There is a scene in the movie Invictus that I often use in our leadership workshops to illustrate a number of Adaptive Leadership practices and techniques. Nelson Mandela addresses South Africa’s rugby committee, asking them — unsuccessfully at first — to keep the Springbok emblem as the nation’s team symbol rather than discard it as a relic of apartheid. The moment is composed, restrained, morally luminous. It is also, for some right now, alienating.

That reaction surprises people. Mandela remains one of the most widely admired moral figures of the modern era. His clarity, courage and capacity for forgiveness still command respect across political and cultural lines. Discomfort with the clip is not a repudiation of Mandela. It is something subtler, more contextual, and more revealing about the moment many of us are in.

What is being rejected is not reconciliation as a value. It is reconciliation as expectation. It is reconciliation abstracted from its conditions and redeployed in a setting where the underlying terms feel profoundly different.

To understand the reaction, it helps to slow down and look carefully at what the scene is doing, and what viewers are bringing to it now.

The Power of Context

Mandela’s appeal to the rugby committee made sense because of where South Africa was in 1995. Apartheid had formally ended. Political power had shifted. A new constitution was being written. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was about to begin its work. White South Africans had lost their legal dominance, and Black South Africans had secured the vote, representation and international legitimacy.

Reconciliation in that context was not a substitute for justice. It followed a rupture. It was an attempt to stabilize a fragile transition after something real had changed.

That sequencing matters. Reconciliation after political transformation carries a different moral weight than reconciliation in the absence of it. When viewers watch the clip today, many do not recognize that sequence in their own experience. There has been rupture, yes, but no transfer of power commensurate with the harms endured.

What they see instead is a familiar pattern: a call to unity arriving before accountability, before repair, before structural change. The scene risks collapsing two very different historical moments into one moral lesson. That flattening is not neutral. It carries an implicit demand.

Reconciliation Fatigue

For many people, there is a kind of exhaustion that has accumulated over decades. The fatigue does not just come from conflict. It comes from restraint. From being asked, repeatedly, to modulate tone, absorb insult, extend grace and demonstrate patience while conditions remain stubbornly intact.

In that light, Mandela’s calm authority can register less as inspiration and more as pressure. Not because he is wrong, but because his posture echoes a role many have been asked to play too often: the moral adult in the room, steadying the system that has yet to steady itself.

The burden is asymmetrical. Calls for reconciliation often land hardest on those who have already compromised the most. When that dynamic goes unacknowledged, even a powerful historical example can feel like another instruction to endure quietly.

This is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition.

Symbolism and Its Limits

The Invictus scene is about symbols. The Springbok jersey becomes a stand-in for national identity, shared belonging, and the possibility of a future not entirely defined by the past.

Symbols matter. They can create openings. They can signal shifts in narrative. But symbols without accompanying material change can also function as substitutes. Many viewers have watched symbolic gestures proliferate while concrete outcomes lag far behind.

Corporate statements after police killings. Diversity slogans without power-sharing. Commemorations without reparative policy. In that environment, a speech about preserving a symbol can feel hollow, even manipulative, regardless of its original intent.

The discomfort is not with symbolism itself, but with how easily it is used to declare closure prematurely. The clip risks being read through that lens, especially when stripped of its historical scaffolding.

The Problem of Elite Moral Theater

In the film, Mandela is composed, persuasive, almost pedagogical. That framing is not accidental. Hollywood favors leadership that looks like this: calm reason, personal persuasion, enlightened elites choosing the greater good.

For viewers who have watched institutions absorb moral language without altering their behavior, that image can ring false. In June 2020, corporate America issued sweeping statements on racial justice. By 2026, many of those same companies had quietly dismantled DEI offices, citing “economic conditions” or “evolving priorities.” Universities commemorated George Floyd while increasing campus police budgets and rejecting calls for community oversight. The pattern is consistent: moral vocabulary gets incorporated, power arrangements remain untouched. The Invictus scene resembles that performance — elites invited to feel magnanimous without relinquishing much.

The risk is not that the scene is inaccurate to South Africa’s history. It is that it is too easily repurposed in a different context to reassure those who already hold power that moral clarity has been achieved.

Timing Matters

Moments land differently depending on what else is happening.

Right now, many people are navigating a political environment marked by backlash: against voting rights protections, against DEI efforts, against historical reckoning itself. Gains that once felt tentative now feel actively contested. Language about equity is being rolled back or recoded. Institutions are retreating from commitments made only a few years ago.

In that atmosphere, a clip emphasizing harmony can feel out of sync with the urgency of the moment. Not wrong in principle, but misaligned in timing. It can feel like being asked to skip steps that history has not yet delivered.

Reconciliation is not a static virtue. It has a tempo. When the tempo is off, the music grates.

The Risk of Weaponization

Perhaps the most significant source of resistance has less to do with Mandela than with how the clip is often used.

The scene circulates most often as a lesson. This is how real leadership looks. This is how change happens. This is how protest should sound. Calm. Generous. Non-threatening.

When an example becomes prescriptive in that way, it stops being illustrative and starts being constraining. It narrows the range of acceptable responses. It subtly delegitimizes anger, urgency and refusal.

We have good reason to be wary of moral exemplars being deployed as discipline. History is full of moments when the language of nonviolence and reconciliation was selectively amplified to police the behavior of the oppressed rather than to confront the behavior of the powerful.

In that context, skepticism is not disrespect. It is discernment.

Aesthetic and Cultural Distance

There is also a simpler dimension. Invictus is a polished Hollywood film centered on rugby, nationalism and political leadership. Its emotional register is restrained, its pacing deliberate. For younger viewers especially, the film can feel like a relic of an earlier moral imagination, one that assumes shared national projects and clear moral arcs. That aesthetic distance affects what people can see themselves in, and what feels imposed from elsewhere.

Respecting Mandela Without Freezing Him

None of this diminishes Mandela’s achievement. His choices were extraordinary. His capacity to imagine a shared future in a moment of justified rage remains rare. He deserves the reverence he receives.

But reverence becomes distortion when it freezes a leader in time and turns their context-bound decisions into universal prescriptions. Mandela did not offer reconciliation as a shortcut. He offered it after securing leverage, legitimacy and irreversible political change.

To lift his words out of that sequence is to misunderstand them.

Honoring Mandela means honoring the conditions he insisted upon, not just the tone he adopted.

What This Reaction Reveals

The unease some people feel watching the Invictus clip is not a rejection of unity. It is a demand for honesty about what unity requires.

It reveals a collective sensitivity to how moral language can be used to close conversations rather than open them. It reflects a refusal to perform reconciliation on cue. It signals an insistence that healing follow truth and that generosity follow justice.

That insistence is not radical. It is historically grounded.

Reconciliation is not a mood. It is an process. It is what becomes possible when power shifts, harms are named, and repair is underway. Without those elements, calls for unity risk becoming another way of asking the injured to carry the system on their backs.

The Invictus scene still has something to teach. But what it teaches now may be different from what it taught twenty years ago. It teaches the importance of speaking to people’s sense of loss. Of framing amidst competing values and loyalties. Of what those who teach leadership narrative call the Story of Self, Us, and Now. Of restraint not as virtue signaling, but as strategy earned through struggle. Of being willing to risk disappointing your own people for a greater purpose. It also teaches the danger of mistaking moral clarity for moral completion.

Mandela understood that danger. He never confused forgiveness with forgetfulness, or unity with amnesia.

If his example unsettles us now, that may be less a failure of his legacy than a reminder of how much unfinished work remains. The discomfort is not the problem. It is the signal. And honoring that signal means insisting on the conditions that made Mandela’s reconciliation meaningful: power shifted, harms named, structural change secured. Anything less is not reconciliation. It is performance masquerading as progress.

The work is naming what reconciliation actually requires, and refusing to perform it on demand until those requirements are met.

———

If you’re interested in exploring how to navigate leadership moments…

• Let’s talk – feel free to DM me.
• Adaptive Leadership Foundations is our public workshop covering the core practices of adaptive leadership, including how to read context, sequence interventions, and distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges. It’s designed for anyone looking to build a foundational practice.
• Our Leadership Narrative Program focuses specifically on the craft of public narrative — developing your Story of Self, Us, and Now, and learning to deploy narrative strategically in service of mobilizing people toward change.