Witwatersrand Gold & the Creation of South Africa
The colonial authorities responded to the news of the gold find at Witwatersrand by sending surveyors to choose a suitable nearby site where the inevitable influx of gold prospectors from all over the world could live. The site chosen would eventually become the great city of Johannesburg. Within a decade, the young town boasted 100,000 inhabitants, and by 1900, this figure had risen to 166,000. Johannesburg became the largest African city south of the Sahara. It was a wild place in the early days where the spending was as loose as the morals. One contemporary described Johannesburg as “Monte Carlo imposed on Sodom and Gomorrah” (Jackson, 14).
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⇒ Witwatersrand Gold & the Creation of South Africa
