Larry Schwartz
LUCKY Dube was a sickly child. So sickly, in fact, that he seemed unlikely to live beyond his first few months. So, to ease what they saw as the inevitable trauma of his loss, his family decided not to give him a name just yet.
“They would just call me The Boy or The Child,” says the South African reggae star. “They thought it would just be a waste of a name.”
After six months The Boy was still with them, and doing well. “They thought, `Wow, he is a very lucky boy’.” And so he was named: Lucky.
The third oldest of five children, Lucky Dube was raised in a town called Ermelo in a maize-growing district in the Transvaal region of South Africa.
Life was tough. He was just three when his mother left for Johannesburg to work as a domestic servant. “Well, I don’t know what my father did,” he says. “Maybe he was being paid for drinking or some womanising or whatever. Maybe that was his job. I don’t know. (That’s) what I hear about
him.”
As a boy, Dube had no idea of the gulf between the living standards of South African whites and blacks. But later, it became all too clear, and he responded in the best way he could – through his music.
That response has often brought him into conflict with the political powers that be, but it has also made him extremely popular.
Although his conversation is peppered with the occasional “Ja man” – which sounds as much like something you might hear in Kingston, Jamaica, as in downtown Pretoria – Dube has not forsaken his past. The reggae he plays is informed by the busy township mbaqanga (literally maize
bread, but it means “bubblegum music”) he favored early in his career.
He learned Afrikaans before English, but after Zulu and Swazi, and has recorded in jest what is billed as “an Afrikaans/Zulu rap album,” called Help My Krap (Afrikaans for Help Me Scratch), that delighted township blacks and sold more than 80,000 copies.
During the apartheid era, however, Dube’s work came under considerable scrutiny. One of his albums was even banned by the state broadcaster. He might reasonably have expected things to improve under the new regime, but he has somehow found himself out of favor with the authorities
again, for daring to broach certain subjects in song.
“In a country like South Africa, you have the freedom of speech and everything,” Dube says. “But one of the comics, Pieter Dirk Uys, said: `You do have freedom of speech but after the speech the freedom goes.’
“We are in a situation where there are certain things that you really can’t say. People think that since this is the government that we all wanted – this is a black government – we need not say bad things about it.
“A lot of people think that we were against the past government because it was a white government and this government is a black government that we all wanted, a democratic government. So everything that happens now is OK and it should just be accepted. Because now politicians
benefit from whatever is happening here. The crime, the corruption. To them it’s good business.”
Dube says he has been told that because lives were sacrificed for political change musicians such as himself should not dwell on “the wrong things they do”. “We should just be quiet and be cool,” he says disbelievingly.
He cites in particular the response to a song called Crime and Corruption on his latest album, The Way It Is.
“I know I’m going to be stepping on people’s toes with this track but that is just the way it is,” he said at the time of release. “I cannot lie in my music.”
In this song he sings: “I don’t even watch the news any more because it’s always about so many people getting killed and this person being caught for corruption.”
Dube explains: “A lot of politicians wouldn’t be very pleased, because they are involved in corruption. There’s a lot of crime going on with high people in the government involved.”
He’s heard complaints of a kind aired when he released an album called Taxman in 1997, “where I was asking where the money goes … They were saying that was uncalled for because it has been going on for over 40 years in South Africa now. What difference does it make now?
“It’s like it’s OK the money is being stolen by black politicians. It’s OK that the black policemen and women in the street take bribes. It’s OK if the people in court just pay their way out of any criminal case that they might have. It’s OK. Which to me is just bull.”
Dube read about Rastafarianism in a high school library in Ermelo. He was soon drawn to the music of Peter Tosh, a founding member of Bob Marley’s backing band The Wailers, who died in Kingston in 1987. He listened to him whenever possible, even though it was very difficult in those
days to listen freely to a reggae tune.
“The government,” he explains, “was against reggae because the message became a threat. So if they found you with a Peter Tosh or a Bob Marley tape, they would confiscate it or throw you in jail for months”.
Rastas Never Die, his first reggae album (said also to be the first recorded in his country), was banned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation. But these days he’s one of the biggest stars in Africa, and still one of the few to have made a specialty of a music mostly associated with
faraway Jamaica.
Though Rastafarians have honored the late Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, and the African roots of reggae, links between Ermelo and Kingston are tenuous at best. Still, Dube won accolades after performing at the Reggae Sunsplash Festival in Jamaica. The crowd took to him, but not
without misgivings. He remembers an uneasiness when he and his band, The Slaves, made a first appearance there in the early 1990s.
“Normally when we go onstage just with the intro people normally go crazy,” he says. “But in Jamaica we had three songs before you could hear somebody clapping.
“The first song was just quiet. They were looking at you and I was like, `Is the PA all right?’ Only on the third song they started clapping. Then we got called back and the newspapers the following day were excited about us, which was great.
“That was every reggae singer’s dream, to perform in Jamaica.”
The Sunday Age 16th of April 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 