History and Heritage

As I put the finishing touches on this essay, a World Cup soccer match was being played in the Royal Bafokeng Stadium, a short distance from my office. As helicopters circled, vuvuzelas blared, and crowds of foreign visitors swarmed around the village of Phokeng, the tensions between an ever more commercially successful “ethnic corporation” (Cook 2005) and a struggling community of previously disadvantaged people, had never been more stark.

The Bafokeng are a Setswana-speaking community long settled near present-day Rustenburg. This article focuses on their protracted legal battle with Impala Platinum in recent times to improve their royalties. It also analyses the interconnection of this struggle in the 1980s with the political consequences of Bafokeng incorporation into the apartheid ‘homeland’ of Bophuthatswana under Mangope. The injustices of the Mangope era endured by the Bafokeng are detailed extensively here. Subsequent Bafokeng court action against the powerful mining conglomerates made legal history.