Our AOTW was an iconic but erratic South African singer who would have been 53 by November 3, this year well except for a permanent ending of vital processes in her cells – those icy cold hands of death. With a career spanning two decades, she enjoyed a string of hits and multi-platinum selling releases.
Known as the “Queen of the Vocals” and dubbed the “Madonna of the Townships”, Brenda Fassie was one of South Africa’s most popular vocalists, mixing African vocals with a slick international pop sound. She had her greatest success in the 1980s and continued to record into the ensuing decades, but became a celebrity known more for her off-stage antics than her on-stage work.
Brenda Fassie
Born in 1964 in the small village of Langa, Cape Town, Fassie came from a musical family and began singing early, forming her first singing group at the age of four. Whether you know her as “the Queen of Afropop” or “the Madonna of the Townships,” she was a larger-than-life influence on the music of the continent. Fassie was the youngest of nine children, born into a desperately poor family in the Cape Town township of Langa. Her father died when she was two, and her mother, a cleaner, recognised her daughter’s talent early on.
By the age of four, Brenda, named after the US country singer Brenda Lee, was performing at church events, accompanied by her mother on the piano. At the age of 16, she left for Soweto to seek her fortune as a singer, first with the local vocal trio Joy, and later fronting the township pop group Brenda And The Big Dudes. She formed her own band, The Tiny Tots, aged five and would charge tourists to hear her sing. Fassie rose to fame at the age of 19 with her all-male band, The Big Dudes
In 1983, she released her debut recording, Weekend Special, a lament about a boyfriend who would see her only at weekends. It was an instant hit, eventually taking the group to the US, Brazil, Europe and Australia, and was rapidly followed by several more hits, including It’s Nice To Be With People and No No No, Senor.
We compiled a list of the four best Brenda Fassie songs that became hugely influential in the SA pop landscape.
NUMBER 4: Weekend Special
Revelling in her new-found fame, Fassie lavished money on cars, houses and extravagant parties. She had a son, Bongani, by a fellow Big Dudes musician; a 1989 marriage to a businessman was annulled a year later.
This disappointment appeared to derail Fassie. She became addicted to hard drugs and her career suffered. She fired managers, was sued by promoters for failing to turn up at concerts, and, in 1992, was fined for assaulting a photo-journalist. She got into financial difficulties and lost her house. Bongani was expelled from school because his mother did not pay the fees.
In 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic elections, Fassie unsuccessfully attempted a comeback with Abantu Bayakhuluma (The People Speak), after which she sank into cocaine addiction, renting a room in a sleazy Johannesburg hotel with her female lover, Poppy Sihlahla. Only after Sihlahla died of an overdose did Fassie pull herself together and go into rehab.
Shortly afterwards, she released Memeza, with its hit single Vulindlela. It became South Africa’s biggest-selling album in 1998, and was followed by an album a year for the next four years. The money rolled in again, and Fassie resumed her lavish lifestyle.
NUMBER 3: Black President
A talented musician, her genius lay in her ability to reinvent herself, and give voice to the frustrations and aspirations of the township. She started off as a pop queen but, politicised by growing up in Langa at a time of tremendous upheaval – the 1976 student uprisings had deeply affected her school – she easily tapped into the political militancy of the 1980s.
In 1990, she released the single Black President, a tribute to the still imprisoned Nelson Mandela, which was banned by the apartheid regime. She stopped singing in English, declaring: “I am proud to be an African.” All her subsequent songs were in Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho. When kwaito, the first authentically African sound in decades, emerged from Soweto street parties in the early 1990s, Fassie adopted the genre as her own.
She also inspired by example. When she confessed to drug and drink addiction, other prominent musicians went public about theirs. When she took her first lesbian lover, other black celebrities came out of the closet.
NUMBER 2: Nomakanjani – released in 1999
Dying as she lived, Fassie was pursued to her grave by controversy. Local media have been full of reports of squabbles between her lover, gospel singer Gloria Chaka, and her family; between her manager Peter Snyman and her producer Chicco Twala; and speculation that the coma which preceded her death was induced not by an asthma attack, as her family claimed, but by yet another drug incident.
Brenda died aged 39 on 9 May 2004 in hospital without returning to consciousness after her life support machines were turned off.
On the morning of 26 April 2004, she collapsed at her home in Buccleuch, Gauteng, and was admitted into a hospital in Sunninghill. The press were told that she had suffered cardiac arrest, but later reported that she had slipped into a coma brought on by an asthma attack.
According to the South African Sunday Times and the managers of her music company, the post-mortem report also showed that she was HIV-positive. Her manager, Peter Snyman, denied this aspect of the report. Her family, including her long-term partner, were at her side when she died.
NUMBER 1: Vulindlela – released in 1997 off her Memeza album
Fierce, often controversial, always beloved and an incorrigible envelope-pusher onstage and off, Brenda Fassie was the grande diva of South African pop from the 1980s until her death in 2004. This sprawling greatest hits collection documents it all, from bopping ’80s pop like “Weekend Special” that led Time to dub her “Madonna of the Townships” to thick cuts of Afro-pop sung in South African languages that led fans to christen her Queen of African Pop, from her experiments with kwaito to fiery political statements like “Black President” (banned under apartheid). A formidable pop presence.
NUMBER 4: The song that started it all, “Weekend Special” was originally released in 1984 but only caught on a couple of years later. The ultimate side-chick anthem, it was recorded by Brenda & The Big Dudes (Blondie and Pappa Makhene) and its success catapulted MaBrrr to stardom. The tune is also a Fassie blueprint: a compelling African tale told in inimitable style, accompanied by super-catchy afro-disco grooves. A masterpiece.
NUMBER 2: As news of Nelson Mandela’s death broke in South Africa, one song became inescapable – from giant sound systems erected in Soweto to pop stations that normally exist on a diet of Katy Perry and Bruno Mars, you could hear “Black President” by Brenda Fassie, arguably South Africa’s biggest pro-Mandela anthem, everywhere.
The song was released in 1990 following Mandela’s return to freedom and became part of the pantheon of spectacular anti-apartheid songs in South Africa. Both then and now, the song has surpassed its aim of rousing the masses to thank Mandela for his enormous sacrifice. But it is only a very small part of the Brenda Fassie story.
NUMBER 1: It was voted Song of the Decade at the South African Music Awards on 26 April 2004, a month after Fassie’s death.
