And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just by the look of the traffic lights and street signs.
I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.
In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed several universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and take a closer look at the Pretoria skyline."
That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out. Because once you know which city it makes it much easier.
> I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.
If you look closely, you can see stenciled markings on the yellow poles. These felt like official markings to me so I tried to figure out how to use the markings to narrow down the list of candidate cities.
According to Wikipedia, the _Burger_ newspaper is distributed only in three regions: Western, Eastern, and Northern Cape. There are not too many large-ish towns in these district.
So I made a list of all towns with >50k inhabitants. Looking at those cities on Street View one by one, I found there are only two towns where the yellow poles have the exact same typeface of stencil numbers on them: East London and Uitenhage.
So I took a closer look at either town. (After a few misses, you quickly get a feeling where to find the parts of towns where the roads actually have traffic lights). With a bit of luck, I actually managed to locate the first picture just by randomly clicking on corners. Its coordinates are 33.7648S/25.4012E.
There are only 4 or 5 large cities in SA, though, so even if you didn't get lucky guessing Pretoria first time round it wouldn't take that long to check all their skylines for that distinctive building.
And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just by the look of the traffic lights and street signs.
I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.
In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed several universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and take a closer look at the Pretoria skyline."
That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out. Because once you know which city it makes it much easier.