Johannesburg - One Hundred Years

Johannesburg - One Hundred Years

The biography of a city from its inception in 1886 until 1996 

Foreword from the Mayor of Johannesburg, Councillor (Professor) Harold G Rudolph, 1996

Introduction:

The Gold discoveries that gave birth to the the city of Johannesburg occurred in the region called the Witwatersrand (white water's ridge) which was situated in the southern part of the South African Republic  (Transvaal), Zuid Afrikaaansche Republiek (ZAR) of President Paul Kruger and his small Boer community. Their forbears had settled there more than a century earlier when, disillusioned with British policy in the Cape Colony, they had packed their ox wagons and left the Cape's eastern frontier regions. For many years thereafter gold discoveries in the new land, generally known as the Transvaal, filled these men and women with trepidation. The last thing they wanted was an invasion of foreigners. Now exactly that happened. Even some of their own people had joined the thousands of foreign adventurers and fortune-seekers on the farms proclaimed public diggings. The dates on which these farms were to become public diggings varied. For Randjeslaagte it was October 4 1886, and since it was Randjeslaagte on which Johannesburg's first stands were laid out, that is the date officially accepted as marking the town's birth.

Published by Chris van Rensburg Publications, 1986

Hardcover

Good condition