RUSTENBURG—The Bafokeng, owners of the Royal Bafokeng Stadium, where World Cup games are played in Rustenburg, are a tribe with the good fortune to be situated on top of a 2 billion-year-old rock formation that contains about three-quarters of the world's known platinum reserves.

It's Bafokeng property: In the 19^th century, when the Boers began to take over, the Bafokeng king sent men from the community to work in the Kimberley diamond mines to earn money to buy back the land.

Platinum was discovered in the 1920s. In 1999, the Bafokeng won a long legal battle and gained the right to more than 20 percent of the royalties from platinum the Impala Platinum company mines on their land.

In recent efforts to diversify for the long term, the Bafokeng went into sports. They built a stadium, bought a soccer team (the Platinum Stars) and a rugby team (the Platinum Leopards), and began athletics programs for 20,000 Bafokeng children.

The 300,000 Bafokeng people are part of the Rustenburg municipality long governed by whites and are in the unusual situation of very probably being wealthier than the municipality.

Rustenburg means City of Rest, and as we walk downtown, its most striking industry is the business of death.

The Tswane Tombstone Factory. Budget Tombstones. Bofelo Tombstones. There are half a dozen tombstone outlets in a couple of blocks on the main drag of Nelson Mandela Drive and more on side streets, showing stones made from nearby granite quarries. Loan places offer funeral loans. Insurance companies prominently advertise packages that include free funerals.

The newspaper runs a public-service section called "Unclaimed Bodies," with a list from a local hospital of dozens of names and birthdays of (mostly) men too young to die alone: Simon Motlhaping, born in 1982; Thabiso Sekereu, born in 1972; Isaac Tokwe, born in 1970.

Even the park-and-ride lot in use for the World Cup is to be made into a cemetery—the old one is full.

This is what AIDS looks like in a mining town in South Africa, where apartheid policies long mandated that when men move hundreds of miles from home for work, they leave their wives behind. Now it's a country where a third of pregnant women aged 20 to 24 have HIV, and in a city like Rustenburg, people often die.

"Some people I work with come to the office on Monday, and they haven't even had a chance to rest, because they've been at funerals all weekend," says Willie, the co-owner of our bed-and-breakfast, who works for the municipality.

My boyfriend, Marcel, uses up our Skype minutes calling friends in France to discuss the farce of their national team. The headline in L'Equipe said, "Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute," literally, "Go get sodomized, dirty son of a whore"—words one of the players reportedly said to the coach. The player was sent home, and, in protest, the rest of the team refused to practice.

The day France plays South Africa, we have tickets to the Mexico-Uruguay game scheduled for the same time at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium, and Marcel wears his France T-shirt underneath his Mexico jersey.

The stadium is like a nationalist Halloween party, with people dressed as Mexican wrestlers, Mexican bullfighters, Mexican chiles. Even the South Africans wear sombreros.

"¡Sí, se puede!" people chant. "¡Chinga tu madre, Uruguay!" they yell, suggesting unspeakable things to do to Uruguay's mother.

Then, without warning, the vuvuzelas begin to hum, and the South Africans in the crowd stand and cheer. "Sounds like South Africa is beating France," Marcel says grimly. A round of text messages must have hit the cell phones.

But Bafana Bafana do not do well enough to go on to the second round. The vuvuzelas are uncharacteristically quiet at the end of the game.

In Soweto and Johannesburg, we had never wandered around alone because our hosts were concerned for our safety. (In Kruger National Park, of course, the same thing was true.) Rustenburg, a city of about 400,000, feels calmer. Black and white people walk in the streets, and Rina, the co-owner of our B &  B, doesn't miss a beat when Marcel says he wants to walk out to pick up food; she just gives him directions. There is no guard at the gate. When we need a taxi, Rina just gets out the phone book without fear that a strange driver might kill us.

But a few weeks ago, a Portuguese journalist covering the World Cup was robbed in his hotel room near Rustenburg. "They told me to lie on the bed, and they covered me with a blanket, pressed the gun against my head, and told me to sleep," he told reporters.

The local newspaper reports on robberies impressive for a small city, including that six men with guns held a knife to 4-year-old Baby King at his father's grocery store, threatening to slit his throat and demanding cash. The men also took a Toyota pickup, cards for cell phone minutes, jewelry, cosmetics, and cigarettes.

Earlier this month, armed thieves stole 100,000 rand, or roughly $13,000, in cash and checks from the Rustenburg municipality administration office.

South Africans have always been obsessed with sports. For years, the country was banned from international competition because of apartheid, and many whites say that made them reconsider their politics for the first time. Meanwhile, people of all races played, watched, and cared about sports. So it makes some sense that the Bafokeng should view sports as a long-term development strategy. But I was curious to hear more, so I called and asked to meet the queen mother.

Semane Bonolo Molotlegi, 65, "Mmemogolo," or "mother of the nation," has the regal air of a leader and the smile of a great beauty. When platinum was first heavily mined here, she was a young woman newly married to the king and serving as something like his executive secretary. She remembers when full-blown platinum mining started in the 1960s.

"They sent young officials from the mine to us. They brought this contract for the chief to sign, and said, 'Call him.' I said, 'I'm not going to call him. This is not how it's done. You must make an appointment, he must meet a council, then you can discuss the contract.' "

Other tribes might have just signed, she says.

Much has changed for her personally since apartheid ended, she says—even though she was far from the townships and part of one of the self-governed Bantustans.

"You'd go buy meat—but if you want steak filet, they wouldn't give it to you, they'd give you the worst kinds of meats. You'd have to write it down and take a paper to the butchery, so they'd think you were somebody's servant and give you the meat. I was not anybody's servant, I was my own servant.

"In the whole of Rustenburg, you weren't allowed to fit a dress, because if there were whites in the store, they would leave. I found a shop with a Jewish storeowner where I could go to peek after hours and see which ones I liked, and they would bring it to me to fit.

"I went to the dentist, and I went in the front door. The nurse said: 'What are you doing here? Go to the back.' Outside in the back, in the courtyard, there was no chair, nothing. The dentist comes and just gives injections to everyone, then returns to the white area. Then he comes back and he pulls people's teeth while they're standing up in a line.

"There was no use to be angry," she said. "The best thing is to make it a joke."

Now that those days are over, the Bafokeng are trying to build their community. "Sports has a way of bringing people together and inculcating responsibility in the young," she says.

Marcel had been excited to meet the queen mother, but he waits outside while she and I talk, and, afterward, in the taxi on the way back to Rustenburg, he doesn't want to hear about our conversation while the driver is listening on the radio to the Algeria-USA and Slovenia-England games—in the Tswana language.

"Shhh," says Marcel.

"But you can't understand!" I say.

"I want to hear the intonations," he tells me.