This paper investigates the process of African urbanisation on the Witwatersrand. It suggests that much of the existing literature on urbanisation in South Africa has tended to neglect first‐generation immigration into the towns and has preferred to focus instead on migrant labour and second‐generation African urbanites. It argues that the large‐scale settlement of first‐generation immigrants on the Witwatersrand which took place in the 1930s and 1940s was a product of a complex combination of factors ranging from the trivial to the grand, notably the independent movement of women to the towns, the changing residential ecology of the Rand and the forms in which industrial wages were paid. It goes on to trace some of the journeys by which new immigrants came to the Rand and the parochial, heterogeneous and often ethnically inflected associations which they formed in order to survive in this new environment. It concludes by examining the political implications of these transformations.