The apartheid government dealt harshly with those that were opposed to it, many of whom were South Africa's black majority. It was thus, not an exception when the then government rounded up the traditional leadership of the Mabeskraal community near Rustenburg and banished them hundreds of kilometres away to a remote and isolated farm called Driefontein next to Bona Bona village, in the Kagisano-Molopo local municipality outside Vryburg in the North West. The North West Arts, Culture, Sports & Recreation Department remembered the victims during Black History Month commemorations at Bona Bona village.

Pogo ya Tlou Foundation was established by the children and grandchildren (the descendants) of the 11 Batlhako men, who resisted the Bantu Authorities system, Bantu education, and various forms of apartheid laws. The 11 men were banished from Mabeskraal between 1935, 1949, 1955, and 1956 to Driefontein near Bona Bona, a desolate part of South Africa where as the late Helen Josephs indicated “into the most abandoned parts of the country, there to live, perhaps to die, to suffer and starve, or to stretch out a survival by poorly paid labour, if and when they could get it”...

The human rights abuses associated with state-sponsored violence and vigilante activities, murder and assassination, political detention and banning, are generally well known. Generally unknown is the apartheid stateʼs legislated administrative practice of banishment, in terms of which political opponents were plucked from their families and communities and cast, in the words of Helen Joseph, ‘into the most abandoned parts of the country, there to live, perhaps to die, to suffer and starve, or to stretch out a survival by poorly paid labour, if and when they [could] get itʼ...