Johannesburg sprang up very suddenly in the midst of a rural Boer republic in 1886. To the Boers it was an alien city. The pioneering farmers had bled for their Zuid-Afrikaanse Republic and they regarded the people of "The Camp" as wild interlopers who spoke a babel of tongues and knew only one God - gold.

The Alien town grew. Within four years it was the second largest in South Africa - with no river, no rail link, no port and, at the insistence of the ZAR patriarchs, no civic status nor any say in sovereign affairs. The Boers consoled themselves that the gold would run out and the Uitlanders - the aliens - would go home. But the gold did not run out and within 14 years the diggers had undermined the farmers' republic and helped Britian annex it.

Over the next 60 years the Boers, now Afrikaners, fought back with great political skill and cunning, and in 1961 they reinstated a South African Republic and broke with the British Commonwealth.

By then Greater Johannesburg had spawned a twin city - Soweto. Again the Government in Pretoria saw it as alien, and again it consoled itself that this new place would go away. Indeed it pledged to make it go away. It seemed Soweto to be a temporary "black spot" in a white region and refused it any form of civic status, land tenure, commercial ingrastructure or any effective say, even in its own affairs.......But Soweto did not go away. These two cities began to flash like a binary star in the social history of South Africa. They became the focus of a terrible frustration within a Government committed to apartheid.

What follows is the story of Johannesburg, 111 years old in 1997.

Johannesburg's story really begins in the Spring of 1853, when Pieter Jakob Marais twice panned gold in the Jukskei River, not far north of the Witwatersrand Ridge. For 30 years and more prospectors kept coming back to the ridge because they believed that there just had to be a mother lode there somewhere. It turned out to be  well south of the ridge,  in the coarse grassveld that characterises the Transvaal Highveld. The earlier diggers had been misled by the dazzling white quartz in the ridge itself - those shining rocks which gave the "white watershed" it's name.

One Sunday George Harrison, a stonemason, stumbled on an outcrop of crumbling lichen-speckled rock on a farm called Langlaagte, 6 km from the ridge. He noticed it contained pudding stone, an almost certain sign of gold. Harrison, an Austratian and an old-hand prospector from Australia, crushed a sample, panned it and saw a glinstening tail of gold. He had discovered the Main Reef - a gold reef whose wealth was to excite the imagination of men across the world - as well as the greed of men. George Harrison's reward was a free gold-seekers licence, which he soon sold for 10 pounds. Nobody knows what happened to him after that, although Harrison Street was named after him. His discovery, 111 years ago, caused a city to grow and that city to cause a war - a war that gave rise to a nation......and the gold never ran out......

The Star is Johannesburg's oldest newspaper, actually older than the city itself. The Star's story begins before the town's, in 1871 in Grahamstown, 1 000 kilometers away in the Eastern Cape. Thomas and George Sheffield owned The Eastern Star and their paper carried many stories about the discovery of gold on the Reef. They were not overly excited about the find. Barberton had boasted two stock exchanges in 1885, but in 1886 it was practically a ghost town.........it's gold mined out. Lots of people left for the goldfields, and in July 1887 Thomas Sheffield decided to travel north to take a look for himself. After his visit, the brothers decided to move the Eastern Star to Johannesburg. They wanted to buy the site where Library Gardens and the City Hall is today, but were too late. They managed to buy a site on the corner of President and Sauer Streets, a site which The Star still occupies today. The Eastern Stars plant was railed to Kimberley and then hauled by ox-wagon to the goldfields. Amazingly the whole operation took only 17 days, and on Monday 17 October 1887, the Eastern Star appeared on the streets.
 

There is a multiple choice of dates for the celebration of Johannesburg's birthday. The first two Witwatersrand goldfields, the farms Driefontein and Elandsfontein, were proclaimed public diggings in September 1886. On the other hand, the state-owned ground, Randjieslaagte, on which the village of Johannesburg was to be sited, was proclaimed only in October 1886. It was however, already in August that Goverment Officials met the diggers, who unanimously agreed that a village should be proclaimed. Or maybe the right birthday date for Johannesburg is May. On May 31, Paul Kruger's secretary, F C Eloff, put his signature to a list of Witwatersrand farms which he felt should be proclaimed public diggings. All the farms were then being worked for gold - an area which took three and half hours to cover on horseback.

Accommodation was desperately short in the mining camp and people slept on floors. Cecil Rhodes had to share a room with three others when he came up from Kimberley late in 1886. Most visitors in the '80's remarked on the town's extraordinary growth. It became a point about which the townspeople, and even The Star Newspaper sometimes boasted, as if the growth was due to  some unique mortal virtue.

Within four years of its birth, Johannesburg was a thriving town of large buildings, street lighting, hansom cabs and spiders, surburban mansions and an array of shops which must have rivalled Cape Town in their variety of goods. It had several newspapers - The Star being today's sole survivor.Remarkable if you take into account that it was 600 kilometers from the nearest port, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest railhead and 60 kilometers from the nearest mayor river.

On 11th October 1886, D.P. Ross, of the Standard Bank, Cape Town, opened the Johannesburg branch of the Standard Bank, in a tent in Ferreira's camp. He soon moved it into a thathed roof affair at 185 Anderson Street. He wrote a long, informative letter to his principals, giving a vivid picture of Johannesburg before the permanent village had been laid out. The government had already earmarked for the village a triangular piece of "uitvalgrond" (A surplus piece of land left over after the land has been properly surveyed)

The triangle - called Randjeslaagte - was hemmed by the farms Turffontein, Doornfontein and Braamfontein.  Ferreiras camp with it's 400 inhabitants living in 24 corruggated iron buildings, found itself occupying private ground and was forced to move into the triangle. In June 1887 there was a major government auction to sell off the mineland in the centre of town. They found that the streets did not quite line up, and William Pritchard, a preacher who paid his way by surveying, was forced to design some of them with a kink between the southern and the northern half where they crossed Bree Street. Maybe it was a good thing, because the kinks served to slow down the city's hectic traffic. It did not really bother him that the layout was a bit untidy, because he was sure that the town would not last anyway. He told The Star newspaper that when he had arrived in Johannesburg on a  cold and windy night late in 1886, he spend the night on a patch of veld near the edge of Market Square. He knocked off the top of an anthill and lit a fire inside to keep warm. This was the actual site where The Star built it's premises in 1887. Pritchard Street was named after Auret Pritchard.

The gold diggings were spread across nine farms, which had been  declared public goldfields by the Transvaal Government, with smaller farms inbetween. The population at that stage had grown to 2 500 people. Most of the claim holders were pivate individuals, who had not taken any steps to open up the reefs, for lack of capital.. Mostly only trenches a few feet deep were dug to examine the soil.

The government intended to proclaim a township on Randjeslaagte, called Johannes Burg, where they wanted to grant 500 stands. There has been controvercy over the years as to who the town was named after, but there is solid enough evidence that it was named after Johann Rissik, who, together with Christiaan Joubert was appointed to decide on a site for the mining village.

The camp on Doornfontein attracted many diggers from Natal and was subsequently named the Natal Camp. The camp produced many leaders, mining pioneers such as H.B. Marshall, Carl Jeppe and Henry Nourse. It had very nice homes and also Johannesburg's firt tennis court, laid by a Mrs Wolhuter in 1886.

In July 1886, Joseph Benjamin Robinson, a 46 year old speculator, stood in front of a shop window in Kimberley. A sample of Witwatersrand ore was being crushed and panned in in the window and he was so impressed that he marched straight to Alfred Bait's office and asked him for a loan. Robinson had made his fortune in diamonds but was at that stage on the verge of bankruptcy, for which he party blamed Beit. He was squeezed outof business when he refused to co-operate with the people who where involved in digging diamonds out of what became Kimberley's Big Hole. People like Beit, Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato and Charles Rudd, to name but a few.

With between 20 000 and 25 000 pounds in his pocket he caught the stage coach for Johannesburg and hired lodgings on Langlaagte. Beforehand he had changed some of the notes for gold sovereigns. He knew that he was going to deal with farmers, who preferred gold to pieces of paper! He could speak Dutch very well and could therefor communicate with the farmers better than most. On his first day on the goldfield, he rode out alone across the broken veld and watched ore being crushed and panned. He even collected some in his helmet. He was so impressed by what he saw, that he started buying farms all along the Reef. He bought  Langlaagte for
6 000 pounds, which was enough to make him a multi millionaire. Beit's cut, as promised when he lend Robinson the money, was about 20 million pounds in gold mine shares.

While others speculated as to how far down the gold reef went and whether gold would be found in payable quantities deeper than 65 metres, Robinson seeked out the deeper mines. Rhodes, for instance  could have bought the Robinson mine for 325 pounds, worth a whopping 15 million pounds a few years later, but he did not believe that gold would be down so deep under the earth.   Beit now also started taking an interest and send Hermann Eckstein to open an office in Johannesburg. He was a bit scared thay his name might be associated with a failed venture, so he told Eckstein to open it under his own name and that he could speculate privately for himself too. Eckstein made a million for himself during his first year on the gold fields. By 1888 Eckstein and company had become a premier mining house and Eckstein one of the world's richest men. He built his offices across the street from the Stock Exchange, which had been founded on November 8, 1887. The office became known as the Corner House, a name which became a household word.

Carl Von Brandis, the popular mining commissioner and magistrate, appealed to Pretoria for a waterworks for Johannesburg in October 1887. There was a severe drought in Johannesburg at that time, and the town was relying on a stream which flowed into the Fordsburg valley. Pretoria moved really fast that time and soon the Johannesburg Waterworks, Estates and Exploration Company came into existence. By June 1888 it had laid pipes from a fairly substantial reservoir in Doornfontein. There was also a large well in Auckland Park and a cattle dam on Braamfontein farm, where the town youth's swam.
The long, dry winters was a problem as the mining village was forced to store water, When it ran out the water vendors would move in and sell buckets of water at 2s 6d.

The Volksraad in Pretoria hated Johannesburg and sometimes one could not blame them, Johannesburg was like a mini foreign state which suddenly sprang up in the middle of the Boer's quiet republic. The Pretoria government had no money with which to help Johannesburg. Paul Kruger's government actually asked Mining magnate J.B. Robinson for a loan!
 
 

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