In a world where alarms blare and cameras blink red, there’s a quieter form of protection being slipped onto chains, wrists, and even tucked into shoes, gold. Not just any gold, but amulets. Tiny tokens carved with forgotten prayers, melted into symbols of ancient deities, or hammered into nameless shapes passed down through whispers. In the alleyways of Johannesburg, the back rooms of Durban’s markets, and the shadowed streets of Cape Town’s night economy, gold is still a shield. But not in the way banks or bullion dealers understand it.
This isn’t investment-grade bullion or high-polish bling for Instagram, this is belief metal. Sacred metal. The kind you wear not for the flash, but for the force field it promises.
You’ll find it on bouncers guarding nightclub doors, woven into the braided hair of sangomas, clasped tightly in the hands of Uber drivers navigating midnight routes. These aren’t accessories. They are insurance policies written in gold, faith, and fear.
Ask around long enough and someone will point you to a man named Zuko in Yeoville. Not his real name, but that’s the only name you’ll get. He runs a corner stall that sells knockoff perfume, but the real trade happens under the counter. “Not everything gold is jewellery,” he says, pulling open a tin lined with cloth. Inside: crosses carved from old wedding rings, a lion’s tooth capped in gold, a miniature Zulu spear forged from melted earrings. “This one’s for road safety. This one keeps your enemies confused. This one —” he grins, “makes sure you come home.”
Zuko doesn’t advertise. His clients find him. They come with stories. “Someone threw bones on my doorstep.” “I keep losing money, even when I win.” “My brother got shot at the robots.” And then, they buy. Not because they think it will work. But because they hope it might.
And what is gold, if not hope in physical form?
South Africa’s history with gold is deep and bloody. Mines that swallowed men whole. Strikes and sweat and spades. But in the underground, both literally and culturally, gold never just meant money. It meant connection. To ancestors. To power. To safety. The gold amulet is the modern relic of that legacy. It’s the 21st-century talisman for those who no longer live near rivers and trees, but whose spirits still hunger for grounding.
You’ll find these tokens in pawn shops too. Some wrapped in fabric, others set in old-school chains that no longer glitter. The pawnbrokers know better than to melt them down. “They’re marked,” one tells me, tapping a ring with an etching that looks like a snake eating its tail. “Bad luck to destroy protection.”
There are shops that refuse to touch them at all. Too many stories. A buyer who fell mysteriously ill after purchasing a gold bracelet from a dead man’s estate. Another who claimed to hear whispers at night from a pair of gold earrings that never warmed to the skin.
So they sit there, in the drawers of pawn shops, gathering dust and legend.
But not everyone sees them as superstition. Some designers are embracing the mystique, weaving it into high fashion. A Johannesburg-based collective called InGoldWeTrust is creating capsule collections of urban amulets, gold tooth pendants, ancestral mask brooches, even bangles engraved with lines from isiZulu and Tswana poetry. “We’re not selling trinkets,” says the founder, who only goes by Busi. “We’re reawakening memory. Armour. Identity.”
Their pop-ups attract artists, rappers, activists. People tired of store-bought meaning. People looking to wear something that feels like it believes in them.
Of course, there are critics. Those who argue that spiritual gold is a scam, preying on the vulnerable. That no amount of engraved symbolism can protect someone from a bullet or a bank loan. And maybe they’re right. Maybe belief isn’t bulletproof. But here’s the thing, faith rarely is. It doesn’t need to be. It just needs to make you walk taller when you step out the door.
In a country where crime stats climb, inequality deepens, and luck is often a luxury, the idea of wearing your protection makes sense. Not everyone can afford armed response or private therapists. But maybe, just maybe, you can afford a charm. A sliver of safety. A piece of gold that knows your name, even if no one else does.
There’s something poetic about it, really. In a land whose soil still echoes with the clank of pickaxes and the cries of miners, the gold dug from its belly is returning to the people, not as status, but as shield. It’s not sold in vaults or priced by the ounce. It’s traded in story and sweat and belief.
And maybe that’s the real gold economy. One built not on carats and karats, but on connection. On the quiet idea that something, somewhere, is looking out for you. So next time you see a cab driver wearing a strange pendant, or a woman clutching a gold disk at a taxi rank, don’t ask what it’s worth. Ask what it means.
Because in the underground cities of South Africa, under neon lights and concrete skies, gold still glows. Not just with money. But with meaning.
