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johannesburg: general info
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· history
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JOHANNESBURG
Calling Code: +27
South Africa's biggest city and the continent's one true metropolis,
Johannesburg is an urban sprawl of more than 3 million people in a 635 square
mile area - almost twice the space that New York City's 8 million residents inhabit.
The headquarters of the country's vast gold and diamond mining companies, industrial
giants, and media conglomerates, it has been an African El Dorado since 1886,
when the rock under the Highveld ridges over which it spreads turned out to be
the richest reef of gold on earth.
Empire builders and fortune seekers from Europe,
Australia, and the United States settled here, and between 1890 and 1920, it was
the fastest-growing city in the world, a Wild West on the Africa savanna. By the
1950s, mine shafts plunged a mile down, skyscrapers reached for the clouds, and
townships of urban black poor, most famously Soweto, grew up on the edges of the
city, providing cheap labor for the great capitalist machine. Given this vulgar
disparity of wealth and such close proximity of rich and poor, the crime wave
of the last decade was perhaps inevitable.
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