Krugerrand

The Krugerrand (Afrikaans: [ˈkryχərˌrant]) is a South African coin, first minted on 3rd July, 1967 to help market South African gold and produced by the South African Mint. By 1980, the Krugerrand accounted for 90% of the global gold coin market. The name is a compound of Paul Kruger, the former South African president depicted on the obverse, and rand, the South African unit of currency. During the 1970s and 1980s, some western countries forbade import of the Krugerrand because of its association with the apartheid government of South Africa, most notably the United States, which was the coin's largest market in 1985.

Production levels of Krugerrands have significantly varied during the last 50 years. From 1967 to 1969, around 40,000 coins were minted each year. In 1970, the number rose to over 200,000 coins. More than one million coins were produced in 1974, and in 1978 a total of six million were produced. The production dropped to 23,277 coins in 1998 but have increased again, although not reaching previous levels.

Paul Kruger in The Guns of the South
When Nate Caudell went to the First Rivington Bank, to cash in his Confederate soldier's pay in 1864, the AWB man on duty as a teller gave him a set of very strange coins with an old bearded man on one side and an antelope on the other. Caudell did not understand these images, but did not care. The only thing that mattered to him were that the coins were genuine gold.