An Australian prospector, George Harrison, discovered gold on the Witwatersrand ridge, leading to the largest gold rush in history. The region's unique conglomerate reefs were the deepest and most extensive gold deposits ever found. This discovery transformed the agrarian Transvaal Republic into the industrial powerhouse of South Africa, attracting massive foreign investment and migrant labor.

The Witwatersrand gold mining economy established the stark racial and economic divides that became the central subject of 20th-century South African protest poetry. Writers like Dennis Brutus and Mongane Wally Serote wrote against a backdrop of migrant labor hostels and deep-level mines where the wealth was extracted by black labor for white capital. The 'gold' of Johannesburg (Egoli, the City of Gold) is a consistently ironic and tragic image in South African literature, representing unrealized promises of liberation.