Johannesburg

Johannesburg is a city in Gauteng province in northeastern South Africa, on the high plateau called the Highveld. Its Zulu name, eGoli, means the place of gold. Vilakazi Street in Soweto is the only street where two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, both had their homes.

The city was founded in 1886, after gold was found in a long reef under the Witwatersrand ridge. Tents and corrugated iron shacks gave way within a few years to brick streets, stock exchange buildings and mansions on the ridges to the north. The gold reef ran beneath the southern edge of the city, where headframes and pale yellow mine dumps marked the old mines. The University of the Witwatersrand grew from a school of mines and received its charter in the 1920s. South Africa held the football World Cup in 2010, with the opening match and the final at the stadium known as Soccer City.

Tiger Brands makes Jungle Oats, Tastic rice and All Gold tomato sauce and has its headquarters in the city. Gold Fields, one of the old mining houses of the Witwatersrand, is also based in Johannesburg, as is Discovery, a health insurer.

The FNB Stadium has an outer shell shaped like a calabash, the African clay pot. The Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Park holds South African and European paintings in a building designed by Edwin Lutyens. The Cradle of Humankind northwest of the city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the caves of Sterkfontein have given up many fossils of early human ancestors.