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Brenda Fassie, 1964-2004
She Made us Sing Through Darkness into Light
by David Coplan
'Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse…." Ag, Brenda, did you have to take that phrase, ever popular with South Africa's talented and famous, so much to heart? And what can one say to even remotely encompass an artist who was not simply a musician and a personality but a force of nature? 'Bitch-Never-Die', how can you be dead? Born in Langa township, Cape Town, but not for you the lifestyles of the poor and obscure. At four you were already wriggling your way out of the ghetto, singing your heart out with the Tiny Tots, the girl group with whom you learned to sing until spotted by producer Koloi Lebona and at 14, asked to fill in for Joy's pregnant Anneline Malebo. Not to be left behind, you got yourself to Joburg by hook & crook and found a place with township theatre maestro Gibson Kente, who introduced you as lead singer with The Big Dudes. Your hit 'Weekend Special' - a song about adultery - with them in 1983 made you a permanent star in the South African musical firmament. Neither you nor the country would ever quite recover. But as your career treaded water in the wake of this pop battleship, your personal life got hotter and spicier as you roasted yourself body and mind with every kind of sex and substance abuse known (and possibly unknown) to woman or man. Then came your saviours, personally, professionally, and artistically; producer Sello 'Chicco' Twala and manager Peter Snyman. Fittingly they were with you this past week as your body, but not your spirit, gave out. Chicco's style of arranging and composing was just what the soul doctors ordered: sonorous electric bass line, soaring, heart-grabbing melodic vocals, shake your booty beat. But more astonishing were the lyrics the two of you blended in as temperatures rose beyond the boiling point in the final, scalding battle to bring overcooked apartheid to an end.
A hedonist but never an airhead, you went political but remained danceable as you invited all black South Africa to the coming party, the ANC. Pop liberation anthems like 'Black President' (a prophetic tribute to the still imprisoned Mandela) and 'Shoot Them Before They Grow' (an imaginary debate between a liberal and a racist white on the future of young blacks) on CDs like Too Late for Mama permanently established your place in the deep hearts of the people and somehow relieved 1989's terrifying darkness with the coming certainty of 1990's dawn. If Winnie Mandela was the Mother of the Nation, then no one doubted your own particular claim to be the Girlfriend of the Nation. And to answer those who disapprovingly took this relationship too literally, there was the next set of unforgettable classics: 'I'm a Good Black Woman' and (following your - brief of course - marriage to Nhlanhla Mbambo) 'Don't Follow Me I'm Married'. Meantime the headline and pleasure seeking never let up, always giving everyone plenty to gawp about, as you made the notion that there is no such thing as bad publicity into a performance art form. Moving out from under Chicco's shadow, you worked with other producers (and eight different managers), including the great Oscar 'Oskido' Mdlongwa, and Mandla 'Spikiri' Mofokeng. Never shy of innovation, you collaborated with Congolese soukous legend Papa Wemba on Now Is The Time. Defying the toll your lifestyle was taking, your later career produced one hit CD after another: Memeza, Nomakanjani, Mina Nawe, and of course, Greatest Hits. Just the other day it seems, you celebrated your final, 39th birthday with the release of Mali. Styles of township pop were ever changing, but 'MaBrrr' as they named you, was evergreen. Long green in fact: you were by far the best selling recording artist in South Africa and in Africa for that matter, of all time, with over five million copies sold. Through it all you became a devoted mother of a son, 'Baby Bongani' as your song to him was called; and loved and indulged your ne'er-do-well family to a fault. But it was your insatiable need for love and public recognition, to be the girlfriend of too many parasites of our nation, that stifled you, drove you mad, poisoned you, and finally wore your petite frame and blew your roaring flame - out. Yet even at the end, after the combined asthma and heart attacks that put you in a coma, you refused to give up your riveting grip on life for a week. Meantime the newspapers, for whom you had provided endless copy and sold countless editions, ungratefully headlined your demise in unspeakably callous and dismissive advance. Some retailed the widespread rumor that you had (of course) died of a drug overdose. Like all your rumors this turned out to be true, when your current, sweet young lady-love Gloria Chaka confirmed that the paralysis of lung and heart that finished you had followed a night of crack smoking. Only with the tidal wave of love and support that washed over the country on the news of your too easily and moralistically assumed bad end did the hacks change their tune and devote special feature after front-page story to the triumphant tragedy of your short life and long art. But the people, understood instinctively what can happen to a naive township teenager in the glare of an instant and unrelenting media spotlight. 'Show some respect!' we all cried: she made us sing through darkness into light. If she was not exactly a good black woman, we could at least agree with your title for your slice-of-life video documentary, I'm Not a Bad Girl. Mandela, Mbeki, ministers of government, the aristocracy of black show business, and hundreds of other notables attended your bedside. The TV and radio played your songs. The rest of us, as Chekov said, are in mourning for our life. Rest in peace MaBrrr, 'Dibakazi', Lover of the Nation….
Brenda Fassie will be buried in Cape Town on Sunday May 23, 2004.
David Coplan is author of the groundbreaking book "In Township Tonight" a history of black show business in South Africa. His current research interests include contemporary SA pop music--kwaito and hip hop. Coplan teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at Wits University in Johannesburg. He is a contributing scholar/music advisor for Afropop Worldwide's two part series on South Africa's tenth anniversary of freedom that aired across the U.S. in April 2004.
Contributed by: David Coplan
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