South African gold soon eclipses diamonds in importance.

Africans had mined gold for centuries at Mapungubwe (in South Africa, on the border with Zimbabwe) and later at the successor state of Great Zimbabwe, and they had traded with Arabs and Portuguese on the east coast of Africa.

In the 1860s and the 1870s, Europeans had made a number of small finds of their own, but the major development had taken place in 1886 when potentially enormous deposits of gold were found on the Witwatersrand (literally, "Ridge of White Waters" in Afrikaans, commonly shortened to Rand) near present-day Johannesburg.

English-speaking businessmen who had made their fortunes in the diamond industry quickly buy up all the auriferous claims and establish a series of large gold-mining companies that are to dominate the industry well into the twentieth century.