Witbank, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

🇿🇦 Witbank, officially eMalahleni, is a city situated on the Highveld of Mpumalanga, South Africa, within the Emalahleni Local Municipality. The name Witbank is Afrikaans for "white ridge", and is named after a white sandstone outcrop where wagon transport drivers rested. The city is known for its coal-mining in the surrounding region.

Witbank, which was founded in 1890, was renamed to eMalahleni meaning the place of coal in 2006 by the government of Mpumalanga, matching the municipality. Both names are used.

History Witbank was founded in 1890 and early attempts to exploit the coal deposits failed until the railway from Pretoria reached the area in 1894. It was proclaimed a town in 1903 and became a municipality in 1914.

There are many stories about the city and its origination but the top story would be the arrival of Winston Churchill at the nearby Transvaal and Delagoa Bay Colliery during his escape from Boer imprisonment in Pretoria, on his way to Delagoa Bay (later Lourenço Marques, and then Maputo, in Mozambique).

Some local residents, loyal to the Crown, assisted him in hiding and making the final leg of his escape, thus gaining Witbank the consequent credit once the details of these events could be made known. The town has grown since then from a farming community into a business destination where companies such as Anglo American, BHP, Evraz, Eskom, Exxaro, Komatsu, the Renova Group, SABMiller, and Xstrata, among many others have found substantial returns on their investments.

Name On 3 March 2006, Witbank was officially renamed to eMalahleni, meaning place of coal matching the name of the municipality that contains it. A large number of signs to the town have already changed, but many still remain. Some landmarks bearing the name Witbank have remained, while others (such as the Witbank/eMalahleni dam) have been renamed.

Despite attempts by governing bodies to establish the use of the name, Emalahleni, for the city as well as for the district, locals still tend to call the city by its original name. Similarly to the anglicised pronunciation of Johannesburg, English-speaking residents pronounce the name as “wit•bank” and not as “vit•bunk” as in the original Afrikaans pronunciation, nor as “vit•bank” as English-speaking visitors are prone to say.