Gold was discovered on the Witwaters rand in 1886. Never before in world history had a mineral discovery so suddenly and dramatically, and so utterly, transformed an obscure rural backwater and shaped a new country. Gold became the foundation of the monetary system of the industrialised nation and was to dominate the South African economy and its politics for many decades. Almost overnight Johannesburg turned from a mining camp into one of the most dynamic and volatile cities in the world. There was a virtual explosion of industrial enterprise. Backed by large-scale investment, particularly from Britain, 44 mines were in operation in 1888, with a nominal capital of nearly £7 million and an output worth more than £1 million. By the end of the century the Witwatersrand mines were producing a quarter of the world’s gold.
In the early 1890s the industry was employing more than 100 000 men. Johannesburg had a white population of 50 000, only 6 000 of them Afrikaners. The great majority of the rest were British. The gold mines drew avaricious moneymen, schemers and criminals along with miners, white and black. They played host to the mining house magnates, the so-called Randlords, and at the bottom, the flotsam and jetsam.
In the city there were nearly 300 bars, many with back premises that catered to commercial sex. The streets teemed with diggers, prostitutes, gamblers, saloonkeepers, washerwomen and domestic servants. The Afrikaner poor were migrating in a steady stream to the cities to take up jobs as brick makers, cabdrivers and transport riders. Kruger set aside Vrededorp as a suburb for them.
Marching into Johannesburg in 1900 with Lord Roberts’ forces, Winston Churchill wrote: ‘The whole crest of the Rand ridge was fringed with factory chimneys . . . Before us sprang the evidence of wealth, manufacture and bustling civilisation.’ The ZAR had been transformed, along with the rural areas. By the end of the century between a third and a half of the land in the ZAR had come into the hands of foreign individuals or companies, who preferred blacks to burghers as tenants on their land.
