The Bafokeng name derives from the word phoka, meaning “dew”. A well known Bafokeng oral tradition relates that when the Bafokeng eventually reached their present location, they observed that in the mornings the valleys around the hills in the area trapped heavy overnight dew.

This natural phenomenon seemed to promise that the land would be fertile and we would prosper. A decision was made to settle there and we began to call ourselves the Bafokeng, “the people of the dew”.

To date, land has been the pivot on which the history of our nation has rested. From the fertile agricultural and grazing lands in the early centuries to the contested territory in the 18th and 19th centuries marred by the states restriction on blacks buying land, and finally to the discovery of platinum in parts of the land that the Bafokeng strategically bought back from the Boers after the invasion and dispersal of the Bafokeng in the Phokeng – Rustenburg area by the Voortrekkers.