It's the 1970s and the dream of a new South Africa - free from white minority rule and the tyranny which was its bedfellow - will not become a reality for at least two decades.
It's the 1970s in Langa, one of Cape Town's oldest black townships and a little black girl called Brenda Fassie first attends Tembani Lower Primary and then Moshesh Primary School.
She was born into a family of nine children, not counting a sibling who died a few months after birth. Brenda is the youngest.
And the black townships in the 1970s are not even fit for animals to live in.
But in the midst of this rubbish heap, where white security police officers conduct night raids to remove the enemies of apartheid hiding out in the lowest of low-income homes and corrugated shacks, a flower is gently starting to open.
Under the power lines and the soot of industry in neighbouring Epping, Brenda's family have been nurturing her talent from an early age. There were family sing-alongs at night when Pappa Fassie came home.
At four Brenda steps on stage for the first time with a group called the Tiny Tots. Brenda excels at singing and often eavesdrops on the practice sessions of out-of-town musical performers who come to sleep at the Fassie home in Makana Close, Langa.
She learns breathing techniques and loves traditional songs - her favourite is Elaqaba. She likes it because of all the clicks she has to sing.
The song talks about when Christianity came to the southern tip of Africa and some black people decided to retain their traditions, while others converted, leading to families being split.
In the song, Elaqaba is the name given to blacks who have kept their tradition and refused to be schooled in the ways of "civilisation" and Christianity.
Against all odds the little black girl, born into a family in which the children are clothed in hand-me-downs and food is scarce, is becoming confident in her abilities.
But as the saying goes: "Full many a flower is destined to blossom unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air."
But not the little girl called Brenda Fassie.
Her mother, Makokosie, is a domestic worker, but she is also a mother hen to the little ones of relatives and friends.
Brenda stays in the Tiny Tots, singing and playing the piano.
Members of the group come and go as they grow up and find the opposite sex too appealing to keep going to hospitals and church events to sing, but Brenda is the constant.
She goes to high school at Langa High - it's her political awakening. She becomes acutely aware of the suffering of her people and the issue of youth development sticks with her, even when fame and fortune smile on her and then abandon her.
She starts singing with a group called Cosmos. It's unheard of that a black girl performs in coloured townships. Apartheid and its legacy in the Western Cape are all too familiar to everyone living the past in township South Africa.
It created a hierarchy where whites were top of the food chain and coloureds and Indians were rungs lower but higher than Nguni-speaking blacks.
Her big break comes when world-famous South African singing trio Joy Of Paradise Road fame, are looking for a singer to replace Anneline Malebo, who is pregnant.
Brenda, who according to her family becomes "too powerful for the other ladies", soon leaves the group but Gibson Kente, a writer and producer of musicals, introduces her to a band called The Big Dudes.
In 1983 they release a song called Weekend Special.
"You don't come around to see me in the week, you don't have a chance to call me on the phone. But Friday night, yes I know, I know I must be ready for you, just be waiting for you," the girl from Langa blasts over a loud-speaker system at Strandfontein Pavilion in the 1980s, while coloureds jol on the beach.
It may not have been what Brenda Fassie and the Big Dudes envisaged, but suddenly in so-called mixed-race townships on the Cape Flats coloureds, who had never bent their minds around visiting a Nguni-speaking township, are jiving to the beat of the little black girl from Langa.
And so is South Africa.
Arguments break out about Brenda's origins. In shebeens or just "dronk (drunk) parties" in coloured areas they swear she is from Mitchells Plain.
Weekend Special becomes a gold disc.
Brenda does not tell her mother, but merely sends an aeroplane ticket to Johannesburg, where the little Langa flower now lives and flourishes in the big city of gold.
Mamma Fassie comes up and is confronted by a horde of photographers and journalists.
Against all odds, her tiny tot has made it.
And many now say maybe the story should have ended there. As the years wore on there were rumours and media reports of drugs, party binges and the wild life.
Brenda turns 40 on November 3.
But this week, as she lies in a Johannesburg hospital and rumours abound of brain damage and the like, her old neighbours in Langa and two of her brothers chose to remember an impossible dream which started in the dusty streets of the township.
Her brothers, Sonwabo Kenneth Fassie, 45, and Velile William Fassie, 59, talked to Weekend Argus, but Velile became too emotional.
Sonwabo said he had learnt to be the "stable one" during this time.
"We are a music family; Brenda was born into music," he declared.
He said Brenda was two when her father, Mangaliso Fassie, died in 1966.
Her mother earned money by cleaning the homes of white madams in Pinelands, Claremont and Cape Town's city bowl.
Velile described Langa in the 1970s as "no place to be".
On Wednesdays a flock of people would rumble into town, travelling great distances by train from the black homeland of Transkei. There would be parties, fanned by traditional beer and feasting on meat.
But most times there was either a state or community-enforced curfew of 7pm, when the apartheid security police moved through the area to quash the simmering political outrage of black people trapped in poverty and hopelessness by the government sanctioned racism of the time.
There was hardship in the Fassie home too.
Four rooms, nine children and a mother struggling to make ends meet. They were the first generation of Fassies to make a life in a big city.
The family was originally from Lady Frere in Transkei.
Sonwabo said: "We had nothing".
About Brenda he said: "If she dies, my mother who is living is dead."
Velile, again fighting back the tears said: "I can't take it anymore, I have to see her."
William Mxolose, a school friend of Brenda and a councillor for Langa, said: "She grew up in Langa, where there were no facilities to develop young talent, but she managed under these conditions to succeed. That is one of the things that make us so proud.
"She is loved by this community. She is one of the first from this community to achieve real stardom.
"As one of us - our sister - we hope for her speedy recovery. We really love her."
Nonkosi Nchukana, Brenda's teacher at Moshesh Primary School, described the young Brenda as "a jolly good fellow - outstanding, especially in music and choir".
And on the table in front of her, between the pictures of her gold records and Brenda in outrageous outfits, the tiny tot from Langa swings her little white dress on stage and stares out into the distance in a faded photograph.