Brakpan is a gold and uranium mining town with 346,735 inhabitants in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The name Brakpan was first used by the British in the 1880s because of a non-perennial lake that would annually dry to become a "brackish pan".

The name Brakpan comes from a small pan on a farm called Weltevreden, which was filled with very brackish water and was probably referred to as the " brakpan" and it was near this pan that the first settlement started. In 1888, a coal seam was discovered and a coal mine under the name of Brakpan Collieries was started. When a railway line was constructed from Germiston to Springs, Brakpan became one of the stations along the route.

With gold fever running high on the Witwatersrand in the early years of the twentieth century, it was not long before gold was discovered. In 1905, Brakpan Mines Company sunk its first two gold mining shafts. One of its claims to fame was that it had the highest mine dump in the world at that time, its height being 120 metres (390 ft) above ground level. This was higher than any of the pyramids of Egypt except the Pyramid of Cheops.

Sonja L. Henning (born October 4, 1969 in Jackson, Tennessee) is an American attorney and former collegiate and professional women's basketball player. She grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, where she attended Horlick High School.

She attended Stanford University and played for its women's basketball team from 1987 to 1991. She helped the Cardinal win the 1990 NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship game, defeating Auburn University. The following year, Henning was named Pac-10 Player of the Year and a Kodak All-American in her senior season.

During the summer of 1990, she was a member of the 1990 U.S. National Team that won the World Games and Goodwill Games.

An economics major, Henning graduated from Stanford in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

After graduation, there were few opportunities for women to play professional basketball in the United States at the time, so Henning started her professional career playing in a women's professional basketball team in Uppsala, Sweden in 1992.