The name literally means "place of gold" and in the heyday of gold production produced over 70% of the world's gold. At an altitude of about 1 700 metres above sea level (on the "highveld") it is South Africa's highest city. Gauteng is Africa's economic power house and less than 2% of the total land area generates 40% of the South Africa's wealth. With a population of over 7 million people it is the country's most densely populated area in an otherwise sparsely populated country.

The core of Gauteng is the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan area that is situated on top of the richest gold reef in the world spanning almost 100 kilometres from east to west. Johannesburg, also known as Igoli or Egoli ("place of gold"), is the country's economic heartland and the core of industry.

Gauteng is now widely thought to be the actual cradle of humankind and possibly one of the places where human kind first started walking upright. One of it's most remarkable yields was the 2.5-million-year-old female skull discovered by Dr Broom in 1947 which he dubbed Mrs Ples. The "Little Foot" skull was also found here.

Before the colonial period, however the province was home to many different cultures as far back as 1100 AD, and even before. The Khoi-San people have inhabited the southern African region consistently for hundreds of thousands of years, but their cave paintings (Klerksdorp area) date back to between 20 000 and 30 000 years.

There are many Iron Age sites in and around the province, including in the Melville Koppies, showing mining and smelting activities. So mining has been part of the history of the province as far back as a thousand years ago, suggesting highly evolved and sophisticated cultures, contrary to the idea of "primitive" Africans.

The Voortrekkers moving away from the British Empire in the Cape in the early nineteenth century and the discovery of gold a few decades after that, however changed the nature of the province totally. With the coming of whites came also dispossession of the land and poverty for blacks for the next hundred and sixty years, culminating in "grand apartheid".

The province was know as the Transvaal after the end of the Anglo-Boer War that ended in 1902. Before that was known as the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (the South African Republic, or ZAR) and was an independent from the British Empire. The ZAR's last president, Paul Kruger, was forced to run the country from a train in the eastern Transvaal after the outbreak of the 1899 Anglo-Boer War.

The Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by which the former Boer republics (the Orange Free State, the ZAR and Natal), defeated by the British Empire, were united under British rule.

The country became independent from Britain in 1961 but remained in the British Commonwealth, although not for long. The National Party who won the elections of 1948 started implementing apartheid laws from the early 1950s into the 1960s. Prime Minister Handrik Verwoerd, often called the architect of apartheid, removed South Africa from the British Commonwealth and started on a road that would totally isolate the country from the "family of nations" as envisioned by a previous South African prime minster and co-founder of the United Nations, General Jan Smuts.

The Freedom Charter was first signed in Kliptown, Johannesburg, in 1956 as internal black resistance to apartheid grew. The ideas expressed in the Freedom Charter would later be incorporated in the 1996 South African Constitution, the first in the world that makes special provision for gay rights by the inclusion of the phrase "sexual orientation".

The period 1961 to 1990 is often referred to as "the dark days of apartheid", the trauma of which would remain in the national consciousness for many years to come. This period saw the mass detentions without trial of people who were critical of apartheid, including whites, murders and assassinations. It also saw the Rivonia Treason Trial during which Nelson Mandela was sentenced to 31 years imprisonment.

The times were however changing and by 1990 the apartheid state was falling apart. It had become too expensive to maintain, but there was another enemy of apartheid rising: globalism. In the summer of 1990 president FW De Klerk astounded the country and the world when he announced the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) as well as many leaders, amongst others, Nelson Mandela.

Apartheid had officially come to an end in 1994. A new constitution was being drafted that would turn out to be the most progressive in the world. One of the period's most enduring images must be Mandela casting his vote in the first democratic elections.

In 1994 Nelson Mandela is sworn in as South Africa's first ever black president and Time named him as the most famous African who ever lived.

Gays and lesbians had a lot to gain under the post-apartheid because not only were gay rights secured in the Bill of Rights, when the government moved too slowly to repeal apartheid laws that discriminated against gays, the Constitutional Court stepped in. One of the most remarkable events of recent years was the Constitutional Court judgement the foreign partners of gays and lesbians when the judge "read into the law" (ie "changes the law") without waiting for an act of parliament. It was a South African and world first for a judge to act without the approval of parliament.

The National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality (NCGLE) now had to take action against their longtime alliance partner, the ANC, for inaction on repealing apartheid laws. The NCGLE successfully challenged the Department of Justice on the sodomy law, the Department of Home Affairs on gay immigration and the police medical aid society.

The "Mandela era" was coming to an end and the country's second democratic elections also went smoothly taking the country into the "Mbeki era", and the start of the African Century.

The province is characterised by rolling hills, fold mountains and flat, savannahs with sporadic scrub brush. Acacia trees are the original flora, but foreign species of trees include Jacaranda trees with their purple flowers in October and Ucalyptus trees in woody clusters. There are a few streams (named "rivers"), but the Vaal River to the south and the impressive Magaliesberg mountains to the north form natural boundaries.

Gauteng also has one of the largest meteorite impacts on earth some two billion years ago. The Vredefort Dome is on the border of the Free State province and Gauteng. A more recent crater, the Tswaing, 200 000 year old is perfectly preserved and is located in the Pretoria region. Gauteng's Museums and research establishments have unique collections of fossils, rocks and San and Khoi paintings.