The name Bafokeng means people of the dew, or people of the grass. Oral tradition holds that when the community settled in the valley near Rustenburg, they noticed the land caught heavy dew on cool mornings, and read it as a promise that the soil would be fertile and the people would prosper. They trace their history back nearly nine centuries, to around the year 1140, and their line of kings to the early 1700s. For most of that time they were farmers on rolling bushveld, defending their ground against invaders and land-grabbers, led always by a hereditary kgosi, a king. Today the nation covers more than a thousand square kilometres of the North West Province, with its capital at Phokeng, and somewhere between a hundred and fifty thousand people live on Bafokeng land.

The platinum was found in 1925, in the Bushveld Igneous Complex, the same vast geological formation that holds most of the world's known platinum-group metals. Mining came to the quiet farming district, and for decades, under apartheid, the Bafokeng watched wealth pulled from beneath their feet with little of it staying. Their leverage was the land itself. Because Mokgatle's purchases had given them ownership, the Bafokeng could fight for their share, and they did. A landmark court settlement in 1999 with Impala Platinum, one of the giants of the industry, secured the nation a royalty on every ounce of platinum taken from its territory and a stake in the company itself. The royalties run into the billions of rand, an income stream few communities anywhere can match.

What the Bafokeng have done with the money sets them apart as much as the money itself. Rather than simply distribute the windfall, the nation built an investment institution, Royal Bafokeng Holdings, that functions like a community sovereign wealth fund, managing assets worth several billion dollars and steering the proceeds into the long term. The royalties have paid for schools, clinics, roads, water and a stadium that hosted World Cup football in 2010. And the leadership has been candid about a hard truth: platinum runs out. A community plan known as Vision 2020 set the goal of weaning the nation off its diminishing mineral wealth and building an economy that can outlast the reef, through education, diversified investment and new industries brought to Phokeng.

On the Bafokeng flag, a crocodile moves toward water, a sign the people read as contentment. It is the totem of the wider Basotho-Batswana family, but the Bafokeng draw their crocodile in a way no one else does, with its jaws closed rather than open. Their motto, a e wele metsing, is rendered as let there be peace. There is a quiet dignity in all of it that matches the nation's story: a community that endured colonisation and apartheid, kept its kings and its language, secured its own ground when almost no one else could, and then chose to invest a fortune in its grandchildren rather than spend it on itself. The dew still settles on the grasslands of Phokeng each morning, as it did when the first Bafokeng read it as a promise.