AUTHOR: Njabulo S Ndebele
PUBLICATION: Fine Lines from the Box
DATE: 2007

DESCRIPTION: I first heard Brenda Fassie sing on a languid, sunny, spring Saturday morning in the Roma valley of Lesotho. It must have been in 1984. It was one of those mornings when the world demonstrates the notion of slowness. There was the blue haze in the horizon, rural smoke rising slowly against the sky until it seemed as if the sky was floating. I remember the distant kra-a-a-k of a white-necked raven gliding somewhere in the sky, and the trees so still, as if they had sucked in through their leaves all the motion there ever was. That was the scene I saw when I finally got out of bed after waking to the sounds of ‘Weekend Special’ on Radio Lesotho somewhere in the house….

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