20 — Twenty Rands
The artwork
Front: An African elephant fills the right half, head turned three-quarters on, tusks and the deep creasing of the trunk cut in fine intaglio line; behind it a herd — two adults and a calf — walks out of the bush under a flat-topped acacia. The issuer is named across the top in English and along the bottom in Afrikaans, with TWENTY RAND and TWINTIG RAND running up the side margins. At lower left, the bank's device set inside a faceted brilliant-cut diamond, above the signature and the bilingual title President / Governor.
Back: Mining, the other half of the country's wealth: a processing plant and headgear tower rise at the left, conveyors and gantries stretching across the middle, and a crane-barge works the water in the foreground. Three outlined brilliant-cut diamonds float across the upper field in purple, echoing the device on the face. A large white 20 sits at the right, with the issuer's name repeated top and bottom in English and Afrikaans.
In circulation
The elephant twenty belongs to the "Big Five" family that replaced the Jan van Riebeeck notes in the early 1990s and carried South African money through the transition years. This later printing bears Governor Mboweni's signature, so it dates from 1999 onward. A revised series followed in 2005, and the Mandela portrait notes arrived in 2012.
Details
- CurrencyRand
- DenominationTwenty Rands
- Collectedon the South Africa journey, 2003
- IssuerSouth African Reserve Bank / Suid-Afrikaanse Reserwebank
- Series"Big Five" — the elephant denomination
- SignatureT.T. Mboweni, as President / Governor