Gauteng / the Highveld

A cold, high grassland with no natural reason to hold a city, which now holds the largest one in the country. The Highveld sits between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred metres, has no navigable river, no port and no harbour within five hundred kilometres, and was grazing country for Sotho-Tswana communities and then for Boer republics that had left the Cape in the Great Trek of the 1830s. Everything changed in 1886 with the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reef, the richest ever found and unusual in being a deep, low-grade deposit that required enormous capital rather than individual prospectors. Johannesburg went from nothing to a hundred thousand people in a decade. The mines needed cheap labour in vast quantities, and the system built to supply it - migrant contracts, single-sex compounds, pass laws, the colour bar - became the template for twentieth-century South African society as a whole. The gold also caused the South African War of 1899 to 1902, in which Britain took the republics and then invented the concentration camp to break Boer resistance. Soweto, created by removals from mixed neighbourhoods such as Sophiatown, became the largest township in the country and the site of the 1976 uprising against Afrikaans-medium instruction. The region contains Pretoria, the administrative capital, and generates roughly a third of national GDP on under two per cent of the land. Mining has largely gone; finance and services replaced it. Johannesburg has no river and imports its water from Lesotho. The mine dumps are still being reprocessed for residual gold. Sandton replaced the old central business district in the 1990s. Winters are dry, sunny and cold enough for frost.

• Existed: 1886 CE – present
• Type: Entity