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South Africa: Gauteng

Overview

Gauteng (meaning ‘place of gold’) is by far the smallest of the nine provinces, covering a mere 1.4 per cent of the country (17,010km2/6,568mi2), but it’s home to over 18 per cent of the population and is the most densely-populated province in South Africa – colourful, vibrant and polluted.

Gauteng’s major attraction is its main cities, Johannesburg and nearby Pretoria (see below), which make it the administrative, commercial and industrial centre of South Africa, accounting for almost 40 per cent of the GDP.

Gauteng lacks spectacular natural attractions but its areas of grassland are broken by impressive rock outcrops called kopkies, which have a certain charm; and a small area of the Magaliesberg Mountains is found in the province.

Johannesburg

Johannesburg (sometimes, not always, called Jo’burg by locals) is South Africa’s third-largest city, with a population of around 2 million. It owes its origin to gold mining but now displays extremes of wealth and poverty. It’s an intriguing city, with an alarming crime rate but reputedly the best infrastructure in Africa. Many visitors escape the city as quickly as possible (often immediately after arriving at the airport), which is a pity, because it has attractions, including an impressive cultural life and some of South Africa’s buzziest townships, notably famous Soweto (short for South West Townships), a city in its own right (with a population of 1.5 million it ranks as South Africa’s fifth-largest city) and Johannesburg’s premier tourist attraction. The home of two Nobel Peace Prize winners (Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu), it’s South Africa’s most extreme township, with wealth and poverty existing side by side and some of the world’s worst murder and rape rates. (Foreigners should visit Soweto only on an organised tour, when they’re normally safe.)

Pretoria

Around 50km (31mi) north of Johannesburg, and virtually joined to it by building development, lies Pretoria, the country’s fourth-largest city, with a population of just over 1.5 million. The capital of South Africa and its administrative centre, Pretoria is a much more traditional, sedate city, with a background as a Boer farming centre. Pretoria is still seen as a stronghold of Afrikaner culture, language and identity, although that reputation is changing and it’s becoming more cosmopolitan. The city is famous for its jacaranda trees, which have impressive canopies of purple blossom in the spring; there are said to be 75,000 of them in and around Pretoria.

Other Towns

Other important towns in Gauteng include Benoni (South-Africa’s seventh-largest city, with a population of 490,000, and the distribution centre for the surrounding gold-mining area), Boksburg, Brakpan, Germiston, Kempton Park, Krugersdorp and Roodepoort. Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging (South Africa’s eighth-largest city, with a population of around 465,000) are major industrial centres, while Bronkhorstspruit, Heidelberg and Nigel are important agricultural areas.

More pages

Page 1: Overview
Page 2: Population

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