Johannesburg (Civ6)/Civilopedia

The story of Johannesburg is one of wealth and conflict. The land on which Johannesburg sits is one where humanity has existed for millions of years, and, quite a bit more recently than all that, was occupied by San, Sotho-Tsawana, and other African peoples. But successive waves of European empires were forever to alter South Africa, as first the Dutch, and then the English established a presence in the area. As the latter replaced the former, Dutch settlers moved north into the interior of South Africa and settled far inland. And, in the 1880s in what was to become Johannesburg, one settler discovered the Witwatersrand gold deposit.
The city grew quickly after this, as prospectors flocked to the region sought gold, land barons sought to control territory, and laborers from all over Southern Africa sought jobs in the mines. It would have been a wild place, with miners, gangsters, and other individuals from all over the region, including – perhaps surprisingly – a laundry industry dominated by Zulu men. While the Dutch Afrikaners and English settlers gave their names to the growing city (“Johannes” being the most popular Dutch name at the time), much of the population were African.
The region was at the time controlled by the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek – the Boer (Dutch) South African Republic, a state that had resisted British expansion in the First Boer War and existed briefly as an independent republic. The state was not to resist the Empire in the Second Boer War, which saw Johannesburg depopulated (and saw the establishment of its Chinese community).
This focus on mines was to define Johannesburg. Soweto – the settlement for black African mine workers – grew to a size that rivalled or exceeded that of the central city itself, and under the racist apartheid system, fully implemented in 1948, these workers found their movement restricted and rights curtailed. These tensions erupted in the Soweto uprising in 1976, when black students marched against apartheid. The police, in response, shot them. As a result, Soweto, and the African National Congress gained a leading role in the resistance to apartheid, and the ANC came to power – and marked the end of apartheid – in 1994.
Today, Johannesburg is South Africa’s largest city. Mining has waned in importance, although there are still conflicts between miners and police, but the city remains an industrial town.