More than 100 businesswomen, students and academics packed Nelson Mandela University’s Business School recently for a Women’s Month seminar built around one word: resilience.
Prof Margie Cullen, the entrepreneurship research specialist who facilitated the morning on behalf of the Business School, said the seminar celebrated every woman who overcame adversity despite the odds.
The programme moved from banking to personal safety, career survival and artificial intelligence.
Deputy vice-chancellor for learning and teaching, Prof Muki Moeng, delivered the welcome, tracing resilience back to the 1956 women’s march on the Union Buildings.
“Resilience is not passive endurance, but active resistance, creative rebuilding,” she said.
“As a breast cancer survivor, courage means wearing your scars with pride.”
Nedbank area client manager Jenny van der Walt said entrepreneurs and bankers shared more common ground than expected since both wanted the business to succeed.
She urged women to know their banker rather than “just phone a 0860 number”, to price their worth without flinching and to keep personal and business accounts strictly apart.
Atlas Security brand manager Ryan Morris said shopping centres and parking lots were among the biggest crime hotspots and told guests to get off their phones, to empower staff to act and to walk out “loud and proud”.
“Confidence is an absolute killer to a suspect,” he said.
For Nelson Mandela University MBA student Yoliswa Williams, a business team manager at Continental Tyre SA, it was her first time addressing an audience to share her personal story.
A scientist by training, she grew up in a shack in New Brighton, the daughter of a mother who cleaned houses and scraped together bus fare to get her to school.
Today she leads a staff of 124, oversees nine managers, owns property and has funded her sisters’ education.
“We do not know the strength that we have,” she said.
Newton Park SuperSPAR director Alasia Hayward, recounted rebuilding through two difficult marriages, a custody battle that became a law-school case study, a collapsed store roof — and a breast cancer diagnosis her daughter later shared, who now runs the business.
“When I’m down, I get up,” she said.
“You water the garden and you watch it grow.”
Dr Ife Fashoro, of the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa, closed on resilience in the age of AI, which she called “a bell that we cannot unring”.
She urged women to bounce forward, reshaping and reinventing themselves through lifelong learning.
“Resilience isn’t built in the big dramatic moments; it’s built in the 15 minutes you almost skipped,” she said.
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