Johannesburg

Egoli, they call it – the place of gold. Jozi and Joburg are fine too, because it’s that kind of city: one that only exists because prospectors struck a colossal gold reef in 1886. Within a few years, the tented mining camp had boomed into a place Olive Schreiner called “Hell”, where every man was “fighting for gold, gold, gold.”

Plenty of visitors still pass through like a shift change, in from the airport and straight out to the bush, but the richest seam here runs through stories of how gold built a city, how it divided it, and how that division was undone.

VoiceMap’s self-guided audio guides lead you into two of them. At the Apartheid Museum, your ticket randomly classifies you as white or non-white and sends you through the matching turnstile, before ninety minutes carry you from the gold rush to the first democratic vote in 1994. If the view over the old mine dumps stops you in your tracks, just hit pause. In Houghton, the Nelson Mandela Foundation keeps his office exactly as he left it.

Plug in your earbuds, take your time, and let Jozi tell you how it struck gold.