Where the signs to Sun City begin to fade, with the tar on the road, the village of Ledig appears; its inhabitants, the Bakubung Ba-Ratheo community, hope to be the Platinum Province’s next success story.
The North West province village is 40 minutes from Rustenburg and five minutes from Sun City, where some of the 3Â 0000-strong community work.
Throughout the 1800s the Bakubung resided in nearby Boons and were forcibly moved to Ledig in the 1960s by the apartheid government. Their leadership is contested, with some members of the community believing they should be led by the royal family and others feel their custodians are the traditional council, headed by acting kgosi (chief) Ezekiel Monnakgotla.
Across the road from the village is land fenced off for the future operations of Wesizwe Platinum, in which the community owns shares. Visibly protruding in the distance is the mine shaft that brought employment, royalties and fame to the neighbouring Bafokeng community, an experience the Bakubung hope to emulate.
The village is a mixture of shacks, square semi-rural houses and a few lavishly decorated double-storey homes. But the people of Ledig are not well off.
”We don’t have basic things like water,” says Rose Lukhele, seated at a pub at the entrance to the village. In the background the bleating of goats is as loud as the kwaito playing from the corner café.
”The roads are so muddy that when it rains, we can’t walk anywhere,” Lukhele says. ”The children can’t walk to school. And we don’t have enough schools — the schools are so far.”
Water is a problem in the village, says resident Thabo Segonote: ”We get water only when it rains. There is a reservoir, but the pipes have rotted.”
Yet there are signs of upliftment, too. The soccer field, on which teenage boys are playing as the sun sets, is newly grassed; and there are cylindrical green water tanks with ”Wesizwe” displayed boldly on the side.
”The Wesizwe trucks come to fill up the tanks three or four times a week,” says Segonote. Outside a school is a large board advertising Saturday classes for high school learners — another Wesizwe initiative.
But there is simmering mistrust among those who people this valuable land. The tension is almost as electric as the fences around the mining area.
The community is conflicted, desperate on the one hand to claim its stake in the wealth that lies below its feet, but also dangerously divided about the mine and the people in control of their shares.
”The community was not split before Wesizwe,” says Roseman Matshoba. ”When people wanted to fill their pockets with platinum, that’s when the problem started. We are sitting on a time bomb. And once it explodes …”
