Johannesburg turns 140 today. And most residents will not even know that it is the city’s birthday. This is not a city that has ever been good at preserving or celebrating its history. It is fast-paced and forward-focused, always looking towards the next deal to be made.

Remember the Top Star Drive-in controversy? A case in point. Why keep a symbol of the city’s heritage – a much-loved drive-in situated on top of a mine dump – when there was actual profit to be made in its demolition – sorry, its “environmental rehabilitation”?

With this particular anniversary, however, it would have been absurd to roll out a celebratory red carpet amid the city’s near-catastrophic service-delivery and corruption challenges. Besides, while 140 may be a satisfyingly round milestone, it is not, in the grand scheme of global metropolitan histories, especially important.

What is significant is that the anniversary falls exactly one month before one of the most important local-government elections in decades. It provides a lens through which to examine Johannesburg’s history and the choices that will shape its future. Most importantly, it allows us to ask whether those seeking to govern the city understand the responsibility they are asking its residents to entrust to them.

Johannesburg is a difficult city to govern. In many respects, it has always been so. It sprang up with phenomenal speed on the sparsely settled hinterland of the Transvaal in the tradition of gold-rush towns the world over: rough, dangerous, and avaricious. Its early years were characterised by the disorder and speculation typical of a mining camp, as thousands of prospectors, traders, and speculators converged on the unforgiving Highveld in pursuit of a South African pound.

Never Destined to Remain a Camp

Yet Johannesburg was never destined to remain a mere mining camp. It sat atop the world’s richest-ever discovered goldfield. As the scale and continuity of the Witwatersrand gold reefs became clearer, it was soon understood that its development would require far more than an individual digger with a pick and shovel. It demanded huge amounts of capital, skilled engineers, imported machinery, reliable access to power and water, rail links, and a vast supply of cheap labour.

Such was the scale of the gold-mining bonanza that, within a few years, Johannesburg had mushroomed into the hub of southern Africa’s most important industrial agglomeration. Within a decade, its population had grown to more than 100 000 people.

But this was not a city planned in the conventional sense. It developed in response to the urgent demands of an industry that was technically complex, capital intensive, and in constant need of expansion. Its residential suburbs grew alongside mines, stamp mills, labour compounds, workshops, trading houses, and the beginnings of the financial institutions that would shape the South African economy.

The overriding concern of the mining industry, the principal economic engine of the city, was the efficient extraction of wealth. Little did these mining magnates care for the social and environmental consequences of their activities. In this process, the mining economy moulded Johannesburg around migrant labour, racial exclusion, and deep spatial inequality, while leaving environmental damage that remains visible across the city. Those consequences remain in the distance between home and work, in the uneven quality of public infrastructure, in the stubborn divide between the city’s wealth and its poverty, and environmental scars.

Devil-May-Care

Johannesburg’s evolution instilled a distinctive devil-may-care character. This restless city has always been a place to make money, take risks, live hard, and, if fortune allows, move on to better things. That energy and opportunism have been central to Johannesburg’s appeal.

Yet the slower work of building a city for all who lived in it – everything from maintaining public assets, planning for growth, and creating a shared civic life – was too often deferred, neglected, or made secondary to the immediate demands of commerce and extraction.

History does not and cannot excuse Johannesburg’s current dysfunction. It does, however, explain why it is such a difficult city to govern, and why it requires far more than political improvisation.

But Johannesburg’s history also contains a more hopeful lesson. It has never lacked energy, enterprise, or the capacity to reinvent itself. From the beginning, it drew people prepared to take risks, build businesses, and seize opportunities. While this deal-making quality has often been part of the city’s problem, it is also the source of its extraordinary vitality.

For those seeking office after 4 November, the challenge will be to move beyond the usual rhetoric of a clean-up or turnaround. Johannesburg’s restoration requires a city administration that can rebuild its finances, retain the technical expertise on which basic services depend, and, crucially, establish a governing arrangement that will endure long enough to see the work through. Only then can it restore the basic conditions on which a functioning city depends: reliable water and electricity, maintained roads, safe public spaces, credible planning, and an effective billing system.

This is the foundation upon which not only business, investment, employment, and opportunity depend, but also thriving communities.

At 140, Johannesburg does not need to be rescued from its own character. It needs leaders who can turn its restless energy towards the hard, patient work of making the city function again. If they can do that, Johannesburg may yet recover not the inequalities of its past, but the economic dynamism that made it the country’s most consequential city. 

Jade Davenport is a historian and writer whose work explores mining, history, business, and society. She is the author of Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa, now in its second edition. She lives between London and Johannesburg.