Johannesburg Audio Tours

Johannesburg did not exist before 1886, when a prospector named George Harrison found gold-bearing rock on a farm called Langlaagte on the Witwatersrand ridge. Within ten years, 100,000 people had arrived. Within fifty, the apartheid government had used the city's spatial organization as an instrument of racial control -- Soweto, the township to the southwest, was not a name but an acronym: South Western Townships, a designation for areas where Black workers could labor in the city but were prohibited from living in it freely. The 1976 Soweto Uprising, when schoolchildren protesting compulsory Afrikaans instruction were met with live ammunition, became one of the defining events of the liberation struggle.

Today, Vilakazi Street in Soweto holds the former homes of both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu -- the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel Peace Prize laureates -- and it receives visitors with a directness about history that is characteristically Johannesburg.

The Maboneng district in the inner city has been the focal point of urban renewal for the past decade, full of galleries, design studios, and restaurants occupying warehouses that were written off completely fifteen years ago. The Constitutional Court, built in 2004 on the grounds of the Old Fort prison where both Gandhi and Mandela were held, is one of the most architecturally and symbolically loaded buildings on the continent. Johannesburg is not an easy city, but it is an honest one.