Where Purple Governs

This post is part 1 of 21 in the newsletter of September 2026

There is a colour, a visual symbol of peace and reconciliation reserved for those called to serve before they are called to lead: the purple of authority that is earned, not seized. Not the purple of power, but of responsibility — worn by those who accept a role not to occupy the stage, but to keep it open for others. It is the colour that best describes the style of Annemarie Mostert, South African, social entrepreneur, Past District Governor of District 9400, and now, President for the 2026–2028 term, at the helm of the Executive Council of Rotary’s Intercountry Committees — the resource network that weaves relationships of peace between nations through Rotary friendship.

An architecture built by many hands

Peace, Mostert reminded delegates at the 2025 ICC summit in Calgary, is not merely the absence of conﬂict: it is a “positive peace” — an active, respectful relationship between peoples, cultivated day by day rather than declared once and for all. Drawing on her own South African experience, she made a point that few institutional speeches dare address so plainly: peace must reckon with language, culture and regional sensitivity — from Francophone to Anglophone Africa — and demands sustained, long-term commitment, not a single gesture or a well-worded statement. Her Rotary journey began in 1997.

From there came her involvement in various Rotary leadership positions, founding the EClub of Southern Africa, while in business she spent years leading Mila Services. She also serves on various boards, including as advisory on the academic board of Regenesys Business School. Behind every role, though, one conviction keeps surfacing in her public remarks: authentic leadership does not occupy the room — it opens it up.

Between memory and the future Mostert succeeds Nathalie Huyghebaert as President of the ICC Executive Council, the network of Intercountry Committees active across dozen of the countries on multiple continents. It is a transition she has chosen to frame as continuity rather than rupture: peace, she has repeated on several occasions, is built by passing the baton, not by holding onto it.

This is where her mandate touches the heart of the intergenerational leadership conversation:
on one side, the experience of Past District Governors who built the ICC network over the past 76 years; on the other, the energy of younger members now driving e-clubs and digital innovation. Her Calgary address made exactly this point: neither generation can build a lasting peace alone. What is needed is genuine dialogue — the kind that listens before it speaks, and sometimes stays quiet before it listens.

Keeper and builder

There is a distinction, familiar to those who work in conﬂict resolution, between keeping the peace and building it. The ﬁrst preserves a balance; the second works to make that balance unnecessary.

Mostert’s words and choices place her closer to the second: she does not simply preside over dialogue between committees and cultures, but insists on the need to build the underlying conditions — trust, listening, opportunity — that make conﬂict less likely to arise in the ﬁrst place.

At the ICC Peace Forum in Cluj-Napoca, participants singled out her contribution as one of the most valued aspects of the gathering — an event designed to send every delegate home as a small ambassador for peace within their own community. It is their account, more than any adjective of ours, that best captures what her presence meant. Perhaps that is the fairest measure of leadership: not what it says of itself, but what others carry away from it.

It is no accident that the image of purple — a colour of dignity rather than conquest — ﬁts a leadership style that makes no claim to the whole stage, working instead so that others, standing beside her, are seen and heard. It is an authority exercised lightly, and precisely for that reason it leaves behind something more durable than a term of oﬃce: a shared culture, able to outlast the individual mandate — and the individual name — that shaped it.
At a time when international organisations often struggle to hold together the memory of those who founded them and the energy of those who will inherit them, Annemarie Mostert’s leadership of the ICC remains an instructive case study:

peace, in her own words, is not a slogan for a season, but an architecture built brick by brick, by the hands of more than one generation together.