The Witwatersrand gold rush

The reef that built Johannesburg in ten years

In 1852 a Welsh mineralogist, John Henry Davis, brought gold from the farm Pardekraal near Krugersdorp to President Andries Pretorius of the South African Republic, who feared what the news would do to the young state. Davis was told to sell it, £600 worth, to the Transvaal treasury, and was escorted to the border. In 1853 Pieter Jacob Marais, who had dug gold in California, panned small samples from the Jukskei and Crocodile rivers, and the Volksraad let him prospect on condition that telling any foreign power of a disruptive find would be punished by death.

The first recorded discovery of a Witwatersrand reef came in June 1884, when Jan Gerrit Bantjes found one on the farm Vogelstruisfontein, followed that September by the Struben brothers' Confidence Reef near Roodepoort. These were minor reefs. Credit for the main reef goes, by general consensus, to George Harrison, on the farm Langlaagte in July 1886, and he is believed to have sold his claim for less than £10 before leaving the area. Scientific studies describe the Golden Arc, from Johannesburg to Welkom, as the bed of a massive inland lake where silt and gold settled together.

By August 1886 the unnamed camp held some 3,000 people. Johannesburg was named on 3 October and its first plots auctioned in December, laid out tight and narrow because the government expected the gold to give out quickly, as earlier alluvial fields had. Instead the reef ran deep and wide, and the MacArthur-Forrest cyanide process, introduced in May 1890, made deep ore pay. Capital and expertise came from the Kimberley diamond mines. Machinery and stores came by mule and ox wagon, since the nearest railheads were at Kimberley, Ladysmith and Komatipoort, until the Randtram opened to Boksburg in 1890 as the first working railway in the Transvaal. By 1895 Johannesburg held 102,000 people, and within ten years of its founding it was the largest town in South Africa.

The mining magnates, the Randlords, built mansions on the Parktown Ridge. Foreign miners, without full voting rights, chafed against President Paul Kruger's government, and their grievances fed the failed Jameson Raid of 1895 and 1896 and the Second Boer War of 1899. After the war some 64,000 Chinese indentured labourers arrived in 1904; when they were sent home in 1910, migrant Black workers recruited first from Mozambique and later from British colonies further afield took their place.