The history of the region around Johannesburg is so ancient that it stretches the boundaries of evolutionary science. The 1998 discovery of a 3½-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus in a cave near Sterkfontein, northwest of Johannesburg, has left scientists wondering: Is it human? Who are we? Where did we come from? And all of those big ol' questions.

Several aeons later, in around 100,000 BC, South Africa became the home of the nomadic San people. The first home-in-a-bag backpackers, model conservationists and Old Masters of the cave canvas, the San were the consummate survivalists until the onslaught of disease-ridden, gun-toting white men who reduced them to their measly current population of 10,000.

Long before the arrival of genocidal Europeans, the San were joined by another tribe of nomads, the Khoikhoi, and then by successive migrations of Bantu-speaking peoples, who arrived in South Africa in around AD 500. The Bantu tribes were Iron-Age peoples who domesticated animals, farmed crops (particularly maize) worked metal and pottery and lived in settled villages. Modern South African descendents of the Bantu include the Basotho, Swazi, Tswana, Xhosa and Zulu, but calling these groups 'Bantu' now is insulting, since the term (like many others) was badly misused during the apartheid era.

European settlement in South Africa started modestly, with a supply station established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company. It quickly evolved into an ambitious colonial settlement (based in Kaapstad or Cape Town), with its own dialect (Afrikaans), puritan religion (the Dutch Reformed Church), and slaves imported from as far afield as Indonesia. When the colonists spread east over the next 150 years, they were violently resisted by the Bantu tribes. In 1779, the eastward expansion of the Boers (Dutch-Afrikaner farmers) was temporarily halted by the Xhosa in the first Bantu War. The Boers also came into conflict with the British colonialists who gained control of Cape Town in 1806. The British abolition of slavery in 1834 was regarded by the Boers as an intolerable interference in their affairs, and led to their migration (known as the Great Trek) across the Orange River two years later.

The history of the town of Johannesburg began in 1886 when four sleepy farms on the Transvaal highland were rudely awakened by some fool yelling 'Gold!' The call prompted thousands of digging hordes (amongst them Cecil Rhodes and Barney Barnato) to descend on what turned out to be the richest gold-bearing reef ever discovered. Three years later Jo'burg had become the largest town in Southern Africa - a rowdy place full of bars, brothels and fortune-hunters of all creeds and kinds.

This motley crew of whites and blacks were regarded with deep distrust by the Boers, by the Transvaal government and especially by the president, Paul Kruger. Kruger introduced electoral laws restricting voting rights to the Boers, and laws aimed at controlling the movement of blacks. The tension between the Randlords and uitlanders (outsiders) on one side and the Transvaal government on the other got so hot it all boiled over into the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War.