About Johannesburg

The region surrounding Johannesburg was inhabited by small numbers of people and the Bantu people. When Europeans arrived in the area, small numbers of Boers and British started farms, but there was no major European settlement until the 1880s, when gold was discovered in the region, triggering a gold rush. Gold was initially discovered to the east of present-day Johannesburg, in Barberton. Gold prospectors soon discovered that there were even richer gold reefs in the Witwatersrand. Gold was discovered at Langlaagte, Johannesburg in 1886. Johannesburg was initially a suburb of Pretoria as one had to get permission from the government in Pretoria to build a house in Johannesburg. The town was much the same as any small prospecting settlement, but, as word spread, people flocked to the area from all other regions of the country, as well as from North America, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe. As the value of control of the land increased, tensions developed between the Boer government in Pretoria and the British, culminating in the Second Anglo-Boer War. The Boers lost the war and control of the area was ceded to the British. Controversy surrounds the origin of the name, as there were any number of people with the name "Johannes" who were intimately involved in the early history of the place. Some of the prime candidates are the principal clerk attached to the office of the surveyor general, Johannes Rissik, Christiaan Johannes Joubert, member of the Volksraad and the Republic's chief of mining, Paul Kruger, President of the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek (Transvaal) and even The King of Portugal at the time. Rissik and Joubert were members of a delegation sent to England to attain mining rights for the area. Joubert has the chief park of the city named after him and Rissik, a prominent main street on which the Post Office and City Hall are located. Paul Kruger, who has one of the middle names Johannes, apparently in an attempt to build a strong relation with Portugal, who controlled modernday Mozambique and Delagoa Bay, a neighbouring state of the boer republic, named the city after him as a show of goodwill and halt Portuguese plans to link the two Territories of Angola and Portuguese East Africa by running through the ZAR