Johannesburg and Constitution Hill

Johannesburg exists because of gold. It was found on the Witwatersrand ridge in 1886, and within a few years a mining camp had become a city, with no river, no port and no reason to be there except what lay underground. This morning reads the city from that beginning to the country it has become.

Constitution Hill is the place to start. The Old Fort was built as a prison in the 1890s, and for most of the century that followed it held whoever the state wanted out of the way: Gandhi in 1908, Mandela, and a great many ordinary people arrested under the pass laws and locked into the section called Number Four. You walk through it with a guide, and the cells are left much as they were.

Beside it stands the Constitutional Court, opened in 2004 and built partly from the bricks of the prison’s demolished awaiting-trial block. The slanting columns in the foyer are meant as trees, after the old African practice of settling disputes under one, and the building is full of South African art. It was designed to be walked into.

Then the inner city, where the gold money built banks and exchanges along streets laid out for a mining camp, and where the pavements are crowded with a city going about its business. Your guide reads the buildings for you as you go.

Maboneng, on the eastern side of the centre, is the part you walk. The name means place of light, and a few blocks of old warehouses and factories have become galleries, studios, cafés and independent shops, with murals down the side streets. Stop for coffee here. It is the city’s own idea of its future.

The way back runs through Houghton, an old suburb of big gardens and jacarandas where Mandela spent his last years. Soweto is the other half of this story, and it is best on a day of its own.

Good to know

• The Old Fort keeps its own opening days. We plan the morning around them.
• The inner city is walked with your guide on a planned route. Keep phones and cameras discreet.
• Johannesburg is high, and the sun is stronger than it feels. Hat and sunscreen.
• Summer afternoons bring thunderstorms. A morning tour is the right one.
• Leave the afternoon quiet, or give it to Soweto if you want one long day.