A red square is a shop sign. Apparently there are a number of these "friendly shops" around in ZA, unfortunately they don't have website and Google Maps does not list all of them. You can also see part of the text on the building "*ville mansions". Again, Google Maps does not have this building nor Bing/OpenStreetmaps, but still it's possible that there is some sort of registry of ZA businesses which you could query to get potential addresses. It is also clearly spring on the second photo and the shadows are well defined, so you can approximate time of day (midday) and street directions (shadows point north or so). You can see that these are four way crossroads with at least one road being just two lanes wide, there are at least two buildings on the corners and along one side of the road there is a longish green zone / possibly a park. I think there is a bus stop on the road with the park as well. Not sure what are the FH markings on that yellow thingy and what's that blue square with yellow something. These might be street signs that are specific to some region/city, so just browsing random locations in ZA could turn something up.

This info wasn't enough for me to figure out the location, but it's something. If I was serious about the challenge or there was way to monetize this, I could write OpenStreetMaps / Google Street View scraper that would figure out the location in a matter of minutes.

There is no Dutch text. It is Afrikaans.

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.