27/09/2026
My dear fiends. Time to speak up… You know what they say about silence when in fact it is time to speak.
I have watched the debate around the White Cross Project unfold over the past few days. I have read the arguments for it and against it. I have seen the accusations of racism, the counter-accusations, the statistics, the political arguments and, once again, South Africans retreating into the racial camps that have defined so much of our history.
Perhaps it is time for me to say where I stand.
I support the White Cross Project.
I do not support it because I believe that only white lives matter. I do not.
I do not support it because I believe that only white farmers are victims of violence in South Africa. They are not.
And I do not need to deny the murder of black farmers, farmworkers, coloured South Africans, Indian South Africans, or any other South African, to acknowledge the suffering experienced within a particular community.
Human suffering is not a competition.
I support it because behind every cross is something we have become dangerously accustomed to in this country. A human life violently ended, a family permanently altered, and too often a justice system that never brings those responsible to account.
I know something about that.
In 1998, my father was brutally murdered in his own home. He was 64.
It was a Wednesday afternoon. My mother was at a prayer meeting at the local church.
Three men entered their home. My father was beaten through virtually every room of the house. He was hanged with his own tie and suffocated with a shopping bag.
And there is another part of this story that has never left me.
My two elder brothers were born deaf. One of them walked in and found my father.
Then my telephone rang…To receive a telephone call from your brother who cannot hear, and to hear almost nothing except:
“Johan, come quickly. Johan, come quickly.”
Those words remain with me and still haunts me.
Almost three decades later, nobody has ever been brought to justice for my father’s murder. Not a single follow up call and not a single progress report.
Our family has therefore paid a very real price for South Africa’s violence and failures of justice. We have earned the right to participate in this conversation, not because our suffering matters more than anyone else’s, but because it is ours. We lived it.
And that is precisely why I refuse to make this only about race.
Through the lens of Wisdom Leadership, I believe we are dealing with something deeper. A crisis of leadership.
South Africa inherited an extraordinarily painful and unjust history. Apartheid institutionalised racial discrimination and excluded millions of South Africans from rights, opportunities and participation that should never have depended upon skin colour.
There is nothing about that ideology that I wish to defend.
But precisely because we know where racial classification and exclusion can lead, we should be extraordinarily careful about constructing our future around race.
You cannot heal the wound of racial discrimination by perpetuating racial discrimination in another form.
Two wrongs have never made a right.
The democratic government inherited an enormous responsibility, not merely to redistribute political power, but to heal a divided nation and build a society in which every South African could experience dignity, belonging, opportunity and equal protection under the law.
That required extraordinary leadership.
Leadership capable of holding history without becoming imprisoned by it.
Leadership capable of pursuing meaningful redress while remaining alert to new forms of exclusion.
Leadership capable of distinguishing justice from retaliation.
Leadership capable of bringing black, white, coloured and Indian South Africans into a shared future rather than continually returning us to the identities and wounds of our past.
And leadership capable, above everything else, of performing one of the most elementary responsibilities of government…
Protecting its people.
When citizens are murdered and their killers are never found, leadership has failed somewhere.
When communities barricade themselves behind electric fences, alarms, armed response and security gates simply to sleep at night, something has failed.
When farmers and farmworkers live with the possibility of extreme violence while doing the work of producing food, something has failed.
When corruption takes resources away from policing, infrastructure, education, municipalities and essential services, something has failed.
When skilled South Africans increasingly question whether there is a future for themselves or their children in the country of their birth, we should at least have the maturity to ask why.
And when, after more than thirty years of democracy, our public conversation still so easily collapses into black versus white, something has profoundly failed in our collective leadership.
This is where I believe we need a different conversation.
The children of South Africa did not create apartheid.
Black children did not create it.
White children did not create it.
Coloured children did not create it.
Indian children did not create it.
They inherited its consequences.
The responsibility of leadership is therefore not to perpetually allocate inherited guilt, but to create the conditions in which the next generation can transcend what previous generations could not.
That does not mean forgetting history.
It means learning from it deeply enough that we stop reproducing its underlying consciousness.
Apartheid was morally indefensible precisely because it classified human beings according to race and allowed that classification to determine rights, opportunities and belonging.
If we genuinely understand why that was wrong, then the lesson cannot simply be that the wrong people benefited.
The deeper lesson must surely be that human dignity should never depend upon race in the first place.
South Africa now needs leaders capable of moving beyond the egoic consciousness that continually requires an enemy, an “us” and a “them”, someone to blame and another group against whom identity can be constructed.
We need leadership capable of transcendence.
Not transcendence that ignores history, inequality or injustice, but leadership mature enough to hold them without becoming possessed by them.
Leadership capable of asking not only:
“What happened to us?”
but also:
“Who are we becoming because of what happened to us?”
That is where Wisdom Leadership begins.
Love.
Compassion.
Care.
Mercy.
Justice.
Human dignity.
Responsibility.
Not selectively.
Universally.
That is why I can stand beside a white cross commemorating a murdered farmer while simultaneously grieving a murdered black farmer.
Why I can condemn the murder of a farmworker while condemning the murder of a farm owner.
Why I can acknowledge the historical suffering of black South Africans without surrendering my right to speak about suffering experienced within my own community.
These truths do not cancel one another.
Wisdom is precisely the capacity to hold apparently opposing truths without needing to destroy one of them.
Perhaps that is what South Africa desperately needs now.
Not another ideology.
Not another racial battle.
Not another generation carrying grievances handed to them by the generation before.
But mature leadership capable of saying:
Enough.
Every South African life matters.
Every South African deserves protection.
Every child deserves opportunity.
Every victim deserves justice.
Every community deserves to belong.
And every government should ultimately be held accountable for whether the people entrusted to its care are safer, freer, more prosperous, more hopeful and more united because of its leadership.
So yes, I support the White Cross Project.
Not because I want another racial division in South Africa.
Quite the opposite.
I support the remembering of people whose lives were violently taken because I know what happens when one of those lives belongs to your own family.
My father does not have a cross standing in Washington.
But he could have.
And somewhere behind every cross is another family whose world changed in a moment.
I still hear the voice of my deaf brother on that telephone:
“Johan, come quickly. Johan, come quickly.”
Some things never leave you.
We should not be arguing about whether suffering deserves to be remembered.
We should be asking ourselves what kind of leadership will build a South Africa in which fewer families…black, white, coloured or Indian, will ever need such a memorial again.
Because ultimately, for me, this is not about the colour of the crosses.
It is about the quality of our leadership, the consciousness from which we choose to lead, and the value we place on every human life.
Yours in service.
Dr Johan Slabbert
My father - Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger Slabbert.
