compared with the pre-pandemic years, and the authors noted that the decline occurred despite the high disease burden.
Crime is a second major concern, and the figures depend heavily on how they are collected. The South African Police Service publishes counts of offences recorded at police stations, and these include incidents reported by victims, witnesses or third parties as well as those police detect themselves. According to the South African Police Service (SAPS), 2 569 murders were recorded in Johannesburg for the 2024/25 reporting period. Translated into a rate, this is an estimated 44.3 murders per 100 000 people. A different ranking, compiled from police data for 2024, placed the city's murder rate at 49.0 per 100,000, and reported that it had fallen compared with 2023, so the two series should not be compared directly. In the SAPS quarterly figures for mid-2025, Johannesburg continues to lead nationally in contact crimes and particularly in kidnapping. Perception surveys give a different emphasis. A 2017/18 survey by the Gauteng City-Region Observatory found that crime was cited by 33% of residents as one of the biggest community problems, and the city's own statistical brief notes that concern persists even where official figures improve. Violence is also spatially concentrated: in one earlier reporting year, the township of Alexandra recorded 58 murders while the affluent suburb of Sandton recorded nine.
Xenophobic violence has been a recurring feature of the city's social life since the mid-1990s. In May 2008 attacks that began in Alexandra spread to seven of South Africa's nine provinces, resulting in 62 deaths, including 21 South Africans, 11 Mozambicans, five Zimbabweans and three Somalis; thousands were injured. Some 40,000 foreign nationals left the country and a further 50,000 remained internally displaced. Other accounts give a lower death toll of 56 and report that 342 shops were looted and 213 burnt down. The most widely cited killing of 2008, that of a Mozambican man in Diepsloot, was carried out while a group of South Africans stood by laughing as he burnt to death. Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand argue that the violence had been building up for years, and it did not start or end in 2008. Further outbreaks followed, including a wave of attacks in September 2019 on migrant-owned shops and homes in Johannesburg. For migrants, the effects have included loss of business capital, displacement from homes, and fear of further attacks, and these conditions have been compounded for refugee women living in Gauteng.
Access to health care and housing follows the same lines of income and location. In one TB study, a large majority of participants (95%) relied on public health facilities, indicating restricted access to private healthcare. The authors also identified limited healthcare access, migration status, and systemic inequalities as structural factors shaping TB prevalence. Housing is treated in the same research as a structural determinant, alongside poverty, food insecurity, inadequate housing, unemployment, limited education, and migration, which can affect both the risk of infection and the success of treatment. Residents who can afford private care are therefore better placed to avoid long waits and crowded facilities, whereas most residents depend on the public system, where the strain of TB and HIV caseloads is most visible.
Open debates and unresolved issues
Spatial inequality and redistribution
Johannesburg's spatial pattern still reflects the apartheid-era separation of affluent northern suburbs and corporate nodes from the townships and informal settlements to the south and west. Debate centres on which planning tools can narrow that gap. One camp favours densification and transit-oriented development along existing corridors, arguing that this brings the poor closer to jobs. Others emphasise state-funded housing and land release, while noting that the cost of well-located land limits what can be achieved. Measured income inequality in South Africa is among the highest in the world, so the city's spatial divide is a national issue as much as a municipal one.
Municipal finance and service delivery
The most detailed recent evidence comes from the Auditor-General's reviews of the 2024/25 financial year. Johannesburg's standalone audit regressed from an unqualified audit opinion to a qualified audit opinion in the 2024/25 financial year after the city failed to correct material errors identified during the audit process. The consolidated group accounts, which include municipal entities, remained unqualified with findings. City leadership has acknowledged the regression, attributing it largely to the number of findings and to disputes with the auditors that were not resolved. Auditors have also criticised entities such as Johannesburg Water and City Power for long-standing reliance on modest audit outcomes.
Utility losses are central to the debate. Electricity losses had increased from approximately R4.9 billion in the previous year to R5.6 billion in the current year, while water losses had decreased slightly from about R2.9 billion to R2.8 billion. The city's leadership has reported non-revenue water of roughly 44.7% at Johannesburg Water. Service interruptions linked to ageing infrastructure have also been widespread; since late 2023, hardly a week has gone by without some residents of Johannesburg losing their water supply. The city has also not published a consolidated figure for the cost of illegal mining damage to its infrastructure, which a city official confirmed in 2026.
Post-mining land use
The legacy of gold mining remains an unresolved problem for land use. Mintek estimated in 2016 that there were still about 500 mine waste dumps around Johannesburg, and government owns some of them, as it has inherited the liabilities of closed and ownerless mines. Dumps caused dust that was sometimes contaminated with radioactive materials, and rainwater draining from them has carried heavy metals into groundwater. Acid drainage from abandoned workings is a continuing concern. Reprocessing has become attractive because the low grades of gold remaining in tailings dumps have become economically viable, and several companies are re-treating their own tailings. Critics question whether dust suppression and re-vegetation are adequate, and argue that the government has been criticised for lacking the capacity to enforce laws and regulations in the mining industry. Redevelopment of reclaimed land, such as the Ferreira dump area, has also raised disputes over heritage loss versus commercial use.
Unemployment, informal growth and inclusion
Johannesburg's labour and housing pressures sit within a weak national labour market. South Africa's official unemployment rate increased by 0.9 percentage point from 32.7% in the first quarter of 2026 to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026. Gauteng, the province containing the city, recorded a fall in employment of 22,000 in the same quarter. Youth unemployment was reported at 62.8% in June 2026. In that setting, the informal sector absorbs a growing share of workers, which has fuelled both street trading and informal housing. Tensions over foreign workers have also surfaced, with protests in Johannesburg blaming migrants for scarce jobs, a pattern discussed in the section on health and social challenges.
The central policy question is how to reconcile economic growth with social inclusion. Proponents of market-led growth emphasise investment in corporate and logistics hubs, while critics argue that growth concentrated in northern nodes does little for residents of informal settlements and townships. Municipal finances limit how much public investment is possible, which links the three debates above: weak revenue collection and high utility losses constrain both service provision and the capacity to remediate mining land or upgrade informal areas.
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- Assessment of the Syndemic Relationship Between Individual, Social, and Structural Determinants of Tuberculosis Among People Living in Johannesburg, South Africancbi.nlm.nih.gov
- This South African city has now been named one of the most violent places in the worldbusinesstech.co.za
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