South african singers females 1980s fashion

Township Madonnas and the World Wide Web

It was the reign of the Madonna of the Townships. It was the heyday of the South African alternative music revolution.

It was the era of the release of our late great Madiba.

In this, the fourth feature in our series on Women through the Decades, we look at women in a time of music, politics, AIDS and the Internet.

The sixties-born South African kids were in their teens and twenties in the state of emergency eighties.

Those fuelled with a hunger for freedom, flung open the doors of their unclaimed future and told the story of their lives through the music of the decade.

Down the dusty stairwell of an alternative, early 1980s rock club called Jamesons in Joburg’s inner city, young women dressed in leathers, bovver boots and Afro-punk outfits threw consequence to the night as they lost themselves to the music of The Cherry Faced Lurchers.

It felt chaotic but that forged forth

Young men did th