Johannesburg Johannesburg were destroyed and their people driven away during the wars emanating from Zululand during the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the mfecane or difaqane wars), and as a result, an offshoot of the Zulu kingdom, the Ndebele (often referred to as the Matabele, the name given them by the local Sotho–Tswana), set up a kingdom to the northwest of Johannesburg around modern-day Rustenburg. The main Witwatersrand gold reef was discovered in June 1884 on the farm Vogelstruisfontein by Jan Gerritse Bantjes that triggered the Witwatersrand Gold Rush and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886. The discovery of gold
University of Johannesburg 1960sIt would take more than half a century before the independence of South Africa from the British, that the newly elected National Party sought to provide education in the Afrikaans language, the third most spoken mother tongue language in South Africa. This led to the foundation of Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) in 1966. At the time of its founding, RAU was the second university to be established in Johannesburg and it was established through an act of parliament as the academic hub for Afrikaners, establishing a standard of excellence. After the fall of Apartheid in 1994, African students started to