Speaking in 2004, three years after 9/11 and during the Iraq War, Ndebele drew a pointed parallel between South Africa's transformation and the challenges facing America. He recalled the global solidarity that followed September 11 — how he had written to friends across the United States, telling them how much he suffered with them — and lamented how that solidarity had fractured. Ndebele suggested that the world was in a position not unlike South Africa before its transformation: divided, fearful, and relying on instruments of war that looked 'distressingly primitive' for the twenty-first century. His challenge to the Wesleyan graduates was implicit but unmistakable: the nation that had helped inspire South Africa's freedom now needed to rediscover its own capacity for the kind of counterintuitive courage that had saved his country.