Johannesburg and Soweto

The City Gold Built In A Single Generation From 1886 And The Largest In South Africa, With The Apartheid Museum And Constitution Hill Explaining The Century That Followed, Soweto'S Vilakazi Street Where Two Nobel Laureates Lived On One Road, The Hector Pieterson Memorial To 1976, And A Regenerated Inner City Of Galleries And Markets That Most Visitors Never See · Johannesburg, Gauteng

Johannesburg exists because somebody found gold on a ridge in 1886, and within a generation there was a city of a quarter of a million people where there had been farmland. Everything about it follows from that: the mine dumps, the migrant labour system, the townships built to house the labour and keep it separate, and the politics that came out of them. The reason to come is that this is where the twentieth century happened to South Africa, and the city explains it better than anywhere else - the Apartheid Museum is one of the best history museums in the world, Constitution Hill is a court built on top of a prison that held both Gandhi and Mandela, and Soweto's Vilakazi Street is the only road on earth where two Nobel peace laureates lived. It is also a city with genuine violent crime, unevenly spread, and this row says plainly where that matters and where it does not, because the alternative is leaving you to find out.

On the Witwatersrand gold reef, with Soweto 20 km south-west of the centre and the Apartheid Museum beside the M1, Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

A city: the museums keep daylight hours with tickets and most close one day a week, while Soweto and the inner city are places rather than sites. The Apartheid Museum and Constitution Hill both want a solid half day each and neither should be rushed. SOWETO IS BEST VISITED WITH A LOCAL GUIDE, which is a practical point as much as an ethical one - a guide gets you into places, explains what you are looking at and removes the question of where to go, and walking or cycling tours run from Vilakazi Street. The inner city districts of Maboneng and Braamfontein are lively by day and at weekends. LOAD-SHEDDING cuts power in blocks across the city and affects traffic lights, lifts and card machines - it is a changeable fact and not a schedule. Driving is how Johannesburg works; OR Tambo is the continent's busiest airport and the Gautrain links it to Sandton and Pretoria.

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