A weekend in Cape Town in 2003, a letter written fifteen years later, and the promise made at his centenary concert in Johannesburg.
Beyoncé met Nelson Mandela on Robben Island on 28 November 2003, the day before she sang at his AIDS benefit concert in Cape Town. She was 22, five months after the release of her first solo album. He was 85. Photographers pictured the two of them together outside the cell block where he had spent 18 of his 27 years in prison.
Fifteen years later she went back to South Africa to headline the concert for the centenary of his birth, and wrote him a letter that dates their first meeting to 2004.
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The 46664 campaign that brought her to Cape Town
The concert took its name from Mandela’s prison number. He was the 466th man admitted to Robben Island in 1964, and late in his public life he turned those five digits into a fundraising campaign against AIDS. He launched it in London in October 2003. The Cape Town show, six weeks later, was the first big test of it.
Robben Island, the day before the concert
The performers gathered for a dinner in Cape Town on 27 November and sailed out to the island the next morning. Beyoncé was photographed inside one of the small cells in Mandela’s block, and again standing beside him with Annie Lennox. Reuters reported that the artists took no questions from journalists that day.
Her letter fills in what the pictures do not show. She describes walking back to the prison with him, the deliberate pace of his steps, and the stories of the struggle he told along the way. He smiled, she wrote, while he talked to the musicians and their guests.
The concert at Green Point Stadium
More than 30,000 people came to Green Point Stadium on 29 November, by CBS News’s count. Beyoncé opened the show with a version of “Crazy in Love” rewritten for the campaign, backed by six dancers. She told the young women in the crowd, the Associated Press reported, that there was “nothing sexier than being confident and taking care of yourself”. Bono later said she had been asked to come because of the questions she put to the organisers, among them why 6,500 people a day were dying of AIDS across Africa, an account recorded in Jeffrey Cupchik’s study of the concert for the UCLA journal ECHO.
She led a sing-along built on the five digits, with Oprah Winfrey dancing beside Mandela while it ran. She returned later for “American Prayer” with Bono, The Edge and Dave Stewart, and again for “Amandla”.
Mandela came on after “American Prayer” in a black shirt with 46664 printed across the chest, and told the crowd that for his 18 years on the island he had been meant to be reduced to a number. His prepared text, published by the South African government, said: “AIDS is no longer just a disease; it is a human rights issue.” A photographer caught him kissing Beyoncé on stage. MTV broadcast the concert around the world two days later for World AIDS Day.
Beyoncé’s letter to Mandela, and the year in it
Four days before the Johannesburg festival, the Sowetan published a letter from her addressed to Madiba. She thanks him for his gratitude and his capacity to forgive, and calls those lessons she will pass to her three children. Her mother was among the guests that weekend in Cape Town, and had been the one who first told Beyoncé and her sister about him. The letter closes by telling him his sacrifices were not wasted.
It opens, “I first met you in 2004”, and places the meeting at the 46664 concert.
The weekend was 2003. The Nelson Mandela Foundation files its photographs of it under November of that year, and the Getty and AFP captions carry the same date. She was writing from memory about something fifteen years behind her, and the slip has been repeated by most of the outlets that have reprinted the letter since.
After Mandela’s death in 2013
Mandela died on 5 December 2013, aged 95. Beyoncé posted a photograph of the two of them embracing at the Cape Town concert. Four days later, at a show in Los Angeles, Jay-Z dedicated “Young Forever” to him. The pictures of Beyoncé and Nelson Mandela that circulate now all come from that single weekend.
Mandela 100: the Johannesburg concert in 2018
Global Citizen filled FNB Stadium on Sunday 2 December 2018 for the centenary of Mandela’s birth, the first festival the organisation had staged in Africa. Tickets were not for sale. People earned them by signing petitions and taking other actions online, and about 70,000 came, many standing through heavy rain. Trevor Noah hosted. Graça Machel, Mandela’s widow, took the stage, along with members of the family.
Beyoncé sang “Halo” with the Soweto Gospel Choir and the Mzansi Youth Choir behind her and Zulu lyrics added to it. She performed “Perfect” with Ed Sheeran, the first time the two had sung the duet live. AFP reported that her “XO” drew tears from the crowd, and that the red and pink dress she wore was a tribute to Mandela. She told the stadium she could “feel so much light and beauty in here”, Billboard reported. About 25 minutes of the set went out on the live stream, according to CNN, and the South African broadcaster SABC1 said the rest belonged to the people who had earned their way in.
Shortly before the Carters went on, the BeyGOOD executive director Ivy McGregor and the film-maker Tyler Perry announced $1 million for 50 paid, year-long fellowships for young Africans. The programme ran four intakes and its final class finished in 2023.
The pledge made from the same stage
The largest commitment of the night came from the same stage Beyoncé sang on. Deborah Birx, then the US Global AIDS Coordinator, announced that the United States would put more than $1.2 billion into South Africa’s HIV response over two years through PEPFAR, the American programme that has paid for a large share of the country’s treatment since 2003.
Six weeks later, Birx wrote to the US mission in Pretoria about the next budget cycle. The memo, published by the State Department, says the South African programme “lost more people on treatment than it gained” over the previous financial year and hit a quarter of its target for the net increase in patients on treatment. It set the 2019 planning level at $400 million, against about $577 million the year before, and made any additional funds conditional on better results.
Those two figures prove less than they appear to. Planning levels are estimates the State Department can revise, and no public document says which two financial years the $1.2 billion covered or which budget lines it counted. Global Citizen’s own tally, published the day after the festival, valued the 60 commitments made that night at $7.25 billion, and the organisation said in 2023 that $7.4 billion had been delivered. Those totals are its own, and no outside body has audited them.
Where it stands in 2026
Semafor reported in June 2026 that Washington intends to end PEPFAR funding in South Africa permanently. The Treatment Action Campaign called the decision a threat to lives on 25 June 2026, pointing out that the programme has put more than $8 billion into the country since 2003, the year of the Cape Town concert.
Global Citizen returns to the Great Lawn in Central Park on Saturday 26 September 2026. Tickets to that one run from $89 to $3,000, alongside the free ones people still earn through the app.
A briefing from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in July 2026 put PEPFAR’s share of South Africa’s HIV programme at roughly 17 per cent once medicines are set aside. Twelve clinics serving sex workers and other people at high risk have closed since the cuts began, and more than 60,000 of their patients have had to register at state facilities instead.
