Johannesburg

Jozi, eGoli, the City of Gold - Johannesburg has gone by many names since 1886, when prospectors struck the richest gold reef on earth and a mining camp became Africa's largest city overnight.

That founding rush left little patience for looking back. Many visitors still just clear customs here before racing off to Kruger or the Cape, treating Joburg as a stopover rather than a story. But the seam that built this place was never the gold, long exhausted - it's the history layered above it, from segregation's earliest laws to the Soweto Uprising and the long walk that ended with a former prisoner becoming president.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours take you into that seam. At the Apartheid Museum, trace a century of history from that first gold strike to 1994, hearing how ordinary defiance wore the system down. At the Nelson Mandela Foundation, stand inside a glass replica of his Robben Island cell and follow his path from a rural chief's son to the man who came to symbolise a country's transformation.

Put your earbuds in. In Johannesburg, the richest seam was never the gold.