Four days in Johannesburg: where South Africa actually happened

Three nights, a hire car or a driver, and four days spent in the places the twentieth century turned on: a fort prison, Soweto, a museum built on a gold reef, and a suburb that was bulldozed.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Johannesburg
Places
10 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Most visitors to South Africa land in Johannesburg and leave the same day. They connect to Cape Town, or they drive east to a game reserve, and the city is a set of motorway signs seen through a hire car window. That is a mistake, and an expensive one, because everything that explains the country happened here.

There was nothing on this ridge in 1885. Gold was found the following year, the richest reef anybody had ever seen, and within a decade there was a city of a hundred thousand people on a treeless plateau 1,750 m up with no river anywhere near it. Every fault line in modern South Africa, migrant labour, the compounds, the pass laws, the forced removals, the resistance, runs out from that fact.

It is not a beautiful city and it does not pretend to be. What it is instead is direct: the museums here are unsentimental, the people are famously blunt, and four days is enough to leave understanding a great deal more than you did.

Highlights

  • Constitution Hill, where the country's highest court sits inside the prison that held Gandhi and Mandela
  • Vilakazi Street in Soweto, the only street in the world to have housed two Nobel peace laureates
  • The Apartheid Museum, which issues you a race at the ticket desk and sends you through the matching door
  • Regina Mundi, with police bullet holes still in the ceiling
  • Sophiatown, a neighbourhood erased in 1955 and renamed Triumph by the people who erased it

Where to stay

Johannesburg, three nights

The city sits on the Witwatersrand, the ridge of white waters, at about 1,750 m, which is why the summer evenings turn cold and why the thunderstorms in January arrive like a switch being thrown. Nearly six million people live in the urban area and about half of them in Soweto and the townships around it.

There are no trees native to this plateau. Everything green here was planted, mostly by mining companies wanting timber, and the result is a canopy so dense that from a high floor in Sandton the northern suburbs look like a forest with roofs in it.

Three nights covers all four days without hurrying. Two of them are heavy going, in the sense that the subject matter is, and the city rewards leaving an evening free for a restaurant rather than filling it.

Day by day

Day 1 in Johannesburg

The fort, the court and Braamfontein

The Gautrain from the airport takes about half an hour to Rosebank and drops you into a city that looks nothing like the one people warned you about.

Start where the country's law is made, on a hill in Braamfontein that has been a prison since 1892. The old fort held Boer War prisoners, then black men arrested under the pass laws, then Gandhi in 1906 and Mandela in 1962. In 2004 the Constitutional Court opened on the same site, built partly from bricks salvaged from the awaiting-trial block it replaced.

Afterwards Braamfontein is a short walk: student bars, a Saturday market and a university art collection worth an hour.

  1. 13:00

    Constitution Hill

    Architecture

    A prison complex turned into the seat of the Constitutional Court, and the most articulate building in the country. Number Four, the section for black male prisoners, has been left as it was. The court chamber above it is open to the public and its doors carry the twenty-seven rights of the Bill of Rights carved in sign language and braille.

  2. 15:45

    Wits Art Museum

    Culture

    A modernist box at the bottom of the university, holding one of the best collections of classical African art on the continent and showing it without a hint of the ethnographic. Free, quiet and rarely busy.

  3. 18:00

    Kitchener's Carvery Bar

    Eat

    A bar on this corner in one form or another since 1906, which makes it one of the oldest in the city. Pressed tin ceiling, cheap beer, and a nightclub after midnight if you stay that long.

With more time: If you land in the morning instead, the inner city walking tours run from Braamfontein and are the only sensible way to see the old centre on foot.

Day 2 in Johannesburg

Soweto: Orlando West and the church

Leave early and give this the whole day. Soweto is twenty kilometres southwest and the traffic on the way in decides how much of the morning you keep.

Orlando West is where the school students' march of 16 June 1976 began and where the police opened fire on it. The photograph of a dying twelve-year-old carried by another child went around the world within a day and is generally reckoned to be the point at which international opinion turned.

Two houses on the same short street belonged to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. It is worth standing on it just to register how ordinary the street is.

  1. 09:30

    Hector Pietersen Museum

    Culture

    Two hundred metres from where he was shot, and built around that one photograph without ever being only about it. The exhibition walks through the Bantu Education Act, the decision to teach in Afrikaans, and the morning it all came apart. Give it an hour and a half.

  2. 11:30

    Nelson Mandela National Museum

    Architecture

    The four-room house at 8115 Vilakazi Street that Mandela moved into in 1946 and came back to briefly in 1990. Scorch marks from petrol bombs are still on the outside wall. Small, plain and much more affecting than a bigger museum would be.

  3. 12:45

    Lunch on Vilakazi Street

    Eat

    The strip below Mandela's old house is now restaurants with terraces, and they do a proper plate of pap, chakalaka and grilled meat. Loud, cheerful and aimed squarely at visitors, which on this street is fine.

  4. 15:00

    Regina Mundi Catholic Church

    Religious

    The largest Catholic church in South Africa and the one place in Soweto big enough to hold a political meeting when meetings were banned, so it held them under the cover of mass. Police fired inside the building in 1976 and the bullet holes in the ceiling have deliberately never been repaired.

With more time: The two striped cooling towers of the old Orlando power station are a few minutes away, painted with a mural on one and used for bungee jumping off the other, which tells you something about how Soweto handles its own landmarks.

Day 3 in Johannesburg

The Apartheid Museum, the rock art and a suburb that was erased

Today is the argument in full, told three times over by three institutions that do not overlap.

The first is on the old mining ground south of the centre and takes at least three hours. Do it in the morning while you still have the appetite for it.

The other two are shorter and lighter. One goes back a hundred thousand years to the people who were here first and the art they left on rock faces. The other is a small house in a western suburb, all that survives of a neighbourhood the state demolished in 1955.

  1. 09:00

    The Apartheid Museum

    Culture

    Your ticket is randomly printed white or non-white and you enter through the corresponding gate, which sets the tone in about four seconds. Inside is the whole arc, from the mining compounds to the 1994 election, told with newsreel, court transcripts and 131 nooses hanging in one room. Allow three hours.

  2. 13:30

    Origins Centre

    Culture

    At the university, and the counterweight to everything else on this day: a museum about southern African rock art and the San people who made it, some of it many thousands of years old. Excellent multimedia, a good bookshop, and a reminder that this region's history did not start with a gold reef.

  3. 16:00

    Sophiatown Heritage & Cultural Centre

    Other

    In one of the few houses left standing. Sophiatown was mixed, freehold, musical and inconvenient to the government, so in February 1955 more than sixty thousand people were moved out and the streets were flattened. The whites-only suburb built on top was named Triomf. The centre tells that story from the inside.

With more time: Melville is five minutes from Sophiatown and is where to eat afterwards: 7th Street has the bars, the secondhand bookshops and the only genuinely walkable evening in the city.

Day 4 in Johannesburg

Newtown before the flight

Newtown is the old produce market district west of the centre, rebuilt in the 1990s around a square and a theatre, and it holds the two museums best suited to a last morning.

Both are within three hundred metres of each other and neither takes more than an hour.

  1. 09:30

    Museum Africa

    Culture

    The city museum, in a converted fruit and vegetable market, and much stranger than that sounds: reconstructed shack interiors, a photography collection, the history of the mines and a room on the Treason Trial. Uneven, free, and the best single hour on the city itself.

  2. 11:30

    Workers Museum

    Visit

    The last surviving municipal compound where the city housed its black male workers, built in 1913, preserved with the concrete bunks and communal kitchens in place. Twenty minutes, and it explains the shape of the whole city.

  3. 12:30

    Lunch in Newtown

    Eat

    There are restaurants on the square by the theatre. Allow ninety minutes to the airport in the afternoon, more if you are leaving after four.

With more time: With a whole day, drive forty minutes northwest to the Cradle of Humankind, a set of limestone caves that have produced a large share of the world's early hominid fossils.

Before you go

Where to stay

Two sensible answers, and they suit different trips. Rosebank is leafy, walkable in a small radius, has a Gautrain station and good restaurants, and is the easy default. Maboneng and Braamfontein, closer to the old centre, are where the city's own creative scene is, cheaper, rougher at the edges, and better if you want to walk out for a drink.

Sandton is the corporate option: safe, sterile, full of glass towers and one of the continent's biggest shopping malls, and a long way from anything worth your time here. Melville is the bohemian one, a strip of bars and bookshops on 7th Street.

Avoid booking on price alone in the inner city itself. Parts of it have been beautifully regenerated and parts of it have not, and the difference can be one block.

Getting around

Johannesburg was built for cars and it shows. Distances are large, the motorways are good, and almost nobody walks between neighbourhoods. Hire a car or use Uber and Bolt, both of which are cheap and reliable here.

The Gautrain is the exception and it is excellent: fast, clean, and running from the airport to Sandton, Rosebank and Pretoria. Use it from the airport rather than a taxi. Minibus taxis are the backbone of the city and take some local knowledge to use.

Rush hour is genuinely bad, roughly 06:30 to 09:00 and 15:30 to 18:30 on weekdays. Plan the Soweto day to start before it or after it, not through it.

Soweto, and going with a guide

Soweto is not a slum and not a no-go area. It is a city of well over a million people with suburbs of large houses, shopping malls and a good deal of civic pride, and the tourist strip around Vilakazi Street is busy, cheerful and entirely straightforward to visit on your own.

A guide is still worth the money, and the good ones live there. What you are paying for is context: which house belonged to whom, what happened on which corner in June 1976, and why the two power station cooling towers on the skyline are painted. Half day tours from the centre are common and usually take in both museums.

Bicycle and walking tours of Orlando West exist and are a much better way to see it than a minibus window.

Safety, plainly

Johannesburg's crime statistics are bad and the version visitors experience is mostly precaution rather than incident. The rules residents follow: do not walk after dark, do not walk in the inner city with a phone in your hand, keep car doors locked and nothing visible on the seats, and treat red lights late at night as advisory if the intersection feels wrong.

None of that should stop you coming. It does mean budgeting for cars rather than walking, which is what a trip here costs you.

Johannesburg does not sell itself. There is no old town, the skyline is a business district and the mine dumps on the southern edge are yellow.

What it has is the story, told better here than anywhere else in the country, and a population that has spent thirty years arguing about what to do next. Four days will get you a good deal of that argument, and to leave with the sense that you were somewhere real rather than somewhere arranged for you.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is Johannesburg safe for tourists?
With the ordinary precautions, yes, and hundreds of thousands of people visit every year without incident. The precautions are real, though: use cars rather than walking between areas, do not walk after dark, and keep valuables out of sight. Guided tours of the inner city and Soweto exist partly because they remove the guesswork.
How many days do I need?
Three nights covers the museums and Soweto properly. Add a fourth if you want the Cradle of Humankind, and a fifth if you plan to use Johannesburg as a base for Pretoria, which is forty minutes north on the Gautrain.
Do I need to hire a car?
Not necessarily. Uber and Bolt are cheap and cover everything on this plan, and the Gautrain handles the airport. A car helps if you want the Cradle of Humankind or Pretoria on the same trip.
When is the best time to go?
April to September. The highveld winter is dry, sunny, cold at night and free of the afternoon thunderstorms that arrive most days from October to March. It is over 1,700 m up, so pack a jacket whatever the month.
Should I combine it with Kruger?
It is the standard pairing and it works. The park is about five hours east by road, or a short flight, and most visitors do Johannesburg first and go on to a game reserve afterwards.