The Bakwena or Bakoena ("those who venerate the crocodile ") are a large Sotho-Tswana clan in Southern Africa of the southern Bantu group . They can be found in different parts of southern Africa such as Lesotho , Botswana , South Africa and Eswatini . "Kwena" is a Sotho/Tswana/Sepedi word meaning " crocodile ", the crocodile is also their totem ( seboko ).
7-682: Earliest ancestor of the Kwena clan, Kwena, was a grandson of Masilo I, the King of Bahurutse clan around 1360 CE. Kwena and his followers settled at Tebang, now called Heidelberg . Around 1500 CE, Bakwena started spreading in the region, from the Lekwa River to Kalahari (Botswana) until settling at Ntsoanatsatsi (mythical origin land of the Sotho-Tswana people) with the Bafokeng around 1580 CE. and it continues to
14-657: A capital for the Boer republic during the war with Great Britain under the Triumvirate of Paul Kruger , P.J. Joubert and M.W. Pretorius , from 1880 to 1883. In 1885, the Witwatersrand gold reef was discovered, and the office of the Mining Commissioner was established there. Heidelberg developed as a typical rural Victorian town. Many buildings dating back to the period between 1890 and 1910 have been preserved, including
21-718: Is a town with 35,500 inhabitants in the Gauteng province of South Africa , some 50 kilometres south-east of Johannesburg , close to the Mpumalanga border. It sits at the eastern end of the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve , next to the N3 highway connecting Johannesburg and Durban . The area was once the kraal of the Bakwena , until colonization and the Basotho wars . Modern Heidelberg
28-548: The home of A.G. Visser , a well-loved medical doctor and famous Afrikaans poet, which can still be seen situated close to the main road through town. Other historical landmarks in the town includes Visser's bust and the Klipkerk. The British built a concentration camp here during the Second Boer War to house Boer women and children; a monument to their memory, and to those of the black women and children who also died during
35-662: The royal line of Lesotho. Kgabo II led a small group of Bakwena and crossed the Madikwe River and founded a tribe on the lands of the Bakgatla tribe (whose totem was the blue monkey) which they drove away, modern day Botswana. As the result of a split, several tribes like the Ngwato and Ngwaketse . This article about an ethnic group in Africa is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Heidelberg, Gauteng Heidelberg
42-699: The war, was erected in the main cemetery in the late 1990s by the current ANC -led municipality. The far right secessionist political organisation (and former paramilitary group) the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) was founded by the late white supremacist and white separatist leader Eugène Terre'Blanche in the Heidelberg suburb of Rensburg. Its headquarters are now in Terre'Blanche's hometown of Ventersdorp . The "Jo'burg to Sea" mountain bike stage race starts in Heidelberg. The "Outdoor X" show
49-598: Was founded in 1862 as a trading station by a German , Heinrich Julius Ueckermann. A town was laid out around the store and named after Ueckermann's alma mater . In 1866, the District of Heidelberg was created from the eastern portion of the Potchefstroom district with its own landdrost (magistrate), having been laid out as a churchplace in 1865. Heidelberg has played an important part in South African history, acting as
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