South Africa’s traditional mining heartland has been in decline since at least the 1980s, with industrial activity shifting away from the gold mining industry centred on Johannesburg, and north into a ring along the platinum belt, spanning South Africa’s North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces. This has precipitated a shift of mining enterprises and the associated industrial and social infrastructures into the Pretoria metropolitan area, and giving rise to a new social order amongst affected communities. This paper concerns itself with one such affected polity: Makapanstad, a peri-urban settlement in the southern part of North West Province. Community activist groups, prominent families and other stakeholders have been working to assert themselves amidst a legislative environment which prioritises commercial rights and selectively empowers certain entities according to their reach within the ambit of modern capitalism. A large part of the community’s strategy has been to recognise that the regulatory environment is neither impartial nor apolitical, but that they have tools available to them in a particular account of their own histories, genealogies, and heritage in place—all of which are legally significant, and able to offer a countervailing influence independent of the community’s economic means. They seek to connect themselves and their familial lines to the landscape, to entrench their beliefs and intangible heritage in place, and to enact their own model of the wider strategy of counter-mapping and indigenous cartographies in order to produce narratives which have the right ‘format’ to be taken seriously in judicial proceedings. In a turn from their relatively recent history, in which the apartheid government designed ethnicity as a tool to keep black people out of white cities, interlocutors in Makapanstad are mobilising the exact same resource to assert their right to exist and to shape the new order on this, their ancestral landscape.