Professor Margie Cullen, the entrepreneurship research specialist who facilitated the morning on behalf of the Business School, said the seminar celebrated “every woman who has ever been told ‘you can’t’, and answered, ‘Watch me’.”
Held at the end of July in advance of South African Women’s Month in August, the seminar paired that spirit with practical tools.
The programme moved from banking to personal safety, career survival and artificial intelligence, and sent every woman home with something she could put to use.
Professors Muki Moeng and Margie Cullen
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, where women confronted oppression “with strength, grace and unwavering resolve”.
Resilience, she said, builds courage, strength, adaptability, empathy, hope and perseverance.
“Resilience is not passive endurance, but active resistance, creative rebuilding,” she said. As a breast cancer survivor, she added that courage means wearing your scars with pride.
Nelson Mandela University Business School Acting Director Professor Amanda Werner, right, welcomes speakers, from left, Ryan Morris, Jenny van der Walt, Yoliswa Williams, Dr Ife Fashoro and Alasia Hayward. Images: Lisa Geswindt
Nedbank area client manager Jenny van der Walt turned to money, telling the room that entrepreneurs and bankers share more common ground than they think, since both want 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.
Small business ownership can be lonely, she said, pointing guests to networking and mentorship. Her slide put it plainly: “Consistency beats perfection in business.”
Atlas Security brand manager Ryan Morris made confidence his golden thread. A planned self-defence demonstration had to be dropped the night before when the instructor fell ill, a small lesson in flexibility, so he turned to mindset.
Awareness, he said, is only half the job, since noticing a suspicious person or car matters little without reacting to it. With shopping centres and parking lots among the biggest crime hotspots, he 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. She graduated with her postgraduate diploma cum laude and leads, she said, with the dignity every shop-floor worker deserves.
“We do not know the strength that we have,” she said.
Newton Park SuperSPAR director Alasia Hayward, part of the SPAR family for more than 32 years, drew both laughter and awe. She 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, crediting “fabulous people” and a simple creed: “You water the garden and you watch it grow.” She closed with Glinda the Good Witch: “You have always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn how to use it.”
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”. Rather than bouncing back to where they were, she urged women to bounce forward, reshaping and reinventing themselves through lifelong learning, and challenged each of them to put one new skill on the calendar this week.
“Resilience isn’t built in the big dramatic moments; it’s built in the 15 minutes you almost skipped,” she said.
As programme director, Prof Cullen kept the energy high throughout, with music, high fives and affirmations, and guests left with goodie bags packed with treats from the sponsors.
• Sponsors and partners included: Nedbank, Newton Park SuperSPAR, IITPSA, Business Partners, Sanlam, Atlas, Shambala, Hlambisa Group, Beautiful You, Andelia and EC Motors.