Content warning for drug use, overdose
This week we are excited to begin our celebration of Black History Month! To start, we will be looking at some more recent history, specifically the life and times of Brenda Fassie. Fassie was a South African pop star who gained international fame for her work and for the many media storms that built up around her. She was the niece of the famed activist-turned-president, Nelson Mandela, and held many of the same political stances throughout her life. A number of her songs were even banned in America. She was incredibly influential during her lifetime, exchanging the safety privacy could have offered her for dramatically public life. It seems only right that we explore that life now.
Brenda Fassie was what many of us would refer to as a “child star.” She knew that she wanted to be a singer from a very young age, and she began pursuing that dream early. She was in many singing groups before gaining real popularity with her band Brenda and the Big Dudes. Their song, “The Weekend Special,” sold enough records to seal her fate as one of the most popular musicians in South Africa at the time. To say she only went up from there wouldn't be quite right; while she did continue to garner fame and awards, her personal life was filled with more than her fair share of struggles.
When Brenda was 20, she had a son with one of her bandmates. In 1989, she married another man, Nhlanhla Mbambo, but the two quickly divorced. After the divorce, she was hit by addiction and struggled with a cocaine addiction for the rest of her life.
Most of the press knew about her struggles, and she never did much to hide it. She discussed her drug use publicly and reportedly took drugs in front of members of the press. This addiction led to what Fassie remembered to be one most difficult moments of her life. She awoke to find her lover, Poppy Sihlahla, had died of an overdose in their motel. After this tragedy, Fassie seemed to change, working intensely with her music and publicly discussing her addiction with a new attitude focused on recovery.
She attended rehabilitation not long after Sihlahla’s death; around the same time, she came out publicly as a lesbian. While there is much dispute over the term she used to describe herself, we want to pause here and give our stance on it.
Brenda Fassie used the label lesbian; therefore, that is the label we will use for her. She had access to other words and could have used them if she thought her identity fit under another term better, but she chose the word lesbian. We want to make a clear distinction here because while we often use our best guess to label people, there is a clear difference between providing new words to describe an old experience and speaking over how people identified themselves.
Sometimes there are difficult calls. For example, our article Kristina, King of Sweden, used she/her/hers pronouns for Kristina even though there is a distinct possibility that she was a transgender man. In the end, we decided on she/her/hers because those are the ones she used throughout her life. While we may discuss the possibility that she may have preferred others, we can not decide for her. The line may be thin at times, but there is a line. In Brenda Fassie’s case, the line is crystal clear.
Though she had relationships with men throughout her career, she described herself as a lesbian, and we will do the same. A person can be a lesbian even if they have had romantic or sexual relationships with men in their lives, and it is no one’s duty to override how people describe themselves.
Like her previous relationships with men, she and her girlfriends caused many scandals, but none were too damaging to Fassie’s image. In an interview, she said that her sexuality never affected her career too harshly: “I became more interesting to people.”
Fassie’s fame is never to be understated. She was often called “the Madonna of the Townships,” She responded, “No, no, no sweety, Madonna is the Brenda of America.” It's quite reminiscent of Magnus Hirschfeld’s response when told he was the “Einstein of Sex”: “Einstein is the Hirschfeld of Physics.”
In a rare occurrence for someone who burned so brightly, Brenda’s flame never faded. As is unfortunately too common, though, the vibrant star died far too young at 39. In 2004 Brenda Fassie overdosed on cocaine and slipped into a coma. Thirteen days later, she didn’t return to consciousness when her life support machines were turned off, and she died with her long-term partner Gloria Chaka and the rest of her family by her side.
By the time she died, circumstances of her passing had been announced, corrected, and misreported so often that it is hard to find the truth of it even now. Thousands of her fans attended the funeral; the crowd was so large that some injuries required hospitalization. In the end, her death was just as controversial and widely reported on as her life.
Because there are so many people who have looked at Fassie’s life, there are many ways to discuss the woman herself, but since we are looking at her because she is queer, that is the lens with which we look through her life. Many have fallen into when exploring how her sexuality played a role in her life is the desire to take Fassie as an accurate representation of what life in South Africa was like for queer people at the time, and that is not a correct assumption.
While Fassie was undoubtedly a part of the queer community and deserves to be recognized as such, she did not have the same experiences as many other South African queer people did at the time.
She inadvertently touches on this fact herself in an interview discussing whether she wanted to marry her then-girlfriend, saying, “We’ll get married, when we decide, we will. As a South African music icon, I think I should have my rights given to me.”
And while that was not the case, in the end, it is an interesting comment because it wasn’t legal for same-gendered couples to marry in South Africa until two years after her death. This quote is a good representation of the different attitudes Fassie faced because of her fame. She did not experience the same struggles or hurdles that many other queer South Africans did when discovering and publicly discussing their identities. She was a rich and famous woman who was the niece of one of South Africa’s most revered leaders, so her experiences should not be taken as common.
But that is not to say that South Africa was in any way behind in the fight for queer rights; they were the fifth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, and regarding laws, they are pretty fantastic. They have an equal age of consent, anti-discrimination laws in employment and all other areas, legal adoption, right to change legal gender, and men who have sex with men are allowed to donate blood. So we are not trying to advance the narrative that Africa is as a whole a bad place to be for queer people because that is not accurate. Still, we have to acknowledge that there isn’t any “universal” queer narrative in South Africa, and that is because there is no universal queer narrative anywhere.
No queer experience is universal, and the queer experiences we will discuss within this month aren’t exceptions to this. While the stories we discuss this month will be interesting and many will give us clues to what it was like to live in the places and times that the people we view were living in, they are not the last word, so don’t take them as such. If you want to learn more about how queer people lived in specific places or times, we encourage you to research that but never fall into the trap of believing you understand it all. People are wonderfully complex things, as we see so clearly with Brenda Fassie. Humans are complicated both as groups and individuals, and neither can be used to explain the other completely. The desire for knowledge is a great thing but always remember that there is no end to what we can learn, and this month should not be the limit of how long we look.
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Brenda Fassie: A very human hero. (2004, May 10). BBC News. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3700309.stm
Brenda Nokuzola Fassie. (2011, February 17). South African History Online. Retrieved from http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/brenda-nokuzola-fassie
Desa P. (2001, September 15). Brenda Fassie: Africa: The Madonna Of The Townships. Retrieved from
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000782,00.html
Halsband, M. (2001, September 15). Brenda Fassie: Biography. TIME. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2044674,00.html
Hugh, W. (1990, November 29). Anger At Injustice Fuels Brenda Fassie`s Music. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-11-29/features/9004080965_1_nelson-mandela-south-africa-conditions-for-black-people
Lategan, A. (2004, May 18). The life of Brenda Fassie. W24. Retrieved from http://www.w24.co.za/Wellness/Body/The-life-of-Brenda-Fassie-20040518
McGregor, L. (2004, May 11). Brenda Fassie. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/may/11/guardianobituaries.southafrica
McNeil, D. G. (2004, May 17). Brenda Fassie, 39, South African Pop Star, Dies. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/arts/brenda-fassie-39-south-african-pop-star-dies.html?_r=0
Moorman, M. (2014, June 26). Brenda Fassie’s revolution without harmony. Africa Is A Country. Retrieved from
http://africasacountry.com/2014/06/brenda-fassie-a-revolution-without-harmony/
Olah, N. (2013, December 8). Brenda Fassie: The Woman That Begged Mandela To Sing. Vice. Retrieved from
https://noisey.vice.com/en_dk/article/theres-much-more-to-brenda-fassie-than-her-pro-mandela-anthem
Pantsi, N. (2014, October 5). Remembering Brenda Fassie. The Citizen. Retrieved from http://citizen.co.za/your-life/173557/remembering-brenda-fassie/
Stein, D. (2014, May 9). BRENDA: THE 2003 MAMBA INTERVIEW. Mamba Online. Retrieved from http://www.mambaonline.com/2014/05/09/brenda-the-2003-mamba-interview/
