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As South Africa’s largest city faces an uncertain future, understanding its political history is more pressing than ever. Johannesburg’s Mayors: 140 Years of Making and Breaking the City offers a sweeping exploration of more than one hundred mayors, from the city’s days as a ruthless mining town under Boer control to its troubled present, using their stories to trace how political power has been wielded across the colonial, apartheid and democratic eras.

Rooted in extensive research yet written in an accessible style, the book captures the epic struggles within and among government agencies, communities and developers. It is full of stories of individuals – heroes and villains, successes and failures, scandals and extraordinary personal quirks and escapades – set within a story shaped by developments at global, national and local levels: the struggle for British control over the goldfields; Johannesburg’s pioneering role in shaping local government nationally after the South African War; the bitter contest for control of the city between white ratepayers and white labour; the disruptions of the Great Depression and the World Wars; the 1948 Nationalist victory; the compromising relationship between the Johannesburg City Council and the apartheid state; the collapse of United Party rule in the 1970s; coalition government in the 1980s; the turbulent transition of the 1990s; reconstruction and ambition in the 2000s and the unstable coalitions and institutional decay since the mid-2010s.

The mayor is the visible face of city governance, translating complex bureaucratic processes into public reality Johannesburg’s Mayors: 140 Years of Making and Breaking the City situates each one within the broader machinery of government and its surrounding politics. Written with the city’s current crisis firmly
in mind, the book argues that a long view of how Johannesburg has weathered past crises is a vital resource for understanding its present – even as the authors stop short of offering prescriptions. This is non-fiction with all the pace and tragicomic detail of a historical thriller.

As a world city whose influence stretches into Africa and beyond, Johannesburg epitomises global urban culture: inequality, the clash between accountability and a broken system, urban decay, danger and the hyperbolic, surreal reality of late capitalism. In the tradition of landmark urban histories such as Mike
Davis’s City of Quartz (on Los Angeles) and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (on New York), Johannesburg’s Mayors: 140 Years of Making and Breaking the City blends history, political analysis and social critique – an essential read for anyone trying to understand the modern global city.