The Golden Thread: Women's Day and the Enduring Value of Courage

9 August 2025

There is something about the quality of light in August that makes you think of permanence. Perhaps it's the way the winter sun slants through the windows, casting everything in amber, or perhaps it's simply that this month carries within it the weight of memory, the kind that doesn't fade but burnishes with time, like gold.

On 9 August 1956, twenty thousand women walked to the Union Buildings in Pretoria. They walked in their church clothes, in their work clothes, in whatever they had that lent them dignity for the occasion. They walked carrying petitions against the extension of pass laws to African women, those demeaning documents that would have turned every black woman into a prisoner in her own country.

Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa, Sophia Williams-De Bruyn, names that should roll off our tongues like prayers. They led this procession, this river of resistance, and when they arrived at the seat of apartheid power, they stood in silence for thirty minutes. Twenty thousand women, silent as the grave, present as the sun.

"Wathint'abafazi, wathint'imbokodo," they sang. "You strike a woman, you strike a rock."

The Alchemy of Resistance

What transforms a moment into a monument? What makes an event echo across generations? It's the same quality that turns base metal precious, pressure, time, and an unyielding refusal to break under weight.

The women of 1956 understood something about value that extends far beyond the material. They knew that freedom, like gold, doesn't tarnish. They knew that dignity, like silver, only grows more lustrous when polished by struggle. They invested their bodies, their voices, their very lives in a future they might not live to see, but their daughters would.

Today, nearly seventy years later, we live in that future. We are the dividends of their courage, the compound interest of their sacrifice. And yet, the question that haunts me on this Women's Day is: what are we investing in? What legacy are we leaving for the daughters who will come after us?

Building Wealth, Building Futures

There's a profound connection between the symbolic and the practical, between honouring our past and securing our future. The women of 1956 fought for the right to move freely, to work, to build lives of dignity and purpose. Today, part of that dignity lies in financial independence, in having the wisdom and means to protect what we've built.

This is where the story of women's struggle intersects with something as tangible as a Krugerrand. South Africa's gold coins, minted since 1967, carry within them not just the promise of precious metal, but a piece of our national story. The gold that lies beneath our soil funded empires and fed exploitation, yes, but it also represents the wealth of this land, the inheritance that belongs to all its children.

When women choose to invest in gold and silver Krugerrands through trusted platforms like SA Gold Markets, they're making a choice that would have been unthinkable to their grandmothers, the choice to hold value, to preserve wealth, to pass something tangible to the next generation. They're transforming the gold that once symbolized their exclusion into a tool of their empowerment.

The Enduring Shine

Gold doesn't rust. Silver doesn't fade. And the memory of twenty thousand women walking in dignity toward power doesn't diminish with time, it only grows more precious.

On this Women's Day, as we remember Lilian Ngoyi's steady voice and Helen Joseph's unwavering stance, as we think of all the women who stood when it would have been easier to sit, let us also think practically about our own futures. Let us honour their memory not just with words, but with actions that secure the freedom they fought for.

The women of 1956 invested in our freedom. Perhaps it's time we invested in our own future, with the same wisdom, the same long-term thinking, the same understanding that some things hold their value across generations.

After all, they didn't just strike a rock that day. They struck gold.

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