From its establishment, Johannesburg has always been a fast-paced and dangerous place to live and work in. Indeed, being a city built on the exploitation of man’s ultimate symbol of wealth and with its economy entirely dominated, at least in its earlier decades, on the most risky of professions, a characteristic of danger and avarice soon became, and has remained, inherent to the very nature of the city. Inevitably, the early avaricious ambitions of Johannesburg’s mining industry to produce ever greater quantities of gold at the lowest possible cost created a mindset that was generally quite reckless and, more often than not, indifferent to the safety of employees and residents of the city.

The incident that most accurately illustrates Johannesburg’s propensity for reckless behaviour, at least in its fledgling years, is the catastrophic dynamite explosion that occurred in what is today the central business district in 1896.

It would be no exaggeration to state that, next to gold itself, dynamite influenced the historical trajectory of Johannesburg and, dare it be said, South Africa more than any other manufactured good.

When the gold-bearing conglomerate reefs of the Witwatersrand basin were discovered, the Transvaal government had, for many years already, enforced a policy that gave concessionaires, in the form of favoured individuals or single companies, exclusive rights over a particular industry in exchange for a yearly rental of substantial proportions.

Thus, it was inevitable that the Volksraad in Pretoria would attempt to draw maximum benefit from the fledgling gold industry on the Witwatersrand by imposing concessions on a number of industries key to supporting gold mining.

The most controversial and influential concession granted in the wake of the discovery was the manufacture and distribution of dynamite, gunpowder and ammunition for 16 years. The concession was essentially calculated to stimulate a local factory that could turn out ammunition in times of war, as well as mining explosives in times of peace.

Inevitably, the South African Explosives Company, which secured the concession in 1887, viewed it as an opportunity to swindle the gold mining industry by charging what it liked for anything remotely explosive. And all that the company did was import the dynamite in bulk, repack it in the Transvaal and sell it on to the mines at a profit of 200%.

However, the aspect of this concession that is most pertinent to this narrative is the fact that little care was taken in the transportation and storage of the dynamite once in the gold mining metropolis. In fact, the dynamite was railed to the Johannesburg railway station, near present-day Braamfontein, and often left in the baking sun for days on end before being collected by agents and taken to the various mines. Now logic and present-day health and safety standards would dictate that such a practice was just an accident waiting to happen. And so it was.

The catastrophic accident, which nearly destroyed the very town of Johannesburg, occurred on a seemingly ordinary Wednesday afternoon on February 19, 1896.
According to contemporary news reports, the accident occurred when railway officials of the Netherlands Company, who were shunting some trucks along a siding at the Johannesburg railway station, drove the trucks too hard and caused them to violently plough into nine trucks laden with a little over 50 000 kg of dynamite, which had been standing at the station since the previous Sunday. As would be expected, the explosion caused by the collision into nine trucks of dynamite was of catastrophic proportions.

At the scene of the explosion itself, all that remained was a gaping hole, measuring about 90 m × 35 m and 45 ft in depth, strewn with chunks of iron and steel that denoted all the remains of the dynamite wagons.

The force of the explosion demolished practically every house and building within a 500 m radius and caused all the windows of buildings to be smashed in a wider radius. In fact, such was the force of the explosion that it could be felt as far away as Pretoria, with many residents reporting earth-tremor-like vibrations through their houses.

As the district in close proximity to the railway station was, in those days, largely a residential area, the explosion wreaked havoc and devastation among residents.

An eyewitness account recorded by The Cape Times’ Johannesburg correspondent gives some insight into the immediate scene of devastation. “The district in close proximity to the explosion is occupied mostly by poor Dutch people, and it is these who experienced the full force of the catastrophe.

“Many must have been blown to atoms. I myself saw not merely a hand, but a portion of a face, just like the front of a mask, so disfigured that no one could tell whether it belonged to a white or a black man.

“The scenes were appalling. The dead and the wounded were ranged in their various degrees from total annihilation to slight scars. Everywhere was heard moans, and everywhere were corpses and the unconscious wounded.

“There were many willing helpers in the work of rescue; but all could not be attended to at once, the catastrophe was so widespread. Some of the houses laid low were in flames, and no one could tell whether or not underneath there were poor wounded creatures.

“As might be supposed, the larger numbers of victims were women and children, the explosion occurring in the afternoon, when the husbands and fathers were at work.”

In the end, the death toll numbered just under 100 men, women and children.

The dynamite explosion of February 19, 1896, is an incident that is rarely mentioned in the annals of Johannesburg’s short but influential history, yet it certainly must rank as one of the most devastating and catastrophic accidents ever to have impacted on the city and its residents.