Brenda Fassie

Brenda Nokuzola Fassie was born on the third of November 1964 at the Coloured-designated Langa Township district of Cape Town, the youngest of nine children of Sara Fassie — a community-organist single mother — and a father whose name was not known to the family. She was named for the American film actress Brenda Lee. She sang from her fifth year at her mother's congregational organ at the Langa Methodist Church and at the same age at the family birthday parties of her older siblings for paid contributions. She left primary school at her tenth year.

She was recruited at sixteen in 1981 to the Joy female vocal group at the Soweto music producer Koloi Lebona's Big M studio at Pretoria. Joy was a three-female-vocalist mbaqanga group of the early 1980s. She left Joy at the close of 1982 for the Brenda and the Big Dudes group with the musicians Dumi Ndlovu and Sello Mokoena. The Brenda and the Big Dudes singles of 1983 to 1985 — particularly Weekend Special — established her as a leading South African popular-music voice and produced her major international tour of West Africa and Britain in 1985.

She began her solo recording career in 1988. The 1989 album Too Late for Mama produced her first major commercial hit — the title track that addressed the death of the township-uprising youth of the 1985 to 1989 period. Her 1990s recording career took its decisive direction with the 1996 album Now Is the Time and the 1997 single Vulindlela — the wedding-song that became at her death the most widely-recorded popular song in South African music history. Vulindlela sold over five hundred thousand copies in South Africa alone — at that date the highest-selling single by any South African artist of any genre.

She was named Time magazine's African Madonna in a 2001 cover story and won across her career four South African Music Awards.

She was found unresponsive at her Johannesburg home on the twenty-sixth of April 2004 after a cocaine overdose. She was placed on life support and died at the Sunninghill Hospital in Johannesburg on the ninth of May 2004, at thirty-nine.

She is honored here as the Madonna of the Townships.