The still-special power of Mabrr
Ten years after her death, a collection of essays seeks the heart of Brenda Fassie By Bongani Kona
UNLIKE millions of other admirers, I didn’t fall in love with Brenda Fassie through her music. I grew up in Zimbabwe as a hip-hop-head and moved to Cape Town in 2004. That year, the public drama of her life reached its tragic denouement when she died at 39 from a crack-cocaine overdose in May.
I glimpsed her funeral on my mother’s TV, which switched from black-and-white to colour and back every so often. I remember thinking, as I watched through a haze of static, how sad it all seemed; someone so young and gifted, gone so soon.
But I didn’t know who Brenda Fassie was, not really. So the grief many people felt that winter didn’t resonate with me. She was not then a musician to whom I felt a connection, and my sadness derived more from that sense of memento mori death invites.
That all changed when I read Bongani Madondo’s feature on her life and death — “The Brenda Fassie Trilogy” — which ran in this newspaper circa 2004. The force of her persona jumped out at me through his poignant recollections.
I was spellbound by this woman who, Madondo says, “came into our lives and culture, into our collective psyche, into our shebeens and clubs, into our hearts, like a typhoon and departed like Halley’s Comet. That natural. That dramatic. That strange. That wild.”
‘You see, I’ve never been looked into. I’m always looked at’
These essays offer me something of that force, through the prism of the written word. Over the years, I’ve read other illuminating pieces on Fassie: Charl Blignaut’s provocative “In Bed with Brenda Fassie”; Njabulo Ndebele’s lucid “Thinking of Brenda”; Mark Gevisser’s New Yorker-style portrait in the M&G; and Lara Allen’s poignant “Brenda” in At Risk: Writing Under and Over the Edge of South Africa. In each piece, Fassie comes to life as a contradictory human being — fragile and defiant, loving and selfdestructive in equal measure.
Ten years after her death comes I’m Not Your Weekend Special: Portraits on the Life + Style and Politics
of Brenda Fassie, an essay collection edited by Madondo. The book is by no means a definitive account of her life and work, and does not present itself as one. Instead, the contributors explore their personal encounters with her: at home through a hi-fi set, or at a concert, or in her bedroom. I’m Not Your Week
end Special reads like an 80 000word love letter.
It opens with a remarkably selfaware quote from the woman herself: “You see, I’ve never been looked into. I’m always looked at.” It’s true. So much of her life — the failed marriages, sexual dalliances, substance abuse and financial struggles — was lived out in the glare of the media. This collection looks into Brenda, and en route the writers look at how their lives intersected and, in some cases, collided with hers.
“How long are we still going to ignore the essence of figures like MaBrrr?” asks Cameroonian writer Lionel Manga in his essay, “Wish You Were Here”.
“As long as music is mainly, if not only, in today’s world for entertainment and money, we surely miss its fundamental aspect: a gesture of beauty and more.”
Manga gets to the heart of it: Brenda, her character, her music, and everything else that came with her, wasn’t just showbiz. Sure,
Weekend Special was the first African album to crack the Billboard 100 and she sold millions of records, but those are not the things that define her. Her essence is something less tangible than that and, paradoxically, more human.
Here’s Madondo again, on his first Brenda concert in the early ’80s: “What happened when I first experienced Brenda Fassie coupled a massive teenage crush with the antithesis of it: surrender and helplessness. What happened that day would go down, for me, as a hugely trans- formative moment in which the art of performance revealed, if only a wee bit, the secret properties of music as an act of renewal and salvation.”
Despite the book’s celebration of her triumphant power, it carries an undertone of tragedy. Her story is one of the end of innocence, the fading of a promise, a fairytale with the wrong ending.
A girl from a musical family starts singing as a toddler. Everyone who comes across her knows she’s going to be famous, and she obliges, becoming the biggest pop star SA has seen. But along the way, something happens. She’s ensnared by the darkness — crack pipes, booze, abusive lovers — and there ain’t no coming back after that.
The hardest chapter to read is Tholang Tseka’s. It begins like this: “Somebody woke me up from my deep, drunken sleep with a shout. ‘Tholang, take your lover to the hospital.’” I know and you know what comes after that. There’s no stopping it, even though some part of you wants to.
She’s gone, baby, gone. LS