ABSTRACT
In 1881 the South African industrialist Sammy Marks made a business trip on horseback between Pretoria and Kimberley. On the way he and his companion, Dumont, passed through a sparsely populated farming region of little apparent consequence. A local farmer offered Marks a farm called Driefontein for a trifling £800. Marks was keen to buy but Dumont convinced him that he owned enough of the Transvaal already. He was to regret profoundly this error of judgment. Driefontein, it soon turned out, straddled the Witwatersrand main gold-reef upon which the modern city of Johannesburg was built (Mendelsohn 1991). Marks, a shrewd and calculating man with considerable business acumen, gazed on the parched and waterless farm that would become Johannesburg and was persuaded he saw nothing of interest. For the rest of his life, whenever he visited the city, he was haunted by his failure to see. The landscape of Johannesburg became a painful rebuke, a moral commentary on the failure of his own desires.
