Editing Rustenburg (section)

===Mfecane===
{{unreferenced section|date=October 2018}}
Before European settlers arrived, the area had been settled by agrarian [[Setswana]]-speaking tribes.

Rustenburg's population is primarily [[Tswana people]].  Partially belonging to the [[Royal Bafokeng Nation]], extensive landowners earning royalties from mining operations. The Royal Bafokeng are descendants of [[Sotho people|Sotho]] [[settler]]s who displaced the local tribes from the region, which they came to call 'place of dew' (Phokeng). In the early 1800s, the Bafokeng and other Tswana communities were conquered in a series of devastating wars launched by an offshoot of the Zulu kingdom, called the Matebele.  The Boers had also fought the Zulu and Matebele, and so the Boers and Tswana found in the Matebele a common enemy.  The Tswana and Boers planned together and worked toward defeating the Matebele from a Sotho-Tswana kingdom to the south, and together, they defeated the Matebele.  As the Boers settled in the area, called their settlement Rustenburg because they had relatively friendly relations with their Bafokeng allies in the area, and after the many violent military conflicts with other African chiefdoms, such as the Matebele, they believed they could rest ("rusten" in Dutch) in this settlement, whose name literally means "Resting Town."{{citation needed|date=May 2018}}  Although had already long lived in the area when the Boers arrived, the Bafokeng bought land rights from the Boers, and they purchased their first tracts of land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from the colonial rulers, some in exchange for serving in the [[Boer Wars]]. Although these land purchases were technically illegal,{{Citation needed|date=December 2017}} Paul Kruger, who would become a president of the Transvaal Boer Republic, but was then a veld kornet, was friendly to the Bafokeng and helped arrange many of these purchases. A public hospital has been named after Paul Kruger.