I am watching a football match in a country that is not mine - and I am crying. I cannot fully explain why.
It is 11 June, 2026. The World Cup has come to America and by an accident that feels like anything but one, the opening fixture is South Africa against Mexico: the same two nations, on the same date, that opened my country's World Cup exactly 16 years ago.
I am in a stadium full of strangers. In front of me, a man wrapped in an Iranian flag is embracing a Mexican in a sombrero. Neither of them speaks the same language and neither of them need to.
For 90 minutes, a stadium of eighty thousand people who have every reason to be suspicious of one another have agreed, without discussion, to be one people instead. We lose the match. It does not seem to matter to anyone. Then the whistle blows and they file out into a divided country; and the feeling goes quiet.
But I have felt this before. I know exactly what it is.
In 2010, I was a boy in South Africa and for one impossible winter the whole country tuned itself to a single frequency. It was not [Siphiwe] Tshabalala's “GOAL for all of Africa" that tuned it, though I will remember the shape of that run until I die.
It was the weeks that rolled into one another like the hills of northern KwaZulu-Natal. It was the vuvuzelas our parents and our children learned to blow. It was the Diski Dance. It was the flags knotted to car mirrors in Soweto and Sandton alike, the same cheap plastic flag whipping from the passenger window of the Mercedes and the minibus taxi.
Load-shedding could not touch us. The crime statistics could not touch us. The distant memory of what we had done to each other could not touch us.
We were, briefly, the most beautiful place on earth, not because our problems were solved but because we had remembered, all at once and together, that we were one. He understood long before I did that a stadium was never really about football. It was the one place a divided country could practise being one. Where a divided world could be one.
That is the Mandela I knew.
Yes, I knew him. On the morning of that opening game in 2010, before the country belonged to the whole world for a night, I sat in Tata's office as a seven-year-old boy. My father and Madiba were friends; the friendship had begun decades earlier with a letter my father wrote to a prison cell.
So I grew up around him, the way you grow up around a family member in another city: seldom but never a stranger. That morning we talked about football, about how exciting it all was, a very old man and a very young boy agreeing that something wonderful was about to happen to our country.
Even then I knew him the way a child knows a mountain: a fact of the landscape, too large to take in all at once, but there, always there, holding up the sky at the edge of everything.
I cannot tell you a single word he said. I was seven. But I remember how he came down to my height, gave me a hug and picked me up and held me at his eye level, as he always did.
What I have from that day is a photograph and a feeling I have spent the rest of my life trying to name. Only later did I understand what I had been sitting in front of.
Here is what I have never known how to explain: the word “man" feels too small for him and it always did.
It is not that I stopped believing. It is that I grew up and read the histories, met the human being underneath the icon: the one who made compromises we are still paying for, who promised a rainbow that has faded to grey in too many of the places I love, whose name was later worn like a costume by the men who looted everything he built.
And every flaw I found made me revere him more, not less. Because a saint who is good by nature has done nothing; it costs a saint nothing to be a saint.
But a man, an ordinary, frightened, fallible man who chooses, every single day, across twenty-seven years and a whole life after, to be larger than his own bitterness, that is the most astonishing thing a person can be.
I idolised him as a child because I did not know his flaws. I idolise him now because I do.
And even after that, I still cannot deny the feeling. It keeps breaking in, uninvited, like a shadow. It arrived in that Mexican stadium and would not leave and it is the same thing I felt in 2010; it is older than both.
So I have stopped arguing with it. I no longer believe in Mandela the saint but I believe, completely, in the thing that carries his name: the overwhelming sense that a brutal, divided people can, against all the odds, choose to be one.
Cynics will tell me that is not Mandela. They will tell me that Mandela was a specific and flawed man who died in 2013, who created the flawed country we now have to live in. To them I say maybe and that I don't much care.
What I call Mandela is the feeling that seizes me. That seizes a country and sometimes a world … and for a little while makes it kinder than it has any right to be.
And that feeling has a record the cynics choose to forget.
We are the country that put its torturers in front of a live microphone and chose, on purpose, in full view of the world, to forgive them. Nowhere else did anyone do that but we did.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not a weakness; it was the most audacious act of collective will in the modern history of nations, a people deciding that the future was worth more than the revenge they were owed.
Ahmed Kathrada, Uncle Kathy to me, gave 26 years to a prison cell and walked out with no hatred in him. Oliver Tambo held a scattered movement together across 30 years of exile and died before the freedom we now take for granted ever arrived, having never once asked to be the one who cut the ribbon.
Somewhere a grandmother chose the march over a day's wages, knowing what the day's wages fed, knowing she might lose more than money. None of them did it for a statue. They did it because they had decided, quietly and completely, that the country was worth their whole lives.
Name enough of those and you do not need me to tell you who Mandela was. You already feel him.
I will not insult you with false hope. I know what my country is now. I know that we handed my generation freedom: freedom to choose our leaders but not free to find work. You cannot feed a family on the right to vote.
I know that the same stadiums that hugged the world in 2010 stood in a country that would, again and again, turn on the foreigner: burn the Mozambican's shop, hunt the Zimbabwean, forget with astonishing speed that our own freedom had once been built and sheltered by the very neighbours we now brutalise. We wrote ourselves a promise in 1955, in the Freedom Charter, that South Africa belongs to all who live in it.
Then we switch on the news and watch ourselves vandalise our prize possession.
I know, too, what does not make the highlight reel: the women who are not safe in their own homes in a country that buries them at a rate the world struggles to name, the chatter in the skull of young men whose minds break, in silence, because we have never learned to speak about our feelings. And the unity of 2010 was, I know, a kind of luxury.
It is easy to be one people for the length of a tournament and hard to stay one in the queue at Home Affairs; the family that blew the vuvuzelas loudest still could not afford the days they lost blowing them. But the feeling was real.
It was also a holiday from a reality that came back the moment the stadiums emptied. I will not pretend the holiday was the whole truth.
But I have felt what this country can do. We are not a people who merely dream the impossible; we are a people with the impossible on our record.
We ended apartheid without the bloodbath the whole world had scheduled for us. We forgave each other in public. We turned, for one winter, into the best version of ourselves while the planet watched. Every one of those was impossible right up until the morning it was done. The frequency is not dead. It is dormant. And dormant is not gone.
So I will not mourn him. You do not mourn a mountain and you do not mourn a feeling; you climb toward it. I will do the only honest thing left and take the unfinished work personally: give myself to it entirely, not out of grief but out of a plain refusal to let the feeling lie dormant while I still have breath and hands.
And what I am really after, I think, is not a different South Africa, grand and finished and handed to me but a different way of being South African, one that does not need a tournament to remember it is one thing. Someone has to build the country that showed up for a few weeks in 2010. It may as well be my generation. It may as well be me.
I am in a stadium in Mexico, watching strangers become one people and I am crying and now I can tell you why.
Because I know this feeling. I grew up inside it. Where I come from, it has a name. That's Mandela to me.
Kiyan Singh is the son of filmmaker Anant Singh.