Brenda Fassie

Brenda Nokuzola Fassie was born on 3 November 1964 in Langa, the oldest township of Cape Town, established under the 1923 Urban Areas Act for the city's Black African community. She was the youngest of nine children. Her father died when she was only two years old, and she was raised by her mother, a pianist, to whose accompaniment she began to sing as a small child. Named after the American singer Brenda Lee, she was performing for tourists and leading a children's group, the Tiny Tots, before she had left childhood behind.

Discovered in her teens by producer Koloi Lebona, she moved to Johannesburg and joined the vocal group Joy before fronting Brenda and the Big Dudes. Her 1983 single "Weekend Special" became one of the fastest-selling records the country had known, and she rose swiftly to a fame few Black South African artists had reached under apartheid. Adored as MaBrrr, she was crowned the "Queen of African Pop" and the "Madonna of the Townships."

Her voice was also a political instrument. In 1990 she released "Black President" in tribute to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and she performed it as apartheid gave way to democracy. Fluent in the language of ordinary township life, she sang in Xhosa, Zulu and English and became the defining pan-African popular voice of South Africa's first decade of freedom.

The brilliance carried a private cost, and she struggled with addiction through her later years. She collapsed at her home in Gauteng and died on 9 May 2004, aged 39, mourned as a national treasure. Brenda Fassie sang the townships into the light, and her fearless, unbowed voice honors her still.