Whilst the region around the city of Johannesburg is incredibly ancient and includes the discovery of a 3½ million-year-old Australopithecus africanus in a cave near Sterkfontein, just outside Jozi, the city’s exciting history began only in 1886 with the discovery of gold and the Witwatersrand reef. It didn’t take long for the population of the city to explode from a few shanties into what became, and has remained, the largest city in South Africa. Today Johannesburg is one of the world’s youngest major cities and the powerhouse of the African continent.

The discovery of gold in the region of Johannesburg spurred a mass migration to the area of people wanting to try their luck. The resultant settlement that mushroomed within the space of three years was named by two men, with the first name ‘Johannes’ in common. It leaves little to the imagination then, as to the origin of the city’s name. ‘Burg’, the second syllable, is the Afrikaans word derived from the Dutch ‘village’, similar in some ways to the English word ‘burgh’ meaning ‘town’.

Racial segregation had already become firmly entrenched in the country between the world wars – blacks and Indians were heavily taxed, barred from holding skilled jobs and forced to work as migrant labour – hence the emergence of squatter camps that sprung up around Johannesburg as blacks headed to the city in the wake of industrialisation. These camps developed by all accounts into well-organised cities, and perhaps due to this, were destroyed, forcing people to move to new suburbs known as the South-Western townships, leading to the emergence of Soweto.

Today Jozi is free of discriminatory laws. The inner city is awash with hawkers and street stalls, completely multiracial, and undergoing a total regeneration. Most whites have escaped to the leafy northern suburbs, the sprawling malls and restaurant-lined avenues attractive to visitors and residents alike.

The leafy city of Pretoria in Gauteng serves as one of the country’s three capital cities, officially the executive or administrative capital - the other two are Cape Town, the legislative capital, and Bloemfontein, the judicial capital. The pretty city suffers from an almost menacing image as the former capital of apartheid, and is involved in an ongoing battle over changing its name to Tshwane - controversial to most inhabitants of the city, and, for the moment, left to lie ‘under consideration’. The municipality refers to it as the City of Tshwane, whilst residents still largely refer to it as Pretoria.

It appears that in history there has always been some difficulty over naming the city. Pretoriusdorp, Pretorium, Pretoriusstad and Pretoria-Philadelphia were among early suggestions, from which Pretoria was finally selected by Marthinus Wessel Pretorius in memory of his father, Andries Pretorius. But Pretoria is not just about government. It is also a place of culture with a series of theatres, museums and monuments – Church Square, Union Buildings, Melrose House and the Voortrekker Monument to name but a few. Roses grow beautifully in the city’s climate and it was known early on as the ‘city of roses’. Add to this some 50 000 Jacarandas that line the streets and one can understand how it became known as the ‘jacaranda city’ or ‘jakarandastad’ in Afrikaans.

The city has access to a number of Nature Reserves that include Groenkloof, Rietfontein, Faerie Glen and Wonderboom nature reserves, as well as the National Botanical Gardens.