140 Years On: Johannesburg and the Long Shadow of the Reef

In February 1886, when two Georges – one named Walker, the other Harrison – stumbled over a weathered outcrop of gold-bearing conglomerate rock on the farm Langlaagte, little could they have imagined that their discovery would not only anchor a new gold rush town but also catalyse a century‑and‑a‑half‑long experiment in deep‑level mining capitalism, social engineering, and, ultimately, urban decay on the Highveld. 

The discovery of that outcrop led to the founding of Johannesburg and changed the course of Southern African history.

But the legacy of that 140‑year mining epoch is paradoxical. On the one hand, the Witwatersrand Goldfield financed the transformation of a remote colonial backwater into the most industrialised economy in Africa, underwrote the development of railways, cities, and manufacturing, and produced global mining giants whose reach extended far beyond South Africa's borders. On the other, it entrenched migrant labour, racial segregation, and environmental degradation, the effects of which are still very evident today.

It is no accident that South Africa still struggles with one of the world's starkest income gaps, nor that so many of today's service‑delivery protests erupt in communities that grew up as dormitories for mines that no longer exist. 

This 140th anniversary of the discovery on Langlaagte is the clearest proof that you cannot extract such vast wealth without also embedding a long, costly legacy.

Hollowed-out and Decaying

Nearly a century and a half later, what remains is a largely hollowed‑out and decaying industry and an anchor city strewn with unrehabilitated shafts, acid mine drainage, and collapsing ground that successive governments have struggled, and often failed, to address.

Out of this neglected underground labyrinth has emerged the phenomenon of the zama-zamas, the informal miners who descend into abandoned workings to scratch out the last remnants of the reef, fuelling a violent, unregulated gold economy that preys on the very communities the formal industry once employed. Their presence is a direct indictment of a century of inadequate closure and enforcement, and a reminder that the costs of Johannesburg's gold are still being paid, long after the big mining houses have left the field. 

To walk through Johannesburg today, past fenced‑off sinkholes where shallow voids have collapsed, along crumbling Randlord mansions and leaking sewer lines, over ground still laced with acid mine drainage, is to trace, almost block by block, the entire lifecycle of a mining‑based city that grew too fast, dug too deep, and never quite learned how to plan for the day when the ore body would decline. 

Precipice

Now, the future of this city and its mining‑belt hinterland sits on a precipice of uncertainty. 

But, if we are honest, mining is and has always been a gambler's profession. It hinges on staking immense sums of capital, and often human lives, on geological hunches and probabilistic models that can never offer absolute certainty. Every shaft sunk and every reef pursued is, in essence, a calculated bet that the ore body will hold, the price will rise, and the ground will not betray those who work it. 

That the Witwatersrand's gold extraction industry has survived for almost a century and a half is testament to the sheer scale of the ore body and the ingenuity of thousands of engineers and miners. For much of the twentieth century, that precipice was obscured by the momentum of the gold economy. Headgears rose, shafts pushed deeper, and the mining houses' balance sheets seemed to confirm that the Rand reef was an inexhaustible endowment rather than a finite geological anomaly.

Johannesburg became a laboratory of engineering ingenuity, where almost every major advance in deep‑level mining was tested in the pursuit of ever leaner ounces. The city's skyline, its tramways and later its motorways, its universities and hospitals, all bore witness to the astonishing capacity of gold to mobilise capital and remake a landscape within a single lifetime. 

Yet beneath this surface modernity lay an economic model whose foundations were always brittle: cheap black labour, finite ore, and a political order calibrated to defend that model. 

When the ore body began to tire and the world price of gold could no longer compensate for declining grades and rising costs, the contradictions that had been buried deep underground started to work their way to the surface. Shafts closed, workforces shrank, and with each retrenchment wave the surrounding towns and townships lost not only jobs but the municipal revenue tied to mining's once‑expansive footprint. 

Officially, Johannesburg is now in its reclamation phase, a city of tailings‑rehabilitation projects and dust‑suppression plans rather than new shafts and sinking crews. But this last, technocratic round of gold extraction, dressing itself as a clean‑up while squeezing residual value from century‑old waste, underlines how hard it has been to draw a clear line under the mining era. 

Chaotic Governance

The City of Johannesburg has struggled, often chaotically, to govern this post‑gold terrain. Municipal officials must manage leaking water infrastructure that runs through undermined ground, negotiate with absentee mine owners over who should pay for toxic dumps, and somehow provide services to settlements that sprang up informally on land never intended for human habitation. The physical instability of old workings and the fiscal instability of a shrinking rates base intersect in a vicious circle: as infrastructure fails, investment flees; as investment flees, the capacity to repair what has failed withers further. In this sense, the city is not merely decaying; it is still, quietly, subsiding into the voids left by a century of extraction. 

Breaking that cycle will require a different kind of political courage: leaders who are prepared to prioritise basic maintenance over grand projects to enforce rehabilitation obligations on former operators and the state itself, and to plan honestly for a Johannesburg whose future lies above ground, not below it.

This is why the local government elections due at the end of 2026 or early 2027 matter so profoundly for Johannesburg and its mining‑belt neighbours. Voters are not simply choosing between party colours or personalities; they are being asked to decide who they trust to manage a uniquely complex inheritance. Put bluntly, they will determine whether Johannesburg continues to drift into managed decline, or whether it can reimagine itself as a post‑mining metropolis that is more inclusive, more environmentally sustainable, and more economically resilient. 

At the very least, Johannesburg’s voters should be asking every would‑be mayor and councillor a simple question: how will you deal with the unfinished business of mining – the sinkholes, the dumps, the zama-zamas, the failing pipes – and what kind of city do you intend to refashion in its place?

For readers wishing to learn more about the mining history of Johannesburg – from the first tented camps and syndicates on the Rand, through the rise of Randlords and the making of apartheid, to the long decline of deep‑level mining and the uncertain search for a post‑gold economy – the newly republished edition of my history of South African mining, Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa, offers a detailed companion. It traces how the Langlaagte discovery set in motion both extraordinary innovation and enduring injustice, and how the fate of cities like Johannesburg remains bound up with choices made in the shadow of old headgears and new ballot boxes. You can buy it here.