by Rachel Ogbu

The late music icon Brenda Fassie is coming back alive to perform on stage in her home South African via hologram.

Brenda who died in 2004 would join the Fassies including son, Bongani to perform at the Hansa Pilsner Festival of Legends in Newtown, Jo’burg, on March 23.

The holographic projection technology is said to be the first used in South Africa.

A hologram is a representation of a person or scene in the form of a print or transparent slide; recorded by a camera on light-sensitive material. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object were still present, thus making the image appear three-dimensional.

According to online reports, a team of audiovisual experts took six weeks to create Brenda’s hologram. The whole procedure was priced over R1 million (N17 million)but her son said it gave him the opportunity to perform with his mother again. “I can’t even remember when my last performance with her was, it was so long ago,” he said.

Tupac performed at Coachella in the US last year via hologram. Rappers Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre also took the stage to perform together in a well choreographed style.

In 2008, Will I Am made history as the first to be interviewed via hologram on CNN.

Her career was studded with record sales and awards, but also littered by scandals and battles with drug addiction. Brenda was an anti-apartheid South African Afropop singer with classics like “Vuli Ndlela” and “Too Late for Mama”.