Now, she was a good, old-fashioned Diva! Cut down from the NY Times:
Brenda Fassie, the wild child of South African pop who was beloved as the piercing siren of the dispossessed under apartheid, died on May 9. She was 39. Family members said that her death stemmed from an April 26 asthma attack at home that led to heart failure and brain damage. She had been on life support since then at the Sunninghill Hospital north of Johannesburg.
For 20 years, singing in English, Xhosa and Zulu, Ms. Fassie was one of Africa’s top-selling musicians and the object of some of its liveliest gossip. “Vulindlela,” her wedding song, was adopted by the African National Congress in its 1999 election campaign. “Weekend Special,” her complaint that she would not be a married man’s part-time girlfriend, topped the charts before she was 20 and remained a staple. She struggled for years with drug and alcohol problems, hitting bottom in 1995 when she woke up in a seedy Johannesburg hotel next to the body of her lesbian lover, who had overdosed. She went into rehabilitation, but was defiant in interviews about her crack use and her bisexuality, then largely taboo subjects among black South Africans.
She was often broke, sharing her large houses with her singers, musicians and hangers-on and helping support her siblings. She missed concerts, leading her fans to riot and her producers to sue. Even when she was famous, her son, Bongani, now 20, was asked to leave his grammar school when she could not pay tuition. He is her only survivor. She had a series of stormy relationships with men and women, many of which ended in a hurricane of newspaper articles with accusations from one side or the other of beatings, theft or drug binges. She fired and then reunited with various managers, and alienated critics by hurling obscenities at them during awards ceremonies. And yet through it all, the nation looked on her with indulgent affection.
She could call herself the niece of former President Mandela (she was a member of the same Madiba clan of the Xhosas) and refer to him as a “bloody jailbird” in the same sentence and still be forgiven. (He, his former wife Winnie and President Thabo Mbeki all visited her in the hospital before her death.) Recently, after a string of South African music awards, she boasted: “I’m going to become the pope next year. Nothing is impossible.”